Ancient Thought

THE FIRST USE of the word poverty surfaced in the biblical world around the 10th century b.c.e., referring to landowners who forced peasants to sell land. The term was used in the Bible, turning from adjective into noun, to indicate a situation of precariousness (that is, physical, material, or relational). This was a new condition because up to then most societies were gift-based: poverty as a social condition was not present; reciprocity, redistribution, and domestic administration were the ruling principles. Then gift economies changed into barter economies, and the concept of poverty as a social condition began to be registered (during the 10th to 8th centuries b.c.e., in the Book of Proverbs). It coincided with the institution of monarchy in Israel in the 10th century b.c.e. and the advent of merchant civilization in Greece in the 8th and 7th centuries.

As a concept, poverty expresses two main conditions: destruction of the ties of social solidarity (destituteness, relational lack, and dependence on others) and the choice of virtue (humbleness, call for justice, and voluntary poverty), according to M. Rahnema. Thus, the concept of poverty began to appear in literature around the same time as tribes began to trade using money, instead of just exchanging objects. Although some forms of money were present among the peoples of the Near East already in the 13th century b.c.e., it was the Greeks who first used metal coins as a currency, thus giving birth to money as concept, as a common medium of exchange (during the 8th century b.c.e., money was called nomisma in Greece). In the same period, ancient Greek philosophy began to assign value to different types of abstract thought and to develop the first Western metaphysics.

We see thus that the time of the production of the concept of poverty was the time of the first coinage and of the first production of abstract thought. The concept of poverty can be read in relation to money and to abstract thought. In relation to money, poverty is the expression of a relational lack: it is the rupture in the equivalence established by the economy of exchange, the expression of the breaking of the social tie. In relation to thought, poverty is the material expression of the operation of abstraction done by the first philosophers of Western metaphysics. Poverty expresses at once a relational lack and the material side of knowledge.

In biblical and classical antiquity, poverty is perceived in two ways: one designates poverty as “disempowerment” of any kind (mental and material) and one connects poverty to justice, happiness, and virtue, according to Rahnema. Disempowerment (the Greek penia, the Persian and African meskîn and deha, the Persian faqir, darvîsh, bî kas, the biblical rash) forms a concept opposed to the one of economic value; the second expresses a moral line of voluntary poverty and is a force connected to self-realization.

A further mutation of the concept occurred in the later Roman Empire, with the advent of Christianity and its emphasis on charity, when, with the notion of “love of the poor,” the “poor” was invented for the second time. As it became a virtue to patronize and protect the poor, they became better integrated into society. Paul expresses this idea with the figure of the “cheerful giver,” a person prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of the community; an isotés, a levelling out or equalizing of resources between the brethren, was promoted. In medieval Christian society, regarding the conceptualization [Page 36]of capital and value, the poor of ancient Israel expressed the lack of solidarity and became, from one side, an image of misery; from the other, virtue was replaced by the flourishing of the uses of poverty (from the use of poverty in Peter John Olivi, to Francis's choice of poverty, and Claire's privilege of poverty).

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