I don’t think we can conclude just from the fact that the change occurred when it did that the cause was a change in the morals of the oppressors, rather than a change in how easy it was for revolts to succeed for other reasons (like more urban populations making revolution easier).
In the 19th and 20th centuries, at the height of class struggle, the justice/​charity opposition was resolved with the paradigm that charity was merely an alibi masking the systemic oppression of the upper classes.
The failure of socialism—but not of liberal democracy with a social market economy—now provides an opportunity for a rationalist and non-traditional conception of charity.
This implies charity as an economic dimension of cultural change—moral evolution. In a non-political sense, this is also revolutionary and should be expressed in the form of a social movement with explicit ideological content (anarcho-pacifist, basically… but this requires an ideology of human behavior itself). This remains to be done, but a rational conception of charity as a driver of social change is already a great step forward.
I don’t think we can conclude just from the fact that the change occurred when it did that the cause was a change in the morals of the oppressors, rather than a change in how easy it was for revolts to succeed for other reasons (like more urban populations making revolution easier).
In the 19th and 20th centuries, at the height of class struggle, the justice/​charity opposition was resolved with the paradigm that charity was merely an alibi masking the systemic oppression of the upper classes.
The failure of socialism—but not of liberal democracy with a social market economy—now provides an opportunity for a rationalist and non-traditional conception of charity.
This implies charity as an economic dimension of cultural change—moral evolution. In a non-political sense, this is also revolutionary and should be expressed in the form of a social movement with explicit ideological content (anarcho-pacifist, basically… but this requires an ideology of human behavior itself). This remains to be done, but a rational conception of charity as a driver of social change is already a great step forward.