Purgatory: The Ideal of Purifying Suffering

Social welfare policy, particularly activation policy and especially welfare conditionality with behavioural sanctions attempts to reform and transform the unemployed, making them work-ready, re-training them and governing their jobseeking. Not only is the effectiveness of these policies questionable, their cultural assumptions about work, reform and suffering are problematic. In this chapter, we argue that a purgatorial logic underlies activation policy, from the workhouse through to contemporary jobcentres, the idea is that individuals are responsible for their own unemployment, and that imposing harsher conditions, threats and punishments will serve a purifying and edifying purpose. Tracing the idea of purgatory through medieval theology to its widespread cultural resonance in early modern Europe, we suggest that the Protestant rejection of purgatory as a theological concept also marks its transference into governmental social policy, particularly in welfare and workfare – as demonstrated through an analysis of Bentham’s Pauper Management, contemporary policy, and the voices of the unemployed. This historicisation also attends to alternative to punitive policies within our culture, particularly charity and forgiveness, the impulse to alleviate suffering, which exist in tension with the current impulse to reform the unemployed.