What Is Philanthropy?

What is Philanthropy?

This article summarizes research done by the Catalogue for Philanthropy. For more details, see our book, Philanthropy Reconsidered (2008).
"Philanthropy" is one of the most profound and influential ideas in the history of Western thought, originating 2500 years ago, and as of recently interacting with two cultures: the first, which is humanistic, initiated and defined the long mainstream tradition; the second, which is social-scientific, arose in the 20th century and has tended to ignore that tradition. The latter is still dominant today, though the original humanism is now being revived. The Catalogue for Philanthropy has advocated a balance between the two, for their mutual benefit.
Accordingly, "Philanthropy" is best defined as "private initiatives, for public good..." (the social-science aspect), "...focusing on quality of life" (the humanistic aspect). Thus John Gardner’s "private initiatives for the public good," Robert Payton’s "voluntary action for the public good," Lester Salamon’s "the private giving of time or valuables…for public purposes," and Robert Bremner’s "the aim of philanthropy…is improvement in the quality of human life," may be combined to connect modern philanthropy with its entire previous history.
This distinguishes it from government (public initiatives for public good) and business (private initiatives for private good). Omitting the definite article "the" with "public good" avoids the dubious assumption that there is ever a single, knowable public good, and in any case people rarely if ever agree on what that might be; rather, this definition merely says that the benefactor intends a "public" rather than an exclusively "private" good or benefit. The inclusion of "quality of life" ensures the strong humanistic emphasis of the word's original coinage.
The first recorded use of the word was in line 11 of the ca.460 BCE Greek play, Prometheus Bound, long attributed to Aeschylus. There the titan Prometheus had created mankind out of clay, but his creatures at first had no culture—no knowledge, skills, arts, science, technology, etc.—so they lived in darkness, in caves, in constant fear for their lives. Zeus, the tyrannical king of the gods, who resented Prometheus‘ … read moreequivalent of "private initiative," decided to kill them. But Prometheus, out of his philanthropos tropos, or "humanity-loving character," gave them two gifts: fire, symbolizing all culture (arts, sciences, knowledge, technology, etc.), and "blind hope," or optimism. They were mutually reinforcing—with fire, mankind could be optimistic; with optimism, fire would be put to good use, to improve the human condition.
What exactly did Prometheus "love"? Certainly not his creatures individually, nor as a group of individuals, because at that mythical point in time before the existence of any culture, there could be no individuality. What he "loved"—in the sense of cherishing, caring for, nourishing, and developing it—was human potential, what humans could make for and of themselves, given "fire" and "blind hope." Prometheus' name meant "Foresight" which all benefactors have, but at that time only he and his Mother, Earth, had it. What he foresaw, and in this crucial instance "loved," was what the play was asserting to be the essence of "humanity"—"what it is to be human": namely, the capacities we all have to improve ourselves and our conditions through "fire" and "blind hope".
That, at any rate, is how the ancient Greeks and Romans understood it. What the playwright was seeking to explain, in reworking this myth from Hesiod's earlier version, was the nature and origin of civilization—a topic of special interest in Athens at that time because that was where and when Western civilization was itself being born, in philosophy, art, literature, science, history and mathematics. The play asserted that civilization arose from a mythic "love of what it is to be human"—"All the arts come from Prometheus." (lines 505-6). There is an intentional redundancy here, that Prometheus' philanthropic gift to humankind was philanthropy itself, the essential purpose of which was to improve the human condition by further "loving" "what it is to be human." In effect, Prometheus' philanthropy endowed humans with the capacity to be philanthropic themselves. The "public good" sought was the improvement of the human condition, by endowing humans with the capacity to complete their own creation—to improve themselves and their ways of life, through education and civilization. What was being asserted here was that the attribute (tropos) of loving what it is to be human (philanthropos) is fundamentally who we are, and ought to be, as human beings. By endowing us with this attribute, Prometheus was completing and fulfilling his (and our) creation. The Platonic Academy's philosophical dictionary listed "philanthropía" as: "A state of well-educated habits, stemming from love of humanity. A state of being productive of benefit to humans. A state of grace. Mindfulness together with good works."
