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Okay. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context.

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I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis, and this week we're doing another thematic deep dive, uh, this time into philanthropy and social justice. Now, this is definitely an issue that I've long wanted to cover on the podcast. I mean, I've touched on many aspects of it before, uh, both in conversations with guests and also in some of the other deep dive explorations that we've done, but we've never kind of approached the whole question head-on. So I was very keen to do it. Um, I should also say, if you want to peek behind the curtain, that there was a slightly more immediate pragmatic uh driver here, which was that the the episode that I uh actually originally had scheduled for various reasons I couldn't put out today. So I'm actually recording this on the day that the podcast uh goes out. Uh so it almost has the flavour of a live recording. So I'm going to riff my way through uh an exploration of the historical context for debates around philanthropy and social justice and where we are finding ourselves today. Um hopefully you'll find that uh interesting. I certainly think it's an absolutely fascinating topic. I also there's a slight cheat here, um, well, whether it's a cheat or whether it's just uh clever uh cross-pollination of different bits of work. It's obviously something I've written about plenty before, so there are various articles on the Why Philanthropy Matters website, which I'll be mentioning during the course of uh this podcast, no doubt, and I'll put links in the show notes. I also gave uh a talk um or I uh talked a little bit about the history of social justice philanthropy in the UK uh at the launch of um FOSIA Erfans report on transformative philanthropy earlier this year, which we've mentioned on the podcast many times. Um, and even more recently, I've just come back um this weekend from teaching a new short module at the University of Geneva as part of one of their philanthropy courses. Um, and the focus of that module is on using historical perspective to understand sort of current and future practice in philanthropy. But one of the examples that I ran through, and that was looking at the history of social justice philanthropy and how that kind of informs our understanding of current debates. So I feel as though I'm on top of this stuff, and therefore it lends itself to a fairly uh uh last-minute and hasty podcast recording. That being said, you know, I've actually spent a bit of time this morning kind of structuring my thoughts out, and um, you know, I think there's uh a lot to say about this, so I'm keen to get on with it. So without further ado, let's do that. So the the starting point, I guess, here is to frame what it is that I want to talk about, because I think there are all kinds of different ways that you can take this topic, some of which I'll uh acknowledge but not really go into so much today, and others that we'll go into in in more detail, and it'll kind of become clear where that balance lies, hopefully, fairly shortly. But let's just start with a definition maybe first. So, what is social justice? What is it that we're talking about? And I just took one definition from the the Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation that I found that I thought was quite useful, uh, and that is social justice is the objective of creating a fair and equal society in which each individual matters, their rights are recognised and protected, and decisions are made in ways that are fair and honest. I think we'll see that all the different aspects of that are kind of reflected in the various debates that we're going to run through about social justice and philanthropy. And I guess the big question behind all of this is if that's social justice and that's the goal we're aiming at, what's the relationship then between this goal or this ambition and philanthropy? Is philanthropy something that automatically or naturally delivers social justice, understood in this way? Is it something that doesn't necessarily deliver it automatically, but potentially can as long as we think about how we do philanthropy and do it in the right way? Or is philanthropy something that is in many cases, or some cases at least actively opposed to social justice and actually gets in the way of it and we'll see that this has been kind of a key thread in arguments about it. The other bit I think of important framing here that will help us kind of understand what we're talking about, I think, is just to step back a bit and make a point that I've made many other times uh certainly on this podcast and uh when I've been speaking at events and even occasionally when I've been talking to people down the pub, which uh you know occasionally gets quite odd looks. But this is the point that one of the key things about philanthropy is to understand that it is inherently got a dual nature. So it's kind of it's it's both about the individual and understood at a micro level, it's about individual choices, about giving away assets freely to try and achieve some sort of public good. And then at a macro level, when you add up all of those individual voluntary choices, you get this mechanism that sits alongside the state and the market as a means for determining how resources are deployed within society and a means of kind of addressing social issues. And as with lots of other areas of life and lots of other areas that that kind of philosophers have looked at certainly, it's been noted many times that these two different ways of looking at philanthropy pull in quite different directions. So the focus on the philanthropy at the individual level tends to lend itself to a focus on ideas of individual freedom and liberty and and choice. Whereas when you look at it at that macro level, it starts to be more about a desire for equity and equality and justice at a sort of fair distribution, and that actually these two things don't necessarily always sit that neatly together, and there might be a tension there. Just as one way of kind of hammering this point home, I think there's a useful quote here from um a book by uh Rob Reesch, uh Chiara Cordelli, and Lucy Bernholtz. Um so it's a volume called Philanthropy and Democratic Societies: History, Institutions and Values, which is uh admittedly a relatively dense uh collection of essays, but they're they're brilliant. There's some really, really great stuff in there, and if you're interested in sort of political philosophy and political theory around philanthropy, you should definitely get hold of a copy of that. And there's uh a quote that they have in the intro to that that I've used many, many, many times uh to illustrate this point, where they say philanthropy can refer both to actions and institutions. We can think of philanthropy both as a form of individual giving and as