Lenin and Revolutionary Democracy

Since the beginnings of European expansion, philanthropy both fostered the integration of the Atlantic world and was in turn shaped by it. First appearing in the 17th century and coming into common usage in English in the 18th century, the word philanthropy, from the Greek for “love of mankind,” referred to a sentiment of concern for humanity’s well-being. The corresponding activity to relieve, better, or reform suffering or disorderly people could be pursued through public measures, the benefactions and activism of individuals, or charitable bodies, Recognizing their interrelated and often mutually constitutive nature, this article encompasses public poor relief, private charity, and reform endeavors. Beginning in the same era as European expansion across the Atlantic, and prompted by similar forces of religious competition and social pressures, European peoples began transforming the personal and reciprocal charity of the medieval era into bureaucratic and global phenomenon it became by the late 19th century. In the early modern era, Europeans sought to make charitable institutions more efficient, and they pursued institutional solutions to social problems such as vagrancy. At the same time, they extended their charitable activity around the Atlantic and beyond by transferring the confraternities that provided welfare to imperial outposts and by founding missionary charities to evangelize religious outsiders and strengthen their empires. A second turning point came in the Age of Democratic Revolution. The development of an Atlantic and then global commercial, liberalizing economy, along with the Enlightenment drive for improvement, caused people on both sides of the Atlantic to think anew about poverty and charity. The same economic developments and the revolutionary forces in the late 18th century led to new moral concern for strangers—people who would formerly have been outside one’s moral responsibility—and made humanitarian activity addressing increasingly targeted problems possible. In addition, by the beginning of the 19th century, women on both sides of the Atlantic were setting up female-run charitable organizations that made women’s activism a new force for integration around the Atlantic.