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The idea of the UBI is at least 150 years old. Its two earliest known formulations were inspired by Charles Fourier, the prolific French utopian socialist. In 1848, while Karl Marx was finishing off the Communist Manifesto around the corner, the Brussels-based Fourierist author Joseph Charlier published Solution of the Social Problem, in which he argued for a "territorial dividend" owed to each citizen by virtue of our equal ownership of the nation’s territory. The following year, John Stuart Mill published a new edition of his Principles of Political Economy, which contains a sympathetic presentation of Fourierism ("the most skillfully combined, and with the greatest foresight of objections, of all the forms of Socialism") rephrased so as to yield an unambiguous UBI proposal: "In the distribution, a certain minimum is first assigned for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable or not of labour. The remainder of the produce is shared in certain proportions, to be determined beforehand, among the three elements, Labour, Capital, and Talent."

It was seriously discussed by left-wing academics such as G. D. H. Cole and James Meade in England between the World Wars and, via Abba Lerner, it seems to have inspired Milton Friedman’s proposal for a "negative income tax."6 But only since the late-1970s has the idea gained real political currency in a number of European countries, starting with the Netherlands and Denmark.

This is not to advocate a simplistic "mix and match" approach, but to suggest that a creative inclusion of new elements from different sources could contribute to democracy's rethinking from within.

For most people, at the heart of democracy is toleration of difference combined with an openness to listen to a plurality of voices and opinions. This makes it more than a little strange that there is so little debate over what democracy can and should mean in relation to democracy-support. The logic here is that democracy-support itself needs to be "democratised" - in part by engaging in continuing dialogue, interaction and learning between communities moving to democracy and those seeking to support these processes.