a complex economic and policy structure, as the institutionalized practice of privately funding the production of public benefits. If regarded from the first agential perspective, so the individual one, philanthropy stands apart from other forms of giving, such as gift giving to friends and family and from spending for private indivtion. If looked at from the second structural perspective, it stands apart from alternative institutionalized mechanisms of finance such as taxation or market exchange. And I guess the key thing here is that what is it that these two different ways of looking at philanthropy lead to? I think it brings a sort of sharp focus on differences between those two different ways of understanding them. And this tends to, I think, coalesce around a group of different ideas and concepts that are going to be important as we move through this discussion today. And that's the idea, the idea of things like duties, rights, and what the appropriate response is to redistributed resources and notions of of gratitude and thanks. Because as we'll see, there are quite fundamental differences between, for instance, philanthropy and taxation when assessed according to these different criteria. And also there are sort of different ways of thinking about philanthropy itself and where you think the emphasis should be in terms of the extent to which it's a duty, the extent to which it's based on rights, and the extent to which people should express gratitude as a result of it. Just as a sidebar, I wanted to say before we launch into the sort of specific historical um exploration that I want to go through, uh there's one obvious and kind of important aspect of this whole debate um around uh philanthropy and social justice, which is the idea of tainted donations or kind of tainted sources of wealth. So the idea that specific examples or instances of how wealth has been created raise concerns about injustice or concerns that that money has been raised in a way that cause injustice, and and therefore that undermines the legitimacy of efforts to do philanthropy using that wealth, or at least causes us to kind of reassess them. This is definitely a very important topic, and one that I find absolutely fascinating, as anyone who's spoken to me for more than five minutes will probably realise. But in fact, it's so fascinating and important that I've already done a whole podcast episode on it, which um I can direct you towards in the show notes. And so I don't want to rehearse all of that stuff here. So as a result, I'm going to kind of take it as read that the example and the point around tainted donations is an important one, and it is part of the debate around um philanthropy and social justice. But instead, what I'm going to focus on in a way is the kind of what I think of sometimes as the general case of that argument. So the tainted donations is essentially there is this particular example or these particular examples of money that's been made in ways that raise ethical concerns or concerns about injustice, and we need to assess um you know to what extent the philanthropy that that results from from that wealth is therefore legitimate. The general case is then essentially the argument that all forms of wealth creation to some extent raise issues of injustice because there are kind of structural problems or you know problems with the fundamental idea of capitalism, and it's that that we should be thinking about in broader terms and what that means for philanthropy. And that's kind of the stuff that I want to be focusing on today. So let's just take a very short break here, um, and then when we come back, what I want to do is have a look at the historical development of the critique of uh philanthropy as being something that doesn't necessarily uh meet the requirements of social justice, why that idea has come about, how it has developed over time, and how it has kind of shaped philanthropy as we know it today. So stay tuned for that. Okay, so uh let's dive into a bit of uh history, and it's you know, as ever, relatively sort of big picture thematic history that we're talking about here, rather than kind of nitty-gritty specifics of one time period. And as usual, I'm going to choose an arbitrary starting point. Um, in this case, I want to take as the starting point the medieval period um in the Western world or the Western Christian world, where in terms of that balance between uh sort of philanthropy understood individually and understood systemically that we mentioned before, the focus was primarily on giving or charity as as an individual act. And in medieval Christian teaching, the the kind of key thing to understand is that it there was an acknowledgement that there was inequality in the world. There were some people who were rich and some were poor, there was an unequal distribution of wealth, but that wasn't seen as somehow a problem to be solved, it it was seen as something that reflected God's design. So wealthy people had been put on earth to be the stewards of wealth rather than the owners, which is an important thing. So during their period of life and time on earth, they were there to look after that wealth and to steward it, uh, and then when they were gone, obviously that would be continued by others. And there was clearly an expectation that they would give in the form of arms to the poor, and you know they had a duty to do so. But the the purpose of that arms giving was essentially to meet the immediate needs of the poor within the existing structure of society. What there wasn't really was any sense of there being an aim of trying to change that fundamental structure because that would you know essentially uh imply saying that God had been wrong and that his design was flawed. So the the medieval historian Suzanne Roberts, for instance, says, you know, medieval charity never intended to eliminate or solve social problems. Medieval people had no social theory of poverty, and they did not expect to change the social order. Following St. Paul, they believed that the poor would always be among them. And it and in fact, actually it was sort of oddly it was seen as quite a good thing that there were so many poor people, partly because those poor people were argued to be closer to the divine, so actually, you know, they were often told that they were lucky to be poor. Um, you know, those unfortunate wealthy people uh had their own problems. Um obviously the biblical teaching that um you know it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle and for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven sort of shows that there was there was it seemed to be this disparity where actually the more money you had, the harder you had to work in order to kind of salve your immortal soul. And luckily the presence of poor people, I'm being flippant there, you know, it gave wealthy people a way of demonstrating their virtue through you know mercy and charity, and this was important. I