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Part One
New philanthropy and social transformation![]()
ONE
Philanthropy and its critics: a history
Hugh Cunningham
Introduction
In 1795, the English Unitarian George Dyer set out his vision of the relationship between philanthropy and justice (Dyer, 1795, pp35-6):
There would be less occasion to erect so many temples to Charity, if we erected more to Justice. To remove the defects and excesses of governments; to give a just direction to the laws; and to preserve the course of industry from being obstructed, would be attended with more advantages to the poor, than the erecting of a thousand hospitals; and, on this ground, every philanthropist should be a reformer.
Dyer (1795) believed that âin proportion as a country abounds in poor, the state of society is badâ (p47). He was a supporter of the newly-formed Philanthropic Societyâs plans to reform convictsâ children and âadd citizens to societyâ. In the late 18th century, philanthropy as a word indicating a love of humankind and a desire to promote human wellbeing was radiating out from its French base, and Dyerâs statement reflects this moment of hope. Old charity with its temples and its hospitals was neither adequate nor necessary. Instead philanthropists should focus on removing âthe defects and excesses of governmentsâ. In short, philanthropy was a political project: to be a reformer was to engage in politics. For people like Dyer the point of philanthropy was to deliver social justice.
This late-18th-century moment stands out in the history of charity and philanthropy. Before and after it social justice was rarely absent, but it was equally rarely an overriding concern. In part this was because charity and philanthropy faced criticisms which had the effect of deflecting their activities onto what seemed safer terrain than the promotion of social justice. This was particularly the case in the 19th century, when philanthropy was criticised for interfering with the workings of a free market. In setting out some of the criticisms made of philanthropy (or charity, as it is properly called before the late 18th century) I aim to show how and why a concern for social justice became marginalised.
Charity and poor relief
From the late 15th century charity was intimately bound up with poor relief and there were only a limited number of possible policies that could be utilised. At one extreme lay indiscriminate giving to the poor as you encountered them on the street, at the other the incarceration of beggars. In between was domiciliary help for the poor, based on assessments of need determined by visitors from a higher class. Whichever policy was favoured, charity was frequently criticised as inefficient and liable to demoralise the poor whom it was meant to be helping. Critics urged a more rigorous charity, an end to indiscriminate giving, an attack on begging, careful examination of claimants and, with shades of today, a measurement of outcomes. In the wake of this criticism things changed, but with the passage of time old habits returned, and it was time for another round of criticism.
The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries provide a starting point to examine this pattern. Previous to this in the West, in the early Christian centuries and in the Middle Ages, there was a degree of reciprocity in gifting. The rich gave, and in return the poor â sometimes thought of as close to Christ â prayed for the souls of the rich. It was particularly common in the later Middle Ages for the wealthy to try to reduce their time and sufferings in purgatory by paying for chantries, where prayers would be offered. But in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Europe, attitudes to the poor became harsher; rather than being considered close to Christ they became thought of as idle, licentious and dangerous. Most historians ascribe this new attitude to a changing economic climate which then, and subsequently up to the late 19th century, condemned about one-third of the population to poverty. Charity became inextricably bound up with poor relief and reciprocity in the gift relationship came to an end. Further, if charity was helping in the relief of poverty it was also criticised for exacerbating the bad behaviour of the poor.
The new attitude was most evident in the northern European countries that turned Protestant. In Germany, Luther was scathing in his attack on Catholic mendicant orders. He, and others like him in the 1520s, drew up schemes of poor relief based on funding from a common chest, the engagement of town authorities, and delivery in the recipientâs home rather than an institution (Grell, 1997). Move forward two hundred years to Hamburg, and we find the poor relief system criticised and, consciously or not, the advocacy of policies such as opposition to begging, very similar to what had been proposed and implemented in the 16th century. Mary Lindemann (2002) emphasises the new economic conditions that underlay the Hamburg initiatives. Hamburg was a port town with an unsettled population, its residents subject to the vagaries of global trade. Alongside the Protestant input to the reform proposals there was concern to maintain the economic order. The Hamburg reforms (Lindemann, 2002) became well-known and were copied elsewhere, but they formed only part of wider criticism in the 18th century of charitable practices.
