Historical Epistemology and a ‘Real Knowledge of the People’

Social histories that note the changing role of philanthropy over the course of the nineteenth century emphasise its variability as a social and political force. The culture of altruism and the professionalised, institutionalised philanthropic practice to which it gave rise were a modernising agency in the nineteenth-century history of class relations. In theory, the notion of social rehabilitation revised earlier conceptions of philanthropy (or charity) by replacing an organic, status-based paternalism with a liberal contractarianism that insisted, for instance, on a distinction between pauperism and poverty (the one being a moral condition, the other economic) as a means of assessing what Victorians called helpability. In other words, philanthropic discourse and practice registered the epistemological shift that defined the relationship between the individual and modern capitalist society.

That mid-Victorians were conscious of a new social order there can be no doubt. The first epigraph is indicative in which G. H. Lewes reflects on the advent of a distinctive model of social relations in the context of his promotion of positivism.