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THE ROMANTIC SOCIALIST ORIGINS OF HUMANITARIANISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2019

NAOMI J. ANDREWS
NAOMI J. ANDREWS*
Affiliation:
Santa Clara University E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

“Humanitarian” (humanitaire) came into use in French contemporaneously with the emergence of romantic socialism, and in the context of the rebuilding of post-revolutionary French society and its overseas empire beginning in the 1830s. This article excavates this early idea of humanitarianism, documenting an alternative genealogy for the term and its significance that has been overlooked by scholars of both socialism and humanitarianism. This humanitarianism identified a collective humanity as the source of its own salvation, rather than an external, well-meaning benefactor. Unlike liberal models of advocacy, which invoked individualized actors and recipients of their care, socialists privileged solidarity within their community and rejected the foundational logic of liberal individualism. In tracing this history, this article considers its importance for contemporary debates about humanitarianism’s imperial power dynamics.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 737 - 768
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Michelle Burnham, J. P. Daughton, Sharmila Lodhia, and Amy Randall, each of whom read multiple drafts of this piece, as well as the anonymous readers and the editors of Modern Intellectual History whose knowledgeable critiques of this article contributed greatly to the clarity of my argument.

References

1 The first dictionary entry in French for humanitaire is in Littré, 1863, where it is denoted as a neologism, and its coining erroneously attributed to Alfred de Musset. Artful database accessed 15 June 2017. The term appeared in English earlier, referencing a “person believing that Christ's nature was human only and not divine.” The second definition, “A person who professes a humanistic religion, esp. an adherent of the socialist religious ideas of Pierre Leroux,” dates to 1831. The third comes closest to current usage: “A person concerned with human welfare as a primary or pre-eminent good” (OED).

2 Historians have taken a variety of approaches to historicizing humanitarian sentiment, broadly questioning its origins, intent, and practice. Historians of antislavery have been pivotal in this regard, especially the pathbreaking essays by Haskell, Thomas, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” American Historical Review 90/2 (1985), 339–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90/3 (1985), 547–66; Brown, Christopher Lehman, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar; Grant, Kevin, A Civilised Savagery (New York and London, 2005)Google Scholar; Halttunen, Karen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100/2 (1995), 303–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For some chroniclers of humanitarianism, the moral and ethical scruples of historical actors are beyond reproach, while others have drawn broad connections between the paternalism of humanitarians and the European civilizing mission. For an example of the former approach see Adam Hochschild's widely read popular histories, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (New York, 2006) and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1999); for a more critical perspective that makes linkages to modern imperialism but remains overall laudatory see Barnett, Michael, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, 2011)Google Scholar. See below for more specific discussion of this literature.

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4 British antislavery activists can be seen in some ways as a limited exception to this generalization, given the widespread consequences of slavery abolition to the economic health of the British empire. On this question see Drescher, Seymour, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd edn (Chapel Hill, 2010)Google Scholar; and Brown, Moral Capital.

5 Historians of antislavery have documented the paternalism and racism of the movement, with their obvious linkages to the imperial politics of the age, though their promotion of colonial settlement is less direct than what is discussed here.

6 E.g. Barnett, Empire of Humanity; Hunt, Lynn, The Invention of Human Rights (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

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10 See Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 49–56, in which social and political developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain are presented as the “Humanitarian Big Bang.”

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15 Socialisme was popularized by Pierre Leroux in 1834 in “De l'individualisme et du socialisme,” Revue encyclopédique 60 (Oct. 1833), 94–117.

16 Seeber credits Michel Raymond, aka Raymond Brucker, with coining the term in “Humanisme, Humanitisme, and Humanitarisme.”

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21 Entries before 1831 are misreads of Latin words.

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103 Le docteur Gasc-Hadancourt, Association humanitaire fondée par le docteur Gasc-Hadancourt (Toulouse, 1848), 71.

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109 Ibid., 10.

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118 In their most recent book, A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity (New York, 2015), Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn frame their discussion about charity in the US in terms of the benefits to the giver, describing it as “a source of fulfillment” that contributes to physical and mental health (ibid., 17). For a critical review of the book that echoes my analysis see www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/nicholas-kristof-a-path-appears-review, accessed 16 Nov. 2018.

119 In the international aid arena, anthropologists Didier Fassin and Peter Redfield have investigated the impossibility of political neutrality in humanitarian crisis zones. See Fassin, Didier, “Noli Me Tangere: The Moral Untouchability of Humanitarianism,” in Bornstein, Erica and Redfield, Peter, eds., Forces of Compassion (Santa Fe, NM, 2011), 35–52Google Scholar; and Peter Redfield, “The Impossible Problem of Neutrality,” in ibid., 53–70. Recent debates about the Responsibility to Protect initiative have likewise engaged with this question; for an overview of these debates see Weiss, Thomas G., Humanitarian Intervention, 2nd edn (Malden, MA, 2012)Google Scholar.

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