Because Prometheus' philanthropy constituted a rebellion against Zeus' tyranny, for which he was severely punished, it came also to be associated by the Greeks with freedom and democracy. "Philanthropic and democratic" became a common tag—both Socrates and the laws of Athens were later referred to as being "philanthropic and democratic." The idea was that philanthropic humans can be entrusted with the power of government, and will be capable of governing themselves.
It is significant that "philanthropos" was coined not as a noun referring to the gift, nor as a verb referring to the act of giving, but as an adjective, describing the character of the benefactor—his personal or cultural values. One of the earliest uses of the noun form, philanthropía, was in an early Socratic dialogue (Euthyphro, 390 BCE), in which Socrates himself says that "pouring out" his thoughts to his listeners, "without pay," is his philanthropía.
The synonymy of education and culture with "loving what it is to be human" was immediately grasped by the Greeks. They conceived of education as self-development toward areté, or excellence, the perfection of all our resources of body, mind, and spirit, to make us more fully and effectively all that we can be as human beings. Their word for culture as purportedly ennobling education was paideia (as in "encyclopedia," from "encyclos" or universal, and "paideia" learning)—which was the essential core of liberal education as it was Classically conceived. Proving this entire argument is the fact that both paideia and philanthropía were later translated into Latin as one word: humanitas.
With the fall of the Roman Empire, this humanistic, cultural, understanding of philanthropy went underground, and hibernated, as it were, for a thousand years in forgotten manuscripts of medieval monastic libraries. It was revived with Renaissance humanism, and informed Pico della Mirandola's famous 15th-century Oration on the Dignity of Man. The word entered English in the early 17th century: Sir Francis Bacon, in his essay "On Goodness" (1608), defined it as "the affecting of the weale of men, what the Grecians call philanthropía." Sir Henry Cockeram in his first English Dictionary (1623) used "philanthropie" as a synonym for "humanitie," in the Classical sense.
But what does this Classical history have to do with us today in modern America? As it turns out, a great deal. (For a full discussion, see Philanthropy Reconsidered, Chapter 2: "Philanthropy's Finest Hour: the American Revolution.") At that same time, in the early seventeenth century, the Classical conceptualization of philanthropy came to America with the English colonists. Here there was a new historical situation, in which Europeans had to create their own new society in a wilderness. Land was plentiful and cheap, so labor was scarce and dear, and in any case they had no cash to pay for labor. Thus every major project—from barn-raising to building roads, churches, schools, hospitals, civic buildings, fire departments, everything —had to be done by volunteers. Over the next 150 years, a culture of collaboration arose, in which as Alexis de Tocqueville later observed, "voluntary associations"—which is to say "private initiatives, for public good, focusing on quality of life"— abounded, for every conceivable public purpose. This, he said, was a key to the rise of "democracy in America"!
As an idea and value, "philanthropy" was a central ethical precept of the Enlightenment, considered to be so essential in human nature as to be the key to human happiness and well-being. From the Scottish Enlightenment in particular it was channeled into the thought of many of our Founding Fathers.
On both conceptual and practical levels, then, philanthropy gained significant cultural influence in colonial America. It is notable that in the American colonies, philanthropy was more about volunteering than about monetary donations—two leading examples of this are Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere, both of whom wrote that their lives had been shaped as youths by reading Cotton Mather's popular tract of 1710, Bonifacius, An Essay to Do Good.
A philanthropic precursor of the American Revolution occurred in 1747, when Franklin privately assumed a public responsibility to keep the peace in Pennsylvania because the Quaker (pacifist) government was failing to act. Using his newspaper The Philadelphia Gazette,Franklin raised a volunteer army of 10,000 men and £6,000 to solve the problem. As the son of William Penn observed, "That is a dangerous man—if he can do this without us, he can do it against us." The signers of the Declaration of Independence were private citizens, pledging to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. The Declaration itself was addressed to all mankind. The Minutemen, Paul Revere's riders, the Sons of Liberty, the Revolutionary Army were all voluntary associations. General Washington insisted on serving as a volunteer, "pro bono publico" and he used to sign his letters "Philanthropically yours." Several major unprecedented features of our early government were modeled on voluntary associations—the people (members) as the constituent power; launching a nation with a philanthropic mission statement; addressing it to all mankind; and focusing government on quality of life.