One criticism focused on donors. In England, the Dutchman Bernard Mandeville turned his acid pen against them. Charity, he argued, sprang from donor selfishness; what he called âthe reward of virtuous actionâ - that is âa certain pleasure [a man] procures to himself by contemplating on his own worthâ (Williams, 1996, p84). Too often, Mandeville went on, this pleasure was celebrated communally in annual dinners, where donors feasted and congratulated themselves and âthe objectsâ of the charity were paraded round on display. Benevolence as a part of human nature was much celebrated in the 18th century, but did it, as Mandeville suggested, spring from self-love?
As to the recipients of benevolence, the âobjectsâ, Mandeville was one of a long line of critics, reaching its height in the mid 19th century, who argued that the unregulated exercise of benevolence would do more harm than good: in a nutshell, it encouraged dependency and idleness and sapped the springs of industry. Thomas Secker, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1758, argued that âLove to our Fellow-Creatures is one of our natural inclinations.⊠If we succeed, we have exquisite Joy: if we fail, it is no inconsiderable Comfort, that we meant wellâ (Andrew, 1992, p584). Nonsense, said Mandeville, you have to weigh the consequences of your benevolence. Even David Hume â a proponent of benevolence â acknowledged that if you looked at the encouragement âto idleness and debaucheryâ arising from giving alms to a common beggar, you had to view âthat species of charity rather as a weakness than a virtueâ (Hume, 1975, p10).
This kind of thinking was widespread throughout Europe. In Modena in Italy in the early 18th century, Ludovico Ricci worried that all forms of charity were potentially vicious, since they might undermine self-sufficiency and encourage improvidence (Davis, 2005, p12). France was the epicentre of the critique. In Montpellier, indiscriminate giving was thought to have far exceeded donations to the cityâs charitable institutions â leading Bishop Colbert in 1735 to urge his flock to stop it altogether, to âregulate your almsâ. This criticism of charity, fuelled by anti-clericalism, became a leading theme of Enlightenment thinkers. In the words of Turgot in 1757, too much and ill-directed relief âmade the condition of the idle preferable to that of the man who worksâ. In place of traditional charity the Enlightenment advocated bienfaisance, a term popularised by Voltaire, suggesting a universal human propensity to give in the face of suffering â but one that needed to be ordered and well-directed. This led in the Revolution to the establishment of bureaux de bienfaisance (Jones, 1982, pp2-3, p77).
The Enlightenment critique of charity gave birth to the SociĂ©tĂ© Philanthropique de Paris in 1780, an elitist reforming institution (Duprat, 1993). It was the first clear sign of the emergence of a new and enduring vocabulary of âphilanthropyâ and âphilanthropistsâ, disengagement from the Church a key aspect of their approach. The Parisian model spread and Philanthropic Societies were soon founded in other French towns, in London, and in Brussels. They put much of their energy into the prevention of youth crime and the reform of prisons. The first person to be described as a âphilanthropistâ in England was John Howard, famous for visiting prisons all over Europe.
The new thinking associated with the Enlightenment was gendered. To some people the âman of feelingâ, never ashamed to shed a tear when occasion demanded, was indeed an ideal. Isaac Wood, for example â who established the Shrewsbury House of Industry for children in 1783 â recorded how the scene of children working, ânever fails to interest the intelligent spectator. I have seen the tear of benevolent sensibility trembling in the eye of a HOWARD [John Howard the prison reformer], and several other exalted characters, as I have accompanied them through the working rooms; where they frequently stopped to indulge their generous emotionsâ (Cunningham, 1991, p26). But if such a passage was moving to some readers, to others it exposed itself to ridicule and attack. The trembling âtear of benevolent sensibilityâ, the indulgence of the âgenerous emotionsâ, smacked of self-regard. Worse still, they suggested that most heinous of late-18th-century crimes: effeminacy. It was âunmanlyâ to behave in such a way. Softening hearts, trembling tears, the indulgence of the emotions: these were womenâs province.