just want to say that you know, if we zoom out and backwards a bit before we go forwards, I'm focusing here on Christian theology because it provides a useful starting point for the kind of history of an idea that that I want to trace. But if you were properly tracing this idea of social justice and philanthropy, you'd have to acknowledge that not all other religions took the the same kind of tack as as Christianity. So in other religions such as Judaism or Islam, for instance, social justice I think is far more of an element um of their concepts of giving and their teachings on giving. So you know, if you look in Islam, for instance, the the duty of zakat, so uh kind of mandatory uh giving based on wealth um at certain times in the year, um the social justice is an important part of that, both because the amounts uh that you owe are calculated according to a strict formula, so there's certainly an element of duty and it not being a free choice, um, but also my understanding is that part of the aim is to empower the recipients, and there is a sort of um a social justice aspect to that. Similarly, in in Judaism, um the notion of tsadaka, which sometimes gets sort of lazily translated as as philanthropy or charity, actually, again, my understanding is it's much more complex than that, and and it definitely contains kind of embedded notions of social justice. And there are other, you know, even uh concepts that it have an even stronger element of social justice, such as um tikan olam, which I think roughly translates as world repair, and this is very much about identifying structural problems and trying to address them. And there are really interesting examples of how this kind of stuff plays out. So, even you know, in in the ancient uh Jewish world, there are quite radical things like um there's a sort of seven-year debt cancellation cycle that's that's mentioned uh in the Torah and kind of um the teachings within it. And so every seven years you were ex- you know, those who had lent to others were expected to kind of cancel those debts as a form of economic justice, which you know seems radically far ahead of the the uh what we find in the medieval Christian world. So I think it's important to acknowledge that there were these other traditions out there that maybe were kind of slightly ahead of the curve in terms of how we now think about social and economic justice. But I want to to return just at this point to the idea that social justice in the way that we're going to be coming to think about it wasn't something really that was that present in medieval Christian theology, and that sort of shaped thinking about poverty and society and and charity. And then what changes really is the way in which thinking changes during the Enlightenment. So this is the period of sort of rapid intellectual development in uh in the sort of sixteenth and seventeenth century, where there were huge shifts in thinking and views about the nature of religion and the state, but also about the nature of property and the nature of charity. So, in terms of property, this is important, there was it was a big shift away from the idea that the distribution of property in the world was kind of predetermined by God. And actually, interestingly, that thinking, if you trace it, goes in two different, quite different directions, and and this is really important. So, on the one hand, you've got people, thinkers like John Locke, the philosopher, Hugo Grotius, and um the legal theorist Samuel Perfendorf, and and these they all argued that the way we should understand property is in terms of the idea of natural rights. So these are rights that are kind of prior to any man-made laws, so it's it's not about society having decided how property is distributed, but instead the distribution of property is grounded in these natural rights that that rely on an individual's right to claim ownership over that part of the world that in Locke's words they've carved out of the state of nature. So essentially, on this view, property, the property that you have, belongs to you because you've earned it, you've you've somehow kind of put in the hard yards to to lay claim to that property. And because it's yours, you know, and so it's ownership now rather than stewardship, as understood um in the medieval period when all of it essentially still belonged to God, it's now a matter of choice, really, about whether you give any of it away. And people within this school of thought differed on you know how voluntary they thought that choice was. So Grotius, for instance, I think took a relatively hard line saying, well, you can give to charity if you want, but you're absolutely under no compunction to. Whereas somebody like Locke was a bit uneasy with that idea, so he kind of definitely believed in property and the idea of natural rights, but he then claimed there was still some sort of duty that was there upon those who'd earned that property, although it's bit very hard to determine in Locke exactly what the basis of that uh duty is. Um I mean it's hard enough when reading John Locke anyway to understand most of what he's saying, but that's a particularly difficult to understand uh bit. The important thing in many ways, and we'll come back to this definitely, is the flip side of the idea that people have property because they've worked hard and earned it by you know sheer toil and carving it out of the state of nature, is that the reason other people don't then have property is simply that they haven't tried hard enough or then you know they're lazy or they're they're slackers. So this definitely provides the basis for quite a punitive and judgmental view of poverty, one that that centres on the idea that some people are deserving whilst others are kind of undeserving. And and in terms of how this starts to play out when it comes to charity, it becomes the idea that the core concern for philanthropists then is to give in a in a suitably discriminating way that ensures that only deserving people get um support whilst undeserving people don't. And we'll come back to that idea very much in a moment. But the other way of thinking about wealth and poverty and charity um that emerged during the Enlightenment took things in a very different direction. So here you have people like Mary Wollstonecraft, who is sort of pioneering early um feminist thinker, Immanuel Kant actually, was interestingly said some things that aligned him with this view, and Thomas Paine and others. They all argue that the the distribution of wealth and property within society doesn't reflect natural rights. Actually, what it does is it reflects flawed societal structures. So in a way they kind of they agree with the medieval view in saying, yes, well there is all there is this sort of prior distribution of resources in society, but but what they're saying is it's not set in place by God and it doesn't reflect some grand plan, it just reflects the fact that society is unfair and unjust