Some historians write about social capital

...and most completely ignore the subject or else don't understand what it's about. Well, at least some of them in Patterns of Social Capital (ed Robert Rotberg), which claims to "advance the study of social capital across chronological and geographical space".

Some of them either just write standard articles about their own subject with some random references to social capital or Putnam throw in without bothering to say what they mean by social capital (or as the intro says, "Brucher, Muir, Grew and Rosenband test generalizations, as most historians do, against empirical details over longer or shorter episodes of time").

Others just regard social capital as pretty well the same thing as civil society/civic engagement/public sphere without really bothering to define them (see Mary Ryan's Civil Society as Democratic Practice: North American Cities During the Nineteenth Century), or else decide that social capital is basically cultural capital so let's just talk about cultural capital instead (see Raymond Grew's Finding Social Capital: The French Revolution in Italy) - though Jack Greene does more usefully discuss how social capital needs to be located within cultural capital to look at how others can inherit advantages associated with this (in his article relating it to colonial British America).

Generally, there seems a deep suspicion of the concept of social capital among some of the historians writing in the collection:

Some of the essays attack Putnam's description of Italian history, particularly his description of the origins of higher social capital in Northern Italy resulting from republican guild associations, and therefore are suspicious of whether a theoretical concept can be built around this mistaken analysis (and also of guild based association in other countries - see Rosenband's Social Capital and the Early Industrial Revolution)

There is also suspicion about a concept used by political scientists and economists, eg:
* Greene says that historians are "far less concerned with how to attain the specific goals that modern society deems desirable" and that social scientists' definition of social capital is "too narrow, too instrumental, too Whiggish, and too Western". It needs to be applicable across a wide variety of times and spaces (I would have it was but nevermind) and that it must be "redefined and expanded to include not just traditions of civil interaction but the entire range of institutions, practices, devices, and learned behaviours that enable collectivities and individuals to render physical spaces productive and social and cultural spaces agreeable".
* For Mary Ryan, "'social capital' might ring pleasantly in the ears of social scientists, but to some humanists it emits a discordant economistic sound"
* Elisabeth Clemens regards it as a metaphor, using financial imagery, but that metaphors can be dangerous because they can "assert multiple dimensions of similarity" which may be misleading. In social capital's case, she argues that it can lead to seeing social capital as as portable or fungible as financial capital, whereas it is much more firmly rooted and embedded in networks.

However, there are also a number of very useful analyses of social capital in different contexts, and also how using social capital as an analytical concept in historical studies needs to address a number of important issues. More on these in a bit...

Charity, philanthropy and reform

Notes from Charity, philanthropy and reform, ed Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes

From Intro by Cunningham
6 themes for further study of charity and philanthropy are:
* changing perceptions of poverty (esp with urbanisation and manufacturing)
* "politics of charity" - states and cities prided themselves on their charitable efforts, which lent legitimacy to often fragile structures of power
* gendering of charity - women and (religious) charity, men and (secular) philanthropy
* need to avoid simply studying organisations because they leave records - need to look at informal giving and private charity
* studies have looked at Christian western Europe, and haven't looked at how Islam might have influenced Europe
* past focus on donors - what about recipients ("charity was a reciprocal relationship and encoded appropriate modes oof behaviour on donor and recipient")

From State, Church and Voluntarism in European Welfare, 1690-1850 (Joanna Innes)
* lots of complaints in early C19 about settlement laws needed with local poor relief, but hardly any mention about shifting it to national taxes (because of lack of effective expenditure control?)
* needed local elites to run poor relief (lack of local elites in Ireland meant more difficult to adapt English system)
* dissenting groups and the state - "they were likely to treasure their independence, and to be interested in building up charitable resources and enlarging their welfare role primarily as a means to protect and reinforce that. It was not uncommon for dissenting groups' special efforts to attract wider notice and for them to be held up as models of community self-sufficiency" (eg French protestants in Switzerland in 1770s)
* role of charities in poor relief was attractive to states, in terms of both cash and people - they could do things the state could not, they could get money that people were unwilling to give to the state, and it helped in terms of legitimation

From Head v heart? Voluntary Associations and Charity Organisation in England, c 1700-1850 (Michael JD Roberts)
* good on rise of more scientific charity - eg giving was no longer a duty but was "an act of mercy peformed as a result of morally refined sensitivity in the giver to the sight or knowledge of human suffering". Giving was voluntary both legally and morally so it was "reasonable for the donor to expect the recipient to conform to certain continuing standards of deservingness" - mainly to restore and retain a self-supporting positionin society by being in the labour market
* problems of charities trying to monitor and evaluate deservingness of charitable applicants - difficult to keep doing and difficult to do on any large scale
* religious charities were pulled in two directions - professionalising and proseltyzing

From Transforming the Nation and the Child: Philanthropy in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and England, c1780-c1850 (Jeroen Dekker)
* uses concept of social marginality, with poor at periphery of society compared to mainstream, with intermediate area of fragility where people could sink into periphery
* like others, contrasts "philanthropy" (utilitarian) with "charity" (Christian) and also growth in C19 of mix which was "Christian philanthropy"
* traditional Christian charity aimed to make life more humane for those with marginal standard of living, but modern philanthropy "not only aimed at making life for the poor and the marginals more humane, but also at eliminating the marginals as a specific social group"
* Catholic charity was more reliant on clergy congregations, compared to Protestants with more individual action and where semi-independent bodies played a role

From Religion, Philanthropy and the State in late 18th and early 19th Century Ireland (Maria Luddy)
* In Catholic eyes, all Protestant philantrhopy was eventually to become tainted with the stain of proseltism, precluding any interdenominational attempts at co-operation for the benefit of the poor and needy in Irish societ" - which was presumably brought as an attitude to England by Irish immigrants

back with the Internet

Have been rubbish at updating this for the past couple of months, mainly because we've been moving house and BT took forever to sort out removing tags from our new phone line. Anyway, it's all sorted now so should be more in a bit. In the meantime, here's a photo from the medieval fancy dress wedding we went to last week in Cornwall. Photos with fancy dress are on flickr.