ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the roots of a deservedness idea in public policy from the perspective of three, apparently unconnected, elements: idleness, deviance and discipline. The emergence of a moralising element in public policy can be traced back even further, surprisingly enough to the birth of democracy in ancient Greece and its ambivalent approach to the idea of 'idleness'. The chapter explains that the 'moral factor' argument regulating poor relief and solidarity actions before the advent of the modern welfare state. One of the most important elements of social discipline and moralisation, the 'categorisation' of the poor in the English workhouse in different classes, was an essential mechanism of social separation, submission and alienation of the undeserving poor. An English statute of 1547 ordered that idle able-bodied vagrants would be labelled as 'vagabonds' and branded with a hot iron with a 'V' on their chest so as to make the mark on the idler 'a perpetual mark during his life'.