as it currently stands, and that is something that we need to address and do something about. And for them, the only way of addressing this was through pretty radical reform, and actually this led them to be very critical of uh philanthropy as it existed at the time, because I guess the problem was that it it understood in the way that property um was understood before these critiques emerged, all the philanthropy and charitable giving that was being done was essentially just kind of leaving the structure, the existing structure of society and the status quo untouched. Whereas what they were saying was, you know, that's not enough. We need to be doing things that fundamentally alter this structure. And we'll come back at length in a little bit to the idea, the question of whether philanthropy can actually be a tool for doing that or whether it requires thinking in other terms. But just to illustrate this. This kind of strain of thinking. So Mary Wollstonecraft kind of famously said it's justice, not charity that's wanting in the world, and sort of set out a stool then. And I mentioned Immanuel Kant, and so he on this question said, You know, we have an impulse to benevolence, but not to righteousness. This impulse makes a man merciful and charitable to his neighbour so that he makes restitution for an injustice of which he's quite unconscious, though unconscious of it only because he does not properly examine his position. Although we may be entirely within our rights, according to the laws of the land and the rules of our social structure, we may nevertheless be participating in a general injustice. And in giving to an unfortunate man, we do not give him a gratuity, but only help to return to him that of which the general injustice of our system has deprived him. So very clearly Kant is there saying, actually, when we're doing philanthropy, if we understand it and put the analysis in of uh kind of inequality and injustice, we should understand it as you know we're doing a sort of fairly minimal bit of redistribution that is kind of demanded by justice. And William Godwin, who was a political philosopher who was uh the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft actually as well, he said, you know, theirs is a system of clemency and charity instead of a system of justice. It fills the rich with unreasonable pride by the spurious denominations with which it decorates their acts, and the poor with civility, by leading them to regard the slender comforts they obtain not as their incontrovertible due, but as the good pleasure and grace of their opulent neighbours. And again we'll see that that contrast between duty and rights and the relationship they bear to justice, and the fact that philanthropy is is seen as based on ideas of benevolence and patronage and mercy, there's a critique of that and saying that this is an inappropriate uh basis on which to expect society to become more just. Now, having seen that that these criticisms emerge um in the seventeenth century, he might say, hang on a minute, if people were already making this sort of analysis at that point, why hasn't the history of philanthropy ever since been one of philanthropy just becoming ever more focused on justice and on making itself a more effective tool for delivering justice and why why are we having debates about this still today? Well, we will see in the next section that there definitely have been lots of examples where philanthropy, I would argue, has aimed towards social justice. Whether that has been entirely effective, you know, that's that's an open question. But it definitely has taken these criticisms and arguments on board and tried to sort of do philanthropy in ways that are more aimed at social justice. But it is worth looking, I think, briefly at why things didn't actually end up going entirely in that direction and and and therefore why we're having this debate today. And the key point here is to go back to what we were saying before about that other notion of property and charity that emerged during the Enlightenment, the the sort of John Locke um Hugo Grotus idea. This this idea focused on the concept that people own and deserve what they have, and then if they give it away, that's a choice. And furthermore, when they do give it away, the the most important thing about that is to ensure they don't do it in a way that encourages others not to strive sufficiently and to help themselves. So the idea that that central aim of philanthropy should be to avoid indiscriminate giving and not reward the undeserving poor became hugely influential. So just as an example how it sort of started emerging, the uh Scottish philosopher David Hume said giving arms to common beggars is naturally praised because it seems to carry relief to the distressed and indigent. But when we observe the encouragement thence arising to idleness and debauchery, we regard that species of charity rather as a weakness than a virtue. So it's you can see in this the strain of it's not just about saying, Oh, there are lots of different ways of doing things, and it would be preferable if people kind of you know focused on giving to those that we uh consider to be worthy or deserving rather than undeserving. There was a very strong moral criticism of indiscriminate charity as as being something that was kind of an absolute menace to the very um foundations of society. So throughout the 19th century, particularly, this idea really gained currency for a number of reasons. So the first was there was the rise of what was called the charity organisations society movement, which began in in London, sort of spread across the UK and then spread um outside that, certainly to America, uh as we'll see. And this was a movement that sort of espoused um the idea of a very rational approach to charity, and and part of its analysis was that one of the problems was that there was far too much indiscriminate giving. And again, the idea of of this being uh something that was kind of morally problematic because it was rewarding you know beggars and other people who were sort of undeserving, and that actually what they needed to do was to make charity more rational, both in the sense of uh kind of how how the administration of charity was organised at a local level, but also in terms of how people made choices about who to give to. And it's it's quite hard to overstate how much the Victorians got their knickers in a twist about indiscriminate giving. I mean, it it if you take one thing uh away from this podcast, um, and hopefully you'll take many away from this podcast, it is uh that the the Victorians really, really hated the idea of indiscriminate giving. Um, and they were very, very uh you know focused on the idea that um not rewarding the quote unquote undeserving poor was extremely important. So just some illustrations of that. So Walter Um Badge, Baggerhot, I never quite know how to say that, who um was one of the early founders of The Economist