Philanthropy and political economy
By the late 18th century, the chorus of criticism of the consequences of indiscriminate giving was deafening. This reflected the growing dominance of political economy, as it fast became the ideology of capitalism. The course of philanthropy was in many ways determined by that dominance, the two at first in partnership, later at odds. What was at stake was set out by a preacher at Addenbrookeâs Hospital in Cambridge in 1797: âIndiscriminate donations⊠are not found infrequently to defeat the purposes of industry, and in a commercial kingdom may do as much harm as the most unfeeling parsimonyâ (Andrew, 1992, p588). Britain was undoubtedly âa commercial kingdomâ, and the time for indiscriminate giving was over. Nothing did more harm, it was said in 1815, than âthe misplaced benevolence of the charitable and humaneâ; their âinjudicious benevolenceâ that so encouraged vagrancy and begging (Coats, 1973,âMendicityâ, pp121, 139). That comes from the Tory Quarterly Review. Even more stridently, an anonymous writer in the utilitarian Westminster Review in 1824 argued that â[B]enevolence is useless or mischievous without knowledgeâ, and the knowledge that was required was knowledge of political economy:
To convince the public, twenty or thirty years ago, of the goodness of a charity, it was sufficient to shew that the objects relieved were in a state of real distress.⊠But now, that the circumstances are more generally known, on which the condition of the labouring classes depends, all former reasonings on the subject of charity⊠are invalidated.⊠The condition of the labouring classes with regard to the necessaries and comforts of life, is evidently determined by the rate of wages. (Coats, 1973, âCharitable Institutionsâ, p 99)
This writer got to the heart of the political economy case against charity: the rate of wages should be determined by the market and the market only; charityâs meddling interfered with that. Political economy caused much anguish amongst those distressed by the condition of the poor but wary of doing anything that might break its laws. Unitarians, for example, on both sides of the Atlantic â as David Turley has shown (Turley, 1998, pp235-40) â tussled with this dilemma.
The problem didnât go away. In 1865, Joseph Rowntree was withering in his assessment of giving: âCharity as ordinarily practised, the charity of endowment, the charity of emotion, the charity which takes the place of justice, creates much of the misery it relieves, but does not relieve all the misery it createsâ (Vernon, 1958, p64). Indiscriminate almsgiving, asserted another writer in 1869, was âa public nuisance, if not a grave moral offence â (Coats, 1973, âCharityâ, p684).
In the 1820s, claims were made that âphilanthropyâ was the means by which political economy could set bounds to unlimited charity (Coats, 1973, âCharitable Institutionsâ, p113). Teaching the poor âthe knowledge of the laws which regulate wages⊠depends in a great measure upon the exertions of enlightened philanthropistsâ (Coats, 1973, âCharitable Institutionsâ, p113). Thirty years later, in an article tellingly entitled Charity, noxious and beneficent, the message was still being drummed home. It said:
The profession of philanthropy, like every other, can be safely and serviceably practised only by those who have mastered its principles and graduated in its soundest schools. It is as dangerous to practise charity, as to practise physic without a diploma. He who would benefit mankind must first qualify himself for the task. (Coats, 1973, âCharity, noxious and beneficentâ, p81)
What that meant was âascertaining and enforcing those principles of social science by which alone misery can be permanently removed or prevented, and distress, effectually and without mischief, relievedâ (Coats, 1973, âCharity, noxious and beneficentâ, p81). Once the principles of social science (i.e. political economy) were firmly established, âour kindly impulses and deep consciousness of the debt we owe to others, will cast off the lazy shape of charity, and rise into the attitude and assume the garb of true philanthropyâ(Coats, 1973, âCharity, noxious and beneficentâ, p88).
Philanthropy, however, never entirely separated itself from âthe lazy shape of charityâ. In an 1869 article, The philanthropy of the age and its relation to social evils (anonymous author), there was much criticism of âa misguided and sanguine philanthropyâ, and reference to an essay read before the Social Science Association On misdirected philanthropy as an economical question (Coats, 1973). The misdirection arose from ignoring the lessons of political economy, and philanthropy and charity were in danger of doing precisely that. In 1872, Walter Bagehot questioned:
whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to life such g...
