The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity.

• Author: Whaples, Robert M.
• Position: Book review

* The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity

By Jeremy Beer

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Pp. ix, 124. $19.95 paperback.

Robert Higgs and Elizabeth Bernard Higgs reminded Independent Review readers in a recent "Etceteras" column that "[a] ship cannot make much headway when it is held back by a sea anchor. In our voyage toward a truly free society, lack of compassion for the less fortunate acts as such an anchor" ("Compassion-a Critical Factor for Attaining and Maintaining a Free Society," The Independent Review 19, no. 4 [Spring 2015]: 627).

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith argues that compassion-from the Latin compati, "to suffer with"-is innate: "By the imagination we place ourselves in ... [the] situation [of someone in need], we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter, as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them" (part I, sec. I, chap. 1, at http://oll.libertydund.org/titles/2620). If so, the question becomes how to express our compassion.

In recent decades, the American voter has expressed this compassion largely by taxing the rich and redistributing resources directly to the not-as-rich through programs such as Temporary Aid to Needy Families, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicare, and school lunch programs. Unfortunately, these programs have mixed motives-some not so altruistic-and mixed results. Another expression of compassion is the mammoth philanthropic movement, capped by more than eighty thousand foundations with $715 billion in assets. Such foundations, headlined by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose net worth exceeds $42 billion, are often touted by skeptics of big government as an antidote to it. And in some ways they are. But, argues Jeremy Beer, president of the American Ideas Institute, in many ways they provide yet another attempt to solve the world's problems from the top down.

As Beer sees traditional historiographies of philanthropy in America, they fall into one of three camps-a celebratory story of "unadulterated progress and unquestionable goodwill"; a leftist critique of "systems of social control intended to maintain class boundaries and serve middle-class and elite interests"; and a story about reformers "leading, happily, to the advancement of the...