Intellectual Philanthropy

What's in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of anuprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urbansurge of the working-class masses in Spain would create a state of emergency,he or she devises a means to seduce the masses away from rebellion by taking onhimself or herself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual heroinvested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. IntellectualPhilanthropy examines cultural...
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What's in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of anuprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urbansurge of the working-class masses in Spain would create a state of emergency,he or she devises a means to seduce the masses away from rebellion by taking onhimself or herself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual heroinvested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. IntellectualPhilanthropy examines cultural practices used by philanthropists in modernIberia. It explains the meaning and role of intellectual philanthropy byfocusing on the devices and apparatuses philanthropists devised to realizetheir projects. Intellectual philanthropists considered themselves activists inthat they aimed to impact social structures and deployed a rhetoric of theaffect to convince the workers to join their philanthropic enterprise.

Philanthropy, in the nineteenth century, was not necessarilylinked to money. Motivations could be moral or political; they could arise froma desire to enhance social status or to acquire influence. To explicitlydesignate this conceptualization of the philanthropic act, the author proposesits own name: intellectual philanthropy. Intellectual philanthropy isthe use of philanthropic platforms by intellectuals to deploy cultural andeducational structures in which workers could acquire a cultural capitalconstructed and organized by the philanthropists. Vialette argues thatintellectual philanthropy appeared as a reaction to the feared political andcultural organization of the working class, rather than as a process of workeremancipation.

These philanthropic processes aimed at organizing the­workers emotionally and rationally into what she calls micro-societies. Philanthropistsused the technique of seduction and expressed love to and for a targeted class.However, this seduction prevented real communication, and created a moral andsymbolic indebtedness. This process was perverse in that, through its culturaland educational structures, philanthropy would give workers cultural capitalthat was not just emancipatory, but also a way to restrict their agency.