The new Victorians? Celebrity charity and the demise of the welfare state

Abstract

This article asks whether the expansion of celebrity involvement in charitable and humanitarian issues in Northern Europe and the US might be a comparable historical phenomenon with the philanthropic endeavours of prominent nineteenth-century persons. The article notes that the conspicuous nature of star philanthropy in both Victorian times and the present is fairly dramatic in comparison with that of the mid twentieth century, when the welfare state and the New Deal were at their peak: a welfare-oriented era which, to some, now increasingly looks like a ‘historical blip’. It asks whether the rise of contemporary celebrity involvement in charity can therefore be explained in terms of the contemporary political conjuncture, inasmuch as celebrities could be understood as individuals with large amounts of private capital seeking to intervene in – and gain forms of power through – involvement in humanitarian and charitable causes that might have formerly been the job of the state. Can celebrity involvement in charity be explained in these terms? Does the marriage of celebrity and charity today take a neoliberal form, one that parallels the liberal form of nineteenth-century interventions, bequests and donations? What might the key differences between forms of spectacular ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in these eras (particularly the contemporary insistence on the confessional and intimate modes of address) reveal about its workings, its internal traditions and about the specificity of our own age? This article draws on contemporary media discourse, debate in the voluntary sector, historical scholarship and Foucault’s distinctions between liberalism and neoliberalism to argue that whereas ‘celanthropy’ in the Victorian period eventually came to contribute to the welfare state, today it is more involved in privatising and dismantling it.

Keywords:

• celebrity
• charity
• celanthropy
• philanthropy
• philanthrocapitalism

Notes

1. http://www.philanthrocapitalism.net/about/faq/ [Accessed 17 May 2012].

2. As I have discussed elsewhere, the contemporary formation of the CEO-celebrity can be traced through a number of interconnecting routes, from ‘soft capitalist’ imperatives on compulsory casualisation at work, through to the shifting modes of post-Fordist promotional culture and changes in ways stock market cultures value corporations (Littler 2007). The inclusion of Gates’ wife, Melinda, in the framing of this charitable project highlights the private-into-public dimension of CEO philanthrocapitalism as well as using the longstanding connection between femininity and charity.

3. http://www.pinkribbonfoundation.org.uk/about-us/patrons-and-celebrity-supporters/ [Accessed 17 May 2012].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jo Littler

Jo Littler works at City University London, and her research explores questions of culture and power from an interdisciplinary, cultural studies-oriented perspective. Her work on celebrity includes editing two issues of Celebrity Studies – ‘Celebrity Ecologies’ with Mike Goodman (4 (3) 2013) and ‘Celebrity and the Transnational’ (2 (1) 2011) – as well as the edited issue ‘Celebrity’ (Mediactive, 2004). Her books include Radical Consumption (Open University Press 2008) and (with Roshi Naidoo) The Politics of Heritage (Routledge 2005). She is currently writing a book called Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility.