ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two apparently different models of solidarity for the poor, the Italian and the British cases. The emergence of a collective concern for the relief of poverty in Italy, however, is by no means comparable with the activism of the Victorian middle classes. The chapter examines if and how the moralising discourse regarding the poor changed during the transition of these countries from a 'framework of repression' of poverty – under which poor relief for able-bodied adults was 'virtually unobtainable' – to a system of 'prevention' wherein unemployment support became institutionalised: the modern welfare state. It explains the moral and social backgrounds of the contemporary systems of social protection by looking at their common – but not necessarily identical and unidirectional – pathways towards what Lees has termed the 'rejection of residualism' and the emergence of collective forms of responsibility to the poor.
