Intellectual Philanthropy

What's in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of an
uprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urban
surge 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 on
himself or herself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual hero
invested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. Intellectual
Philanthropy examines cultural practices used by philanthropists in modern
Iberia. It explains the meaning and role of intellectual philanthropy by
focusing on the devices and apparatuses philanthropists devised to realize
their projects. Intellectual philanthropists considered themselves activists in
that they aimed to impact social structures and deployed a rhetoric of the
affect to convince the workers to join their philanthropic enterprise.

Philanthropy, in the nineteenth century, was not necessarily
linked to money. Motivations could be moral or political; they could arise from
a desire to enhance social status or to acquire influence. To explicitly
designate this conceptualization of the philanthropic act, the author proposes
its own name: intellectual philanthropy. Intellectual philanthropy is
the use of philanthropic platforms by intellectuals to deploy cultural and
educational structures in which workers could acquire a cultural capital
constructed and organized by the philanthropists. Vialette argues that
intellectual philanthropy appeared as a reaction to the feared political and
cultural organization of the working class, rather than as a process of worker
emancipation.

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