What’s in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of an uprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urban surge of the working class masses in Spain would create a state of emergency, he devises a means to seduce the masses away from rebellion by taking on himself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual hero invested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. |
Aurélie Vialette is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. Her first book is titled Intellectual Philanthropy: the Seduction of the Masses. Her edited volume, Dissonances of Modernity: Music, Text, and Performance in Modern Spain, is forthcoming from North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. |