Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / To take at face value the current enthusiasm at the idea of marshaling science to
end human social ills such as global poverty, one could easily overlook the fact that one
hundred fifty years prior people were making strikingly similar claims as part of a broad
movement often referred to as “scientific charity” or “scientific philanthropy”. The goal
of this dissertation is to contribute to our knowledge of the scientific charity movement,
through a retrieval of the morally weighted language used by reformers and social
scientists to justify the changes they proposed for both public and private provision of
poor relief, as found in the Proceedings of the Annual Assembly of the National
Conference of Charities and Corrections (NCCC). In essence I am claiming that our
understanding of the scientific charity movement is incomplete, and can be improved by
an approach that looks at scientific charity as a species of moral language that provided
ways to energize the many disparate and seemingly disconnected or even contradictory
movements found during the period under study. The changes enacted to late 19th
century philanthropic and charitable structures did not occur due to advances in a morally
neutral and thus superior science, but were born along by a broad scale use of the
language of scientific charity: an equally moral yet competing and eventually more
compelling vision of a philanthropic future which held the keys to unlock the mysteries
of poverty and solve it once and for all. When viewing scientific charity as something
broader than any particular instantiation of it, when pursing it as a set of languages used
to promote social science’s role in solving human problems by discrediting prior nonscientific
attempts, one can begin to see that the reformist energies of late 19th century social thinkers did not dissipate, but crystalized into the set of background assumptions still present today.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/7926 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Klopp, Richard Lee |
| Contributors | Gunderman, Richard B. |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/ |
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