Exploring the Philanthropic Landscape: Introduction.

• Author: Ealy, Lenore T.

In Reclaiming the American Dream ([1965] 1993), Richard Cornuelle argued that the "quality of life in the U.S. now depends largely on a revival of a lively competition between ... two natural contenders for public responsibility" (66): government and the independent sector. Cornuelle's analysis suggested that in waging the twentieth-century contest between market and state, theorists and politicians alike had mislaid an entire sector of human action embedded in a space he called the independent sector. Cornuelle sought to turn our attention to the quiet but persistent actions of private individuals and voluntary associations seeking to lubricate social relations, ameliorate social problems, and co-create more livable communities.

Taking up Alexis de Tocqueville's challenge to reflect upon the "science of association," Cornuelle sought to expand our understanding of what it means to "promote the general welfare" and challenged the failure of analysts to realize that markets and states were not the only means available for advancing the general welfare. Having been a student of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Cornuelle was neither surprised nor dismayed when the socialist economies of the Soviet bloc collapsed in the early 1990s (Cornuelle 1991). Nor was he triumphalist. Cornuelle thought that libertarians had little time for celebration because although they were prepared to offer advice on planting market economies in the nations of the Eastern bloc, they were largely unprepared to offer much insight on how to reconstitute civil societies--that space of voluntary action in which people work quietly toward the cultivation and preservation of the social norms and institutions, the rule of law, and mutual civic respect that form the fertile soil that feeds healthy economies and polities.

One appeal of communism, Cornuelle proposed, had been "the powerful echo of its original promises to protect ordinary people from the hazards of life in capitalist society" (1991). It was thus problematic that "there is no very distinct libertarian vision of community--of social as opposed to economic process--outside the state: the alluring libertarian contention that society would probably work better if the state could somehow be limited to keeping the peace and enforcing contracts has to be taken largely on faith" (1991).

The Independent Institute and the pages of The Independent Review have long brought the insights of research in political...