Raising the Standard of Living. History of a Concept, ca. 1750–1900 Fill out this column or leave cells blank * cells with a star has to be filled out Title of activity Raising the Standard of Living. History of a Concept, ca. 1750–1900 Responsible Bernhard Kleeberg Department/Research Group Dep. II / “Knowledge and Belief” Names of historical scientists and scholars Adam Smith, Thomas R. Malthus, Adam Müller, David Ricardo, Thomas Carlyle, Karl Marx, John Stewart Mill Timeline date 1750–1900 Sort Number for department list II.? Keywords from the Institute's short list Epistemic categories Continuity and discontinuity Knowledge systems Short title of activity “Raising the Standard of Living” Other involved scholars This research activity is part of the activity “Knowledge and Belief” Research activities covered by this activity Related items at the digital research library Cooperation partners Funding Institutions

The Concept of the raising standard of living The project studies the emergence and transformations of the concept of raising the standard of living. It analyzes the shift from cyclical to progressive concepts within different areas of knowledge (economic theory, moral philosophy, political and social practices). Raising one’s standard of living seems a desire so familiar to us that we don’t hesitate to judge it common to people at any place and time. Nevertheless this belief in the possibility and desirability of a general economic amelioration is not self-evident at all: Within anti-materialistic thought or cyclical theories of changes between wealth and poverty for instance, no general progress is conceivable. In my current project I am therefore studying the concept of raising the standard of living as a historical phenomenon that emerges and is being transformed within a polycentric order of different kinds of knowledge: Economic theory, moral philosophy as well as political and social practices. Enlightenment thought since about 1750 provides the idea that in a society that has wisely been created by God (“Book of Society”), the welfare of its members will automatically increase. Although this idea can be found more often around 1800, objections from population theory and moral theology were more influential. By the 1840s this situation changes: Economic and social developments, technical progress and the end of the pauperism-crisis lead to new expectations of wealth in industrialized societies. In addition, developmental thinking in the sciences as well as tendencies of standardization and normalization provided a cognitive basis for certainty in economic diagnosis and prognosis. This made the success of practical actions to increase the standard of living probable. The project deals with epistemological differentiations of “knowledge” about the standard of living, trying to get a grip on relations between social expectations, practical knowledge, theoretical orders of knowledge and basic religious confidence: It analyzes how knowledge about the raising standard of living is constituted, used, and transmitted, how it differs from discipline to discipline, between social areas, and between national contexts.

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