Philanthropy as an Artifact of the State

INSTITUTIONAL FORMS OF PHILANTHROPY

The practice of philanthropy is as old as humanity. People have been giving away their money, property, and time to others for millennia.

The classic work of French sociologist Marcel Mauss illuminated the ubiquity of gift giving in archaic or primitive societies. Mauss identified what he called the gift exchange, a form of exchange contrasted with market exchange. Gift exchange was not merely ubiquitous; Mauss argued that gift giving revealed the deeper structure of social relations and that gifts were embedded within a morality of obligation and reciprocity. Moral norms about giving, receiving, and reciprocating informed gift economies, which in turn helped to establish social order and hierarchy. Gift giving was frequently, perhaps always, competitive and strategic. Gift exchange in this sense does not directly map onto the idea of charity or philanthropy, though of course philanthropy can also be understood as competitive and strategic and also as an exercise of power that reveals underlying social structures and hierarchies.

In a brief and tantalizing passage, Mauss suggested that during times of surplus, expectations about generosity shift and the wealthy come to be seen as obligated to the poor. Here begins, he says, a theory of alms, in which the "ancient morality of the gift" is changed into a "principle of justice." We shall pursue this idea — the distinction between charity and justice — in the next chapter.

In this chapter, our aim is to examine how social norms are always at work in the activity of philanthropy. Philanthropy has an ineliminable moral and political undercurrent. And there is a rich tradition of scholarship, partly stimulated by Mauss, on the gift and its relationship to charity and justice. As I mentioned at the outset, however, my aim in this book is not an exploration of the morality of giving as such — whether, when, where, and to whom individuals should give, and how gifts should be received and reciprocated, if at all. My aim is to develop a political theory of philanthropy, to explore what kind of institutional arrangements should define and structure philanthropy. My particular interest is the fit between philanthropy and contemporary theories of justice that involve commitments to liberal democracy, which is to say commitments to the values of liberty and equality. One might say that I aim to examine the norms, drawn from the independent standing of liberal democratic justice, that ought to inform the institutional setting in which philanthropy takes place.

Seen this way, philanthropy is more than the sum total of individual philanthropic acts. It is also an institutionalized practice of privately funding the production of goods that have prosocial or public benefits. In this respect, philanthropy is not an invention of the state but ought to be viewed as an artifact of the state. We can be certain that philanthropy would not have the form it takes in the absence of the various norms, laws, and policies that help to define and structure it. In the modern-day United States and most other developed countries, this much should seem obvious. The contemporary practice of philanthropy involves tax incentives to give money away. More generally, laws govern the creation of nonprofit organizations and foundations, and they spell out the rules under which these organizations may operate. The legal codification, for example, of the nonprofit corporation, as distinct from the for-profit corporation, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the United States, laws for incorporation as a notfor-profit corporate entity began in the late nineteenth century.

Tax incentives for making philanthropic gifts are also relatively new — dating back in the United States to 1917 and the institution of a federal income tax. Yet states of all different kinds have long done more than simply respect the liberty of individuals to make philanthropic donations. Philanthropy should not be understood in the simplistic manner of an array of activities that take place within a framework of nonintervention by the state: philanthropy as nothing more than the aggregation of private individual decisions to give money away. Instead, philanthropic behavior, both individually and collectively, must be understood as embedded in political institutions, laws, and public policies, the sum total of which help to give shape, structure, and social meaning to philanthropy.

That this is so should seem obvious. Philanthropy is hard to imagine, for instance, without political arrangements concerning property and lawful transfer of property. Such arrangements are necessary, after all, to understand when something can be donated, treated as one person's legitimate possession in order to give to another person or entity. Even if the political attitude toward the philanthropic inclinations of individuals is simple governmental forbearance, such an attitude depends on a background legal infrastructure about property and, quite frequently, much more, such as taxation, a legal codification of recognized charitable purposes, and institutional arrangements concerning bequests, trusts, and endowments and their permissible size and duration.

Typical histories of philanthropy often begin by making reference to the Greek origin of the word "philanthropy" (love for humanity) and the religious, specifically Judeo-Christian, roots of charity, referring to a spiritual calling to assist the poor and sick. Think here of the biblical commitment to tithing or of the passage "it is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). And standard histories virtually always make mention of the passage in medieval England of the Elizabethan Statute of Charitable Uses in 1601. This law was among the first to define what would be recognized as official, that is, politically sanctioned and supported, charitable purposes, with the aim of assigning the state some authority over the creation and expenditure of the many private charitable trusts that had been created, lodged most frequently within a church, and directed at many different purposes. Here we see quite plainly the interaction between the state and the practice of philanthropy.

In this chapter, I provide a short tour of different political arrangements that have organized the phenomenon of philanthropy. Philanthropy may be a universal and time-immemorial activity, but because its practice is embedded within different social norms and structured by different institutional arrangements, it takes on different forms in different places at different times. This is what I mean by the idea that philanthropy is not an...