A Review of the Literature on the History of Charity

Docs en anglais | 15 pages | 02-12-2005 | Format : | Note : Non noté

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Résumé

Le point sur la réflexion des historiens et sociologues français et britanniques sur le thème de la charité - pratiques philanthropiques, relations à la religion et à la médecine, signification du don dans les mentalités... L'histoire et l'historiographie de la charité sous ses aspects les plus fascinants, le tout dans une perspective comparatiste originale.

Extrait:

As the word itself refers both to social action and to an individual mood or habit of mind, the history of charity lies at the intersection of various historical fields, such as social, cultural and religious history. Charity may thus be studied at the “micro” as well as at the “macro” level, from the biography of a charitable figure to the comparative analysis of the welfare states, and through the innumerable local organisations of charitable relief.

The literature on the history of charity is therefore abundant, and that on the history of charity in nineteenth-century Britain even more. This statement however needs precision. Historians, even though they have paid much attention to the intense charitable activity of nineteenth-century Britain, have not yet given to “charity” the place it deserves in historical literature. Indeed, the term of “charity” has often been devalued, or even left aside to the advantage of more “secularised” terms such as “philanthropy”, “voluntarism” or “social action”. “Charity” has indeed kept a religious connotation in France, as opposed to “philanthropy”, whereas in Britain the distinction seems to refer only to that between personal and universal point of view. Dr Colin Jones, a professor at the University of Warwick, in a contribution on “Some Recent Trends in the History of Charity” (1996), noticed that charity has often been presented as the starting point of an evolution towards a more elaborate, modern form of charity. Charity as a personal endeavour would be on the decline in front of a triumphant welfare state, and this from the nineteenth century onwards, when the welfare states began to rise. In traditional historiography charity was in fact linked with philanthropy in this collapse of voluntary sector often depicted as inexorable. If the distinction [...]

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