Philanthropy is rarely out of the news these days. In only the last few months, Bill Gates has been grilled by the BBC’s Amol Rajan on whether his giving exacerbates inequality, while disgraced crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has faced allegations that his Effective Altruist views were a major factor in the collapse of his business empire amidst apparently industrial levels of fraud.
At the same time, Mackenzie Scott has been praised for giving over $14 billion dollars away in less than four years (eclipsing former husband Jeff Bezos in the process), and Yvon Chouinard has won plaudits for transferring his company, Patagonia, into non-profit ownership
These stories are all different, but they highlight a common point: that philanthropy matters, to all of us. It matters whether you view it positively, as a force for driving social innovation by taking risks that the public and private sector cannot; or negatively, as an antidemocratic menace that allows billionaires to bypass the ballot box and shape public policy and debate. Either way, it is vital that we understand how philanthropy works and scrutinise the role it plays in our society.
This realisation that philanthropy is important is not new. In fact, there are many points in the past when philanthropy was much more central to mainstream public debate than it is now, and criticism was also far more pointed. That is one reason why knowledge of the history of philanthropy is a hugely valuable tool in our efforts to understand it in the present. Unfortunately, awareness of this history is distinctly lacking.
Is this because philanthropy is inherently cross disciplinary, so it has often fallen between existing academic siloes – making it harder to get a sense of it as a coherent field of study? Or is it because when attention has been paid to the history of philanthropy it has often been skewed towards the biography and hagiography of individual ‘great men’? Whatever the reason, philanthropy seems notably lacking in knowledge of its own past, even by comparison with many other fields which suffer from a lack of historical perspective.
This leads to problems when it comes to understanding philanthropy in the present. Advocates for philanthropy are often guilty of making overly strong claims about the novelty of current approaches, simply because they are not aware of what has gone before. Conversely, critics sometimes give the impression they are the first to have identified problematic issues, whereas, in reality, these almost always reflect long traditions of critique.
When it comes to the practice of philanthropy, the fact that certain things have been tried before does not, of course, undermine our current efforts, but it should inform them. When faced with claims that modern philanthropists are uniquely keen to ‘combine profit and purpose’ by using approaches that blend financial and social return, for example, it is useful to be aware that this idea actually has a very long lineage and to understand some of the issues it has led to in the past. Knowing why the ‘four per cent philanthropy’ adopted by UK social housing reformers like Octavia Hill and Edward Guinness in the late 19th century was both lauded and heavily criticised, or why the early 18th century ‘charitable corporation’ collapsed in disgrace and stifled the development of blended approaches in the UK for more than 100 years can offer genuine insights for those working in philanthropy today.
The same goes for critical debates about philanthropy. Acknowledging that many of the worries we have today are ones that our predecessors also grappled with does not invalidate our current concerns. Rather it can reassure us that we are not alone in struggling with these questions, and may even lead to a realisation that they reflect fundamental tensions that are baked into the very notion of philanthropy and cannot, therefore, be ‘solved’ in any straightforward sense.
Being aware of past critiques of philanthropy also offers a rich source of insight for anyone trying to formulate concerns about it today. Those who worry about the democratic implications of allowing big money donors to shape the focus of policy and public spending through their giving would surely benefit from knowing that way back in 1910, one US newspaper warned that while it might seem ‘ungracious, if not malevolent’ to criticise J. D. Rockefeller’s decision to leave all his vast wealth to his newly formed foundation, it was also true that ‘with financial power would go the power to shape and direct’ and that as a result, ‘these private incorporated foundations, living forever, would attain an influence anti-social and anti-democratic to an extraordinary degree’. Likewise, anyone who feels as though the philanthropic ambitions of donors like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are paltry in comparison to the scale of resources available to them might like to hark back to G. K. Chesterton’s excoriating attack on Rockefeller, which mocks his apparent generosity on the grounds that ‘Rockefeller decides not to absorb the whole of his own wealth just as he decides, with the same generous self-abnegation, not to drink up the sea or use up all the heat of the sun’.
The past, then, clearly has a lot more to offer in terms of thinking about the role of philanthropy in the present. It can also expand our horizons in terms of thinking about what is possible in the future since taking a long view makes it clear that the way philanthropy is today was not predetermined; rather it is just one version of how things could have been and reflects choices (and mistakes) made at various points in the past. There is huge power in this realisation, as it can give us greater boldness to imagine how things could be different. This is important, as philanthropy will need to adapt and evolve in the coming years in response to the many valid questions and concerns we are currently grappling with. And this will involve making clear and informed choices today about what we want philanthropy to look like in the future.
Rhodri Davies is the founding Director of the think tank Why Philanthropy Matters, and a Pears Research Fellow at the Centre for Philanthropy, University of Kent. He is also the host of the Philanthropisms podcast.
What Is Philanthropy For? by Rhodri Davies is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £8.99.
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