Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1
Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1
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资本主义与人道主义敏感性的起源，第 1 部分
DOI：
10.1086/ahr/90.2.339
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发表时间：
1985
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Thomas L. Haskell
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Thomas L. Haskell
在1750年之后的一百年里，一股前所未有的人道主义改革浪潮席卷了西欧、英国和北美社会。在这种新的敏感性所引发的运动中，最引人注目的是废除奴隶制。尽管在1750年之前，奴隶制的道德性经常受到质疑，但它经常受到辩护，甚至最严厉的道德主义者也很少直接谴责。大约在奴隶制从一个有问题但容易辩护的制度转变为一个自认为邪恶和可憎的制度的时候，关于如何阻止罪犯，救济穷人，治疗精神病，教育年轻人，以及与原始人打交道的新态度开始出现。由此产生的改革，几乎以任何合理的标准衡量，都是对旧做法的改进，而旧做法往往是野蛮的。即便如此，20世纪的历史学家并不满足于将这些改革归因于人类非正常意识的进步，或者简单地归因于利他主义的随机爆发。在解释新人道主义时，历史学家一再指出马克思主义者通常所说的经济基础或社会结构的变化，即资本主义的发展和工业化的开始。追溯人道主义与资本主义之间的联系一直是历史学家的主要关注，我相信，这项事业已经成功地极大地扩展了我们对新感觉力的理解。我们现在知道，改革者的动机远远超过无私的愿望，以帮助受压迫的人，我们
AN UNPRECEDENTED WAVE OF HUMANITARIAN reform sentiment swept through the societies of Western Europe, England, and North America in the hundred years following 1750. Among the movements spawned by this new sensibility, the most spectacular was that to abolish slavery. Although its morality was often questioned before 1750, slavery was routinely defended and hardly ever condemned outright, even by the most scrupulous moralists. About the time that slavery was being transformed from a problematical but readily defensible institution into a selfevidently evil and abominable one, new attitudes began to appear on how to deter criminals, relieve the poor, cure the insane, school the young, and deal with primitive peoples.' The resulting reforms were, by almost any reasonable standard, an improvement over old practices that were often barbarous. Even so, twentiethcentury historians have not been satisfied to attribute those reforms either to an advance in man's mnoral sense or, simply, to a random outburst of altruism. In explaining the new humanitarianism, historians have repeatedly pointed to changes in what Marxists generally call the economic base or substructure of society, that is, the growth of capitalism and beginnings of industrialization. Tracing links between humanitarianism and capitalism has been a major preoccupation of historians, and the enterprise has succeeded, I believe, in greatly extending our understanding of the new sensibility. We know now that the reformers were motivated by far more than an unselfish desire to help the downtrodden, and we