"Burning Charity" and Love For One's Neighbor: Reformed Social Imaginaries of Charity and the Common Good in Eighteenth-Century Spain and New Spain

Abstract: In their quest to forge a national social imaginary or civic consciousness, Spanish Enlightenment reformers sought to redirect the loyalties and funds of Catholic citizens away from local religious confraternities and towards state projects of modernization. One key strategy involved deploying new registers of the religious concepts of "charity" and the "common good," making moral claims on the citizenry to render material assistance for the prosperity of their fellow citizens and the nation writ large. Catholics who resisted these efforts insisted on the embodied, relational foundations of these ideas (rooted in Thomistic thought) as well as the sanctity of the individual will.