and a man who's sometimes called the greatest Victorian um and is very uh sort of typical of a particular strain of kind of muscular, rational uh Victorian thinking. Um he said, Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious that it is open to argument whether it be or not be an evil to the world. And similarly William Stanley Jevons, who was a very influential thinker at the time, said Take the case of so called charity. There are many good hearted people who think that it is virtuous to give alms to poor people who ask for them, without considering the effect produced upon the people. They see the pleasure of the beggar on getting the arms, but they do not see the after effect, namely that beggars become more numerous than before. Much of the poverty and crime which now exist have been caused by mistaken charity in past times, which has caused a large part of the population to grow up careless and improvident and idle. And an article from the Westminster Review, which was a kind of periodical, uh monthly periodical that was very much aligned with these ideas of kind of uh rationality and political economy. Um in eighteen seventy five it said to help the poor, to look after the poor, to relieve want and assuage distress is the pleasant theory of easygoing philanthropy. Its practical application is indiscriminate alms giving, and its results are improvidence, shiftiness, idleness, and consequent pauperism. The theory again breeds sympathy, brotherly love and social consideration. The reality is too often made up of ostentation, vanity and conceit, and the end, be the motive what it may, is mischief. This is the specific called charity. And then just finally, just to really hammer home this point, there's a quote from Dr. Guy, who was um uh a kind of um public health uh person and philanthropist at the time, and he said, If you will somehow contrive to handcuff the indiscriminate almsgiver, I will promise you for reason I could assign these inevitable consequences, no destitution, lessened poor rates, prisons emptier, fewer gin shops, less crowded madhouses, sure signs of underpopulation, and an England worth living in. So, you know, for some people like this was the fundamental problem that was uh plaguing um society. So it was kind of it wasn't that there were structural issues and and injustices and unfairnesses that were resulting in all of this this poverty and ill health. The problem, uh according to these people, was that there were too many sort of bleeding heart um givers out there giving poorly and kind of perpetuating these problems by making it possible for for for those at the bottom to uh to kind of get by without being forced to you know do up their bootstraps and uh and kind of get on with things. And then as the 19th century wore on, these ideas then became bound up with with other new ideas about population and evolution. So you can see in some of what was said already ideas that reflect the sort of Malthusian idea that you know population after a certain point will reach a point where it's sort of unsustainable, and this concern that actually you're making it possible for you know poor people who otherwise might be you know weeded out by natural processes to survive is problematic. And that's obviously tied in as well to the huge growth and influence of um the ideas of Charles Darwin and sort of theories of natural selection and evolution in the 19th century, and these kind of get mingled in with these ideas about charity and also with broader ideas about rationalism and with the industrial fervor of the age, and and this all leads by the end of the 19th century and early 20th to to a new form of kind of scientific charity it's called, and and this was hugely influential, and in particular it was influential in informing the thinking of um people like J.D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, and that's really important because particularly in the case of the latter, his thinking and his way of framing philanthropy became so influential, and I would say still remains influential. So his famous essay, The Gospel of Wealth, you know, is still cited widely, um, but even amongst people who who don't necessarily cite it, I think they don't realise the extent to which it kind of set a template for big money philanthropy. It often gets noted about Gospel of Wealth that car you know Carnegie's antipathy to inherited wealth, you know, and his his enthusiasm for estate taxes, and also his insistence on the responsibility of the wealthy to give back to society. So those things often get noted. But it is really important also to note that he definitely doesn't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and he certainly doesn't think that the point of philanthropy is to address underlying structural issues. So just a couple of quotes from Gospel of Wealth to illustrate this. So he says, you know, we start then with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few. Thus far, accepting conditions as they exist, the situation can be surveyed and pronounced good. The question then arises, and if the foregoing be correct, it is the only question with which we have to deal. What's the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few? And then he says, you know, there remains only one mode of using great fortunes, but in this we have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor. It's founded upon the present, most intense individualism, and the race is prepared to put it into practice by degrees whenever it pleases. Under its sway we shall have an ideal state, in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many, because administered for the common good, and this wealth passing through the hands of the few can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if distributed in small sums to the people themselves. So as you'll see, there's firstly, I mean there's a pretty hefty dose of paternalism in there, because Carnegie very much believed that it was better for him and people like him, other wealthy people who had sort of proved themselves better in a sort of Darwinian sense than others, to administer this money for the benefit of uh you know the wider population and the poor, but you know, to to do philanthropy to them, certainly rather than kind of engage them or necessarily kind of uh give them any any additional power through that philanthropy. But also his analysis is very much that capitalism is the best possible system that we have of ensuring um the health of society, and he was you know extremely sceptical of and concerned about Marxism and communism and the dangers of uh of of a revolution amongst workers that might lead to those systems taking over. So for him, you know, part of the argument for why rich people should engage in philanthropy was to uh kind of lubricate the existing system of capitalism and ensure there was some redistribution, but done in you know in what he considered to be the right way. Now, you