In recent years, social debates in various European countries and in North America about people at the “bottom of society” have led to the use of terms such as “exclusion”, the “new underclass” or the “disconnected precariat”. The often generalizing and stereotypical portrayal of complex living conditions promoted the emergence of a monolithic image of people defined as “poor” or as located socially “at the bottom”; this in turn points to comprehensive problems in dealing with social dislocations. It is not uncommon for those affected to be depicted as lazy and dirty, passive-lethargic and driven by affective urges, as often having many children and sometimes criminal social characters, and as sharing socio-cultural attributes and a supposedly identical system of morals and values. Such attempts to classify the phenomenon of “poverty in comparatively prosperous Western or European societies can be observed today with reliable, even cyclical regularity, whether during election campaigns or in periods of economic or pandemic crises. In these current negotiations, less attention is paid to the respective historical dimensions of such attribution patterns; these, however, must be carefully deconstructed in their respective function and relevance for contemporaries.