Editors’ Note: Thomas Adam highlights an important recent court case in Germany that has the potential to transform the nation’s philanthropic sector. Over the course of the nineteenth century, German civil society experienced a remarkable expansion in the absolute numbers of, and in the assets given to, foundations and endowments. Wealthy Germans created endowments that … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Emma Saunders-Hastings introduces her new article in American Political Science Review on Frederick Douglass and his political theory of ‘dirty money.’ In 1844, the newly-formed Free Church of Scotland sent a fundraising mission to the United States. It raised about £3,000, largely from southern Presbyterian donors. Abolitionists in the United States and abroad … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Kevin Butterfield continues HistPhil’s forum on “uncivil civil society.” Historians and social scientists studying the civil society of the early United States have rediscovered fears and anxieties within the much-celebrated notion of Americans as a “nation of joiners.” The emerging world of mutual aid organizations, reform societies, political clubs, and voluntary associations of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Hans Peter Schmitz, George E. Mitchell, and Elena M. McCollim introduce their research on the Giving Pledge, and analyze how one of its most prominent signatories, MacKenzie Scott, poses a challenge to the discourse surrounding philanthropy it most often advances. During the Covid-19 pandemic, MacKenzie Scott accompanied three rounds of billion-dollar donations to … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Legal scholars Sarah C. Haan and Faith Stevelman assess the significance and consequences of the recent Supreme Court ruling on nonprofit disclosure, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. On July 1st, in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (AFPF), a splintered Supreme Court majority invalidated California’s right, as a perquisite to in-state fundraising, … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Allison Schnable introduces Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion (University of California Press, 2021). This is Schnable’s recently-published book examining the rise of new actors in the international development world: volunteer-driven grassroots international nongovernmental organizations. In 1968, the radical priest and social critic Ivan Illich addressed a conference of North … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Candice Delmas continues HistPhil‘s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society” with a defense of uncivil disobedience. There is a ‘crisis of civility’, we are told, an ‘epidemic of incivility.’ We must #ReviveCivility to preserve our fragile bonds in civil society. We need to break free of our online bubbles and learn to talk and … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Nancy Rosenblum continues HistPhil’s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society.” ‘Civil society’: the phrase comes with built-in praise and promise. The crowded sphere of voluntary associations standing between public political life and private affairs is defined as sociable and civil. What civic education in public schools is for children, civil society is for promoting … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Sheri Berman continues HistPhil’s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society,” revisiting her seminal article, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” in World Politics. In 1997 I published an article entitled “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” that challenged a growing consensus on the part of academic and non-academic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Erin Pineda continues HistPhil’s forum on ‘Uncivil Civil Society,’ examining the civil dimensions of civil disobedience and their relation to our conceptions of civil society. The details hardly need rehearsing: on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building, mobilized by the belief that the recent … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer continues HistPhil‘s forum on ‘Uncivil Civil Society,’ highlighting the challenges in turning to the contrary-to-fundamental-public-policy doctrine laid out in the 1983 Bob Jones University Supreme Court case as a means of policing uncivil civil society. In a recent article, Zachary B. Pohlman and I consider the application to churches of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Simone Chambers and Jeffrey S. Kopstein kick off HistPhil‘s online forum on “Uncivil Civil Society,” revisiting an important article they wrote on the topic two decades ago. The “Uncivil Civil Society” forum will examine challenges to the neo-Tocquevillian strain of thinking that poses strong links between civil society and civil, liberal, and democratic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Benjamin Soskis reviews Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. For a few weeks each summer for the last decade or so, one of my daughters has attended camp at the Smithsonian Institution. That meant that many July mornings and afternoons, when I was dropping off or … Continue reading
Editors’ note: Joseph Mead situates the pending Supreme Court case Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Beccerra within the broader history of efforts to regulate charitable solicitation. The Supreme Court will soon decide a case with potentially significant implications for regulating nonprofits, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Beccerra. In the upcoming case, two nonprofits have challenged … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: This post, from Swati Srivastava, is adapted from her article, “Navigating NGO-Government Relations in Human Rights: New Archival Evidence from Amnesty International, 1961-1986,” recently published in International Studies Quarterly. In 1961, when Amnesty International was founded, it entered a daunting international landscape for human rights. After World War II, the international community passed … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Stanley Carlson-Thies provides historical background for President Biden’s recent (re-)establishment of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. President Biden by Executive Order 14015 (Feb. 14, 2021) created a White House office to promote government partnerships with civil society organizations, both religious and secular, to maximize the effectiveness of services for … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: As the first contributor to an ongoing forum that HistPhil will be publishing over the next several months on the “uncivil” nature and histories of civil society, Chiara Cordelli illuminates the uncivil dimensions of philanthropy. Philanthropy, once again, has stepped in to meet unmet needs. The amount donated in response to the pandemic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Introducing a 2020 article he co-authored with Bill Cooke in Academy of Management Learning & Education, Arun Kumar argues that elite US “foundations’ involvement in establishing B-schools globally is closely linked to a broader mission to establish the USA’s geo-political place and power in the world.” US philanthropic foundations, especially the ‘Big Three’ … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Lily Geismer continues HistPhil‘s mini-book forum on Lila Corwin Berman‘s The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex. You can read Ben Ratskoff‘s earlier review of the book here. Along with Brent Cebul and Mason Williams, I recently co-edited a volume called Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century United … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Over the next few weeks, HistPhil will feature several reviews of Lila Corwin Berman’s recently published The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex (Princeton University Press, 2020). Ben Ratskoff offers the first of these below. Lily Geismer follows with a review here. The climax of Lila Corwin Berman’s new monograph is the infamous fall of … Continue reading
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