know, these ideas were certainly gaining ground, but there were definitely still those who made you know potent and and kind of powerful critiques of um philanthropy on the grounds of concerns about injustice and inequality. So just to take a couple of examples that are kind of contemporary to that, so you've got Oscar Wilde in um The Soul of Man under Socialism. So he says, you know, we're often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedious, and rebellious, and they're quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalists to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board and are beginning to know it. And if that wasn't clear cut enough for you or sort of polemic enough, then you've got um Friedrich Engels in the Condition of the Working Class in Manchester, and he says Philanthropic institutions forsooth, as though you rendered the proletarians a surface in first sucking out their very lifeblood and then practising your self complainant pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity, when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them, charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes, charity which treads down the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. So I think it's fair to say that Engels wasn't, you know, a huge fan of philanthropy. But you can definitely see one thing I think that's important about these critiques is that the concern wasn't just that philanthropy didn't further justice, but in some sense it it actively got in the way of of other potential efforts to further justice. And you know, and this this is probably there's there's some element of fairness to this critique. So, you know, Carnegie, for instance, was pretty open about the fact that he did see his philanthropy at least part in these terms, as Ben Whitaker writes in his book The Foundations from 1974, he said, you know, Andrew Carnegie claimed that one attribute of philanthropy was that it could protect civilization from the challenge of communism and anarchy. A not unsimilar idea of riot insurance lies behind many foundation programmes today, both in the ghettos and abroad. Dame geld that must be paid to preserve capitalism and to contain discontent lest it breed subversion and revolution. And you know, on the the other side of the equation in terms of fundraising, um an interesting example here is Thomas John Bernardo, the um uh children's charity founder, who was very well aware of these kinds of concerns amongst philanthropists and quite uh pragmatically, you might say, if you're uh minded to, or cynically, you might also say, played on these fears. So um it's reported in in David Owen's book on English philanthropy, sixteen sixty to nineteen sixty, he says, you know, Barnardo was Barnardo was well aware of the role of philanthropy in staving off social unrest. What was sometimes called the dangerous classes must not be allowed to become any more dangerous, and he used this argument to add to others in his appeal for funds. Every boy rescued from the gutter, he said, is one dangerous man the less. So, you know, he definitely knew that this was what was going on. And so, you know, we have this idea developing, and we're going to come in the next section to see some of the examples of how concerns about philanthropy and inequality and injustice have maybe then shaped approaches to philanthropy and whether philanthropy can be used as a tool to address injustice and inequality, or whether it's you know always going to be to some extent part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But just to to reiterate why it is that we're still talking about this sort of thing today, a couple of the examples to me that that kind of come to mind about this and this tension between philanthropy and and justice. One that I I like to bring up is the um the example around uh uh Captain Tom Moore, um who, for anyone who doesn't know, was uh an elderly gentleman who's now passed away, um, but he was 99 at the time, I think. And during the um the COVID pandemic, he took it upon himself to fundraise by walking around his garden using a walking frame uh 99 times, or I think something like that, and raised a huge amount of money because this this story kind of really caught on and caught people's imaginations. And that money was to go towards funding uh charities that worked within the NHS. And the initial response to this, I think, understandably, was oh, what a beautiful, heartwarming story, what a you know, what a wonderful altruistic act by by this man. And so looking at that kind of you know, philanthropy at that individual level, I think that was the natural response that most people had. I think then as time went on and people started to think about it probably more from that that wider sort of uh macro perspective, you start to get people saying, Yes, it is good that he's done it, and it's wonderful and heartwarming, but it it makes me uneasy that he had to do it at all. You know, why is it necessary for a 99-year-old man to walk around his garden and raise funds to provide the resources to deliver health services that surely the government should be delivering as a matter of justice and as a matter of rights for people who are affected by this pandemic? So you often get that kind of tension. And again, you know, a pandemic example, we saw it around the the distribution of vaccines as well, where you know philanthropy had played quite a big role in the research and development of a number of vaccines and also then in the sort of the distribution of them, because governments you know weren't necessarily always able to work quickly or flexibly enough. And again, people sort of said this is this is great, maybe this demonstrates you know one of the real strengths of philanthropy is its its ability to respond quickly and and flexibly and adapt to to very rapidly changing uh situations. But then people sort of said, yeah, but the distribution of something like a vaccine here shouldn't be determined in any way by the choices of individuals or individual institutions. It needs to be delivered as a matter of justice and done in a kind of you know a democratic way. And so there's there is again that sort of tension between uh philanthropy and justice. And we see this in all kinds of other places uh as well, which is why this is such a live issue today. So that kind of brings us up, I think, to the present day and hopefully kind of traces in a useful way, hopefully, um the history of that idea and particularly that critique of philanthropy and saying why it might not necessarily be a perfect tool for delivering uh social justice. And then in the next section, I want to come on and look at the question of well, if we have these sorts of concerns, what what do we then do about it? You know, do we give up on philanthropy and what does that mean? Um, or can we reshape philanthropy in light of these sorts of concerns? So stay tuned for that. Okay, so