From Hobbes to Hayek: Perspectives on Civil Society and Philanthropy.

AuthorMerrill, Jacqueline Pfeffer
PositionExploring the Philanthropic Landscape - Report

Charity and philanthropy--private citizens' acts to do good for others--stand outside the realm of government. Charity and philanthropy seem to be quintessentially private; nevertheless, governing authorities are often keenly alert to citizens' charitable and philanthropic activities. Philanthropy is broadly essential to a robust civil society. On the one hand, charity and philanthropy can fill needs that might otherwise fall to the government and thus clear the field for government to provide other public goods. On the other hand, philanthropists and nonprofit entities can also establish and foster rival sources of public influence and authority to government. Philanthropists can fund scientific and policy initiatives that support or undercut the current government's policy preferences. Philanthropy and charity may be acts of private citizens, but they are acts with public and therefore potentially political significance.

No wonder, then, that governments are alert to citizens' philanthropic and charitable activities. Across the ages, political philosophers and others have debated whether there should be limits to individual citizens' freedom to be philanthropists and to dispense charity or whether individuals should have unlimited freedom in this area. Broadly speaking, there are three predominant positions today about the proper relations between government and philanthropists. First, there is an argument for constraint, which holds that because citizens have established government as the legitimate, final authority to represent the commonweal, governments may properly constrain and even limit charity and philanthropy rather than allowing philanthropists unchecked freedom to establish rival loci of power. Second, there is an argument for protection of private philanthropy, which holds that because citizens have rights, especially private-property rights, they should be free to exercise them so long as they do not impinge on others' rights. On this view, government should protect philanthropy and charity as activities bound up with individuals' property rights. The third position, one of encouraging philanthropy, holds that because the health of pluralistic liberal democracies requires the flourishing of communities and associations, with special allowance for those that represent minority communities and unpopular opinions, governments should actively promote philanthropy as essential to sustaining such substate communities and minority groups for the sake of pluralist democracy.

In the past decade in the United States, these three positions have been in the backdrop of heated debates about donor privacy, donor-funded initiatives, and limits to the charitable deduction in the U.S. Tax Code. Although these debates may seem only the flavor du jour of political debate, they have much deeper origins in modern understandings of the individual citizen's relationship to the modern state. By understanding the deeper origins of these various positions, we are better able to understand what is at stake in these contemporary debates.

The first of these positions is rooted in the thought of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and finds powerful contemporary expression in the thought of John Rawls and his followers. The second is rooted in the thought of John Locke, with recent development by theorists such as Robert Nozick and Rose and Milton Friedman. The third is rooted in the thought of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, with contemporary articulation in the writings of F. A. Hayek, Yuval Levin, William Schambra, and others. The scope allowed to private philanthropy and charity tells much about the total scope that is allowed for individual freedom in a political community. I take up each of these positions in turn.

Before I examine them, however, it is worth noting that many political philosophers remind us that government and the rule of law create the possibility to build up wealth, without which there would be no charity or philanthropy. As Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan, without government

there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. ([1651] 1968, 1.13, 186) With his view of human nature as naturally solitary and prone to distrust, Hobbes thought that government should be sure to provide for citizens' basic needs:

"Whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Uncharitablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Commonwealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity." ([1651] 1968, 11.30, 387)

Once citizens do undertake charity and philanthropy, political communities must determine how and why these two things are to be constrained and directed or protected as an exercise of liberty or actively encouraged. Let us now turn to these three positions and their origins in modern political philosophy.

Constrain and Direct Philanthropy

To many, philanthropy seems to be so obviously a good carried out by private citizens' free acts that it is surprising to suppose governments might seek to constrain it. And yet governments past and present have judged that philanthropy may be a threat to the commonweal.

Niccolo Machiavelli offered a dramatic instance of how Rome's senators dealt with what they saw as a threat to the regime from private philanthropy:

When the city of Rome was overburdened with hunger, and private provisions were not enough to stop it, one Spurius Maelius, who was very rich for those times, had the intent to make provision of grain privately, and to feed the plebs with it, gaining its favor for him. Because of this affair he had such a crowd of people in his favor that the Senate ... had him killed. Here it is to be noted that many times works that appear merciful, which cannot reasonably be condemned, become cruel and are very dangerous for a republic if they are not corrected in good time. ([1531] 1996, III.28, 276, mentioned in Reich 2011, 177-78) No philanthropist today is in danger of being executed for his philanthropy, but there are many who do agree that philanthropy, although generally beneficial to the political community, may also and perhaps often be "very dangerous" for the American republic and must be closely regulated.

Consider, for example, the "UnKoch My Campus" and "Transparent GMU" organizations: even in a time of deep concern about soaring higher-education costs, which would seem to make philanthropic support for colleges and universities especially welcome, some campus activists have raised the alarm about the allegedly pernicious effects of Charles Koch's and like-minded donors' private philanthropy to support faculty lines, graduate study, and campus programming, with the charge that these grants are intended to advance a libertarian agenda that is contrary to the public good (Gluckman 2018). Likewise at a time when U.S. primary and secondary students lag behind their peers in other countries, there has been scrutiny of and opposition to the enormous philanthropic investments in K-12 education and support of the Common Core standards on the part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other broadly liberal flinders (Tomkins-Stange 2016, 16). (1) Concerns especially about libertarian and conservative hinders have led to alarms about "dark money" (Mayer 2016) and to calls for charities to be required to disclose...

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