Thus Alexander Hamilton, in the first paragraph, first page, of the first Federalist Paper, launching the Founders' argument for ratification of the Constitution, noted that "It is commonly remarked" that Americans are at a new place in history: whereas previously governments had been products of accident and force, Americans could now choose their own form of government. "This," he wrote, "adds the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism." He was not talking about rich people helping poor people, but about "private initiatives for public good, focusing on quality of life." The United States of America was thus conceived and dedicated to be a philanthropic nation, a gift to all mankind, to enhance the human condition through freedom and democracy—a new "fire," inspired with a new "blind hope"—squarely in the Promethean tradition.
The Classical view of philanthropy in America dissipated in the course of the 19th century, as new and profound changes transformed our nation and Classical education declined. Around the turn of the 20th century philanthropy also took a new turn, as great titans of industry who were creating huge new fortunes—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford et al.—established major philanthropic foundations. These institutions introduced new approaches to charitable giving, among which was purportedly to aim their grants at the causes rather than the symptoms of social ills. This strategic approach was promulgated and sustained by men trained in the social sciences, who thought they were bringing those sciences to bear in social engineering.
Over the course of the 20th century, these same foundations also sought to professionalize philanthropy, to make it technically more sophisticated. By the end of the century professional staffs of foundations and charities were dominated by people trained in the social sciences. They tended to think in terms of group behavior, to focus on technical and procedural issues, using IRS and census data gathered by social scientists for governmental purposes. They saw society as composed of three sectors: government, business, and a third anomalous sector that is neither of those—it is tax-exempt, non-government, non-profit (meaning that it has no taxable profits). Their regulative ideal was "civil society"—a theoretical and societal abstraction, rather than a personal and educational or cultural value, speaking more to academic scholars, than personally to donors and volunteers.
The term "nonprofit" arose in the last quarter of the 20th century. It originated in the IRS and came to refer to the entire "third sector," including charities. Its first use (these numbers were kindly provided in personal communication by Peter Dobkin Hall) in the New York Times was 1915, in a story on the first congressional investigation of foundations. Its first use in a book title was 1937, for a government census of businesses. Its first use in a social-science doctoral dissertation title or abstract was 1959. There were 7 such uses in the '60s, 49 in the '70s, 238 in the '80s. It was not used commonly as a noun until the '80s, and became associated in that form with philanthropic charities, which is factually incorrect and expansively beside the point—there are over 42,000 "nonprofits" in Massachusetts, but we have found that fewer than one in ten of those are philanthropic charities of general interest to donors, eligible for listing in this MPD.
The word "philanthropy" for its part, was almost never used by the end of the 20th century. Foundations occasionally used it about themselves, though they provided only 10% of the private dollars in charitable giving. Fundraisers, at the interface of the sector with donors, referred not to philanthropy as a whole, but to their individual-charity employers. When we launched the Catalogue for Philanthropy in 1997, we were urged not to use the word because it was "pedantic," "pompous" and "nobody knows what it means." Instead, most professionals advising us preferred the "Catalogue for Giving".
That is how great ideas die, and we were simply lucky to have chosen the right word, which ten years later had entered the American vernacular—celebrity philanthropy having attracted enough media attention to popularize it.
Of course people still don't know what it means, which helps to explain why the Massachusetts Philanthropic Directory is working to revive its proper Classical and humanistic emphasis, and to provide hard evidence as to why the term "nonprofit" must now be expunged from the philanthropic lexicon. The fact is, no one defends the use of that term for philanthropy on any other ground than that it is conventional, and hopeless to change. We shall see.