in this section, I guess we're looking at the the kind of so what uh bit. Um so having taken on board the idea that there is this critique and possibly, you know, to whatever extent you think it uh you know justifiable, a critique of the idea that philanthropy can ever be you know usefully employed as a means of delivering social justice, depending on the extent to which you buy that critique, then you know, there are choices to be made about what you you then do about it. So, you know, the first possibility, I guess, is to say, well, we just need to give up on on philanthropy, then it's it clearly isn't, you know, if if our primary concern is to ensure social justice, and we've seen that it's not a means for doing that because it is you know voluntary and based on the choice of the individuals and reflects you know the interests of those who've benefited from the status quo, um, you know, we we can't rely on it as a means of of delivering social justice to any extent. Uh and often what that ends up with is an argument about the need to replace philanthropy with taxation. So, certainly, in terms of those earlier. Thinkers that we outlined, people like um Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, this is pretty much the conclusion that they tended to come to. I think it's important to say in their case, that was obviously at a time where there wasn't an income tax yet. So the context is quite different. It's not that they were saying, well, we you know we've got all these taxes, but they're not enough, and they're arguing for more taxes. They were arguing for the very concept of taxing wealth and and income. And so, in a way, the what they were arguing against was a much clearer sort of implied idea that philanthropy was enough by itself to ensure redistribution from the rich to the poor and to deal with issues of inequality, which obviously is not the case in pretty much any countries around the world uh today, and certainly not in the UK. But let's assume that you know we are talking about uh kind of distinguishing between philanthropy and on the one hand and taxation on the other. Now, this is a big topic by itself, the relationship between philanthropy and tax, and it's one that I'm definitely going to come back to and do a proper episode on the podcast about. So I'll I'll leave some of the detail out here and not get dragged down a rabbit hole. But for the purposes of what we're talking about here, I think some of the kind of key points of difference that we need to be thinking about between philanthropy and taxation are philanthropy is in some sense, you know, it's a matter of choice. Um, it isn't on the whole democratic because it's based, you know, on the choices of uh an individual or a small group of people who are not democratically appointed and they're not representative. It's not necessarily redistributive. I mean it can it can aim to be, but it doesn't have to be, and it you know, arguably at a macro level, you know, doesn't really do that very effectively. From the point of view of the recipients, they are expected to to ask for for gifts, so they're you know they go out and either you know fundraise for them or historically beg for them. And then when they do receive those gifts, there's an expectation that they should show gratitude, and that is the appropriate response. When you look at taxation, on the other hand, you know, that's not a matter of choice, uh well for most people. Um it's a matter of duty. You're you're expected to pay it. You know, it's not that you've chosen to out of the goodness of your heart. The way in which the money from taxation is then uh distributed is is democratically determined to some extent. I mean, in most cases not directly, unless you've got sort of um citizens' assembly or deliberative democracy, but at least through the prism of electoral and representative democracy. Um so you know, you you can there is a legitimate basis on which those people have been uh appointed and they sort of represent, you know, at the at the least a majority view of how tax should be spent, and there are mechanisms for holding them to account. Taxation uh at least, you know, to some extent is intended to be redistributive. Again, very much depends on the specific tax policies that you actually have, and some people would argue that you know many tax policies don't perform that function, but you know, fundamentally that is at least part of you know why we have taxation in the first place. In terms of the the recipients of public spending and and kind of particularly you know welfare that is delivered through taxation and public spending, it's a matter of they're not asking for gifts, they're claiming their rights. So you know, if you're getting welfare payments, it's because society's determined that you are entitled to those as a matter of right. And the appropriate response, therefore, is not necessarily one of gratitude, particularly. I mean, you might be grateful to an ac an individual who's working on behalf of the state to help you. That's a perfectly natural human thing, but you're not showing gratitude in the same way as you might be expected to for uh for a gift that somebody's given you out of the goodness of your heart. So I think those are kind of important differences. Now, in terms of you know, the conclusion that you draw about the appropriate relationship between philanthropy and taxation, so some people might think that all philanthropy has to be replaced with taxation. I would argue that goes far too far because I think you know we've outlined some differences there, and some of those points about philanthropy, I think, are positive ones. I think you know it potentially, because of its different nature to taxation, understood properly, it can perform a different role within society. You know, what that role actually is is something that then needs much further clarification, um, and people may sort of disagree about that and what it means in terms of the desirable balance between philanthropy and taxation, but I do think there there is an argument that there will always be a need for some element of philanthropy because it performs a particular function. So let's assume that you you don't we're not necessarily talking about the idea that all philanthropy has to be replaced with taxation. So what you might think then is that there's a certain level of taxation that's demanded by justice, and then above and beyond that, there may still be room for philanthropic giving. So I mean, a good version of this, I think, is um comes from the uh philosopher George Herbert Meade. So he wrote an essay about the economics of philanthropy, and he said, you know, in a word, charity carries a certain burden that ought in any case to be met. Those whose incomes include a surplus above the necessities, whether their souls are stirred by the suffering or not, may well recognise a responsibility to bear their part in meeting this community obligation. When this point has been reached, there arises a logical demand that this should be met by the community in the same manner in which it meets its other obligations, i.e., through taxation. And so this is a good statement, I think, of that idea that there are kind of demands that come from some sense of justice and uh you know, up to a point we all are required to, out of a sense of duty, to meet those demands through taxation. You know, the question and the debate then, of course, is where does that point come where those demands of justice have been adequately met by taxation? You know, and the point is that a lot of the debate at the moment about taxation and the relationship between philanthropy and taxation and justice is essentially people disagreeing about whether that where that point is and whether we've reached it. And and many certainly today, I think, would say that we're falling short in terms of the extent to which we are taxing, particularly wealth, I think, not just just income. And that that's reflected in in the sort of inequality that we see in society and some of the enormous fortunes that we see and some of the disparities in terms of how much those people who have those enormous fortunes are paying in taxation. And interestingly, one of the things that we are seeing at the moment that that maybe is genuinely a new phenomenon in philanthropy, and I I don't say that very often or very likely, is that there are philanthropists who, in light of these kinds of concerns and these arguments that we've been thinking about, have decided that you know no amount of their philanthropy is ever going to meet the requirements or the demands of justice. So they're recognising that there does need to be some element of uh increased taxation as well. Um, you know, they may then still think that there's room for philanthropy on top of that, and different philanthropists might have different views. But those some of those who think this are the ones who are then joining movements that are essentially calling for more taxation on wealth and on people like them. So you've got movements like Patriotic Millionaires or Millionaires for Humanity, where lots of the people involved in those movements are doing philanthropy as well, but think that it's important to make it clear that they don't think that is enough and that they also need to do this element of campaigning for more taxation because that is demanded by um you know the ambition to achieve social justice. And and an interesting, you know, much more recent angle to that, I think, that we've seen in the US is that that has sort of uh evolved into not just campaigning for taxes on wealth, but campaigning against tax breaks on philanthropy. So there's a kind of there's a you know philanthropy eating itself element to this um out of concerns about you know the way in which um current uh tax reliefs on charities and particularly the US charitable deduction you know seem to be not functioning properly, and and there's campaigns around reforming that to make it fairer, and also to introduce kind of new demands on foundations around levels of expenditure and monetary payout rates and this kind of thing, which that again, whole other debate we could go down a big rabbit hole about. But it's interesting to see that being a kind of additional element to this debate around philanthropy and tax. So let's let's slightly park this for now. Let's assume that we've had all of this debate and you know maybe taxes on wealth have gone up, and that we've we can get to some sort of point where there's a a broadly agreed acceptable level of taxation and one that does still leave some space for philanthropy. So, you know, even if if people are paying lots more in in taxes, they still have some disposable income left on top of that, and they're able to do philanthropy at whatever level. So I guess the question there is so has all the work of justice now been done? You know, is is any remaining philanthropy that you do on top of that uh super rerogatory or supererogatory? I never quite know how to say that, even though I spent years doing philosophy. Is that you know what does that mean? Supererogatory essentially means something that is demanded by as out of duty, something that is above and beyond that which is demanded uh by duty. So is any philanthropic giving that we're doing after we've paid all our taxes, you know, is it is that just absolutely a matter of free choice and we can give it to whatever we want, whether that's you know an opera house or a model railway society or the you know, or or a social movement or a social justice cause if that's what we care about, but there's no kind of moral or you know requirement on us to do so. Or is it that there's a certain amount of the demands of justice that can be met through taxation, but then when it we come to giving money away, we still need to bear in mind social justice as an aim and sort of shape our philanthropy accordingly. And I think some people, you know, lots of people uh still think that that is the case. Um and there are various ways I think in which this could play out. So one pretty radical way, um, and it has to be said fairly theoretical way, is to take the view that that all philanthropy should be focused strictly on justice um and in a quite strict kind of reparative sense. So the political philosopher Chiara Cordelli wrote a paper in which she argues this. So she says, you know, philanthropy should be understood foremost as a duty of reparative justice. Affluent donors should, as a matter of moral duty, exercise no personal discretion when deciding how to give and to whom. Instead, indeed, they should regard their donations as a way of returning to others what is rightfully theirs. Now, I think it's interesting as an argument, as a sort of argument of political philosophy, and you know you can agree with it or disagree with it. I think it's very clear that it's it's normative, it definitely isn't descriptive, it doesn't reflect philanthropy as it currently is. And arguably I'd say maybe the the bar there is too high, as if if we understood philanthropy in this way, essentially it feels like it just becomes yet more tax, and it certainly doesn't mesh with any of you know what we know about the the psychology of what it is that makes people give in a philanthropic sense. So I I can't see this taking off, uh really. So I guess you know if that's at the extreme end of the spectrum, are there other ways that are maybe slightly you know more likely to actually play out in the real world that we can think about making phonty more focused on on social justice? So one I think is um to think about the role of flunty in campaigning and advocacy for social change. Um and this is one that has a very strong historical basis. Um I'd say, you know, going back to that idea that those arguments in the Enlightenment period from Wollstonecraft and and Payne and others that that in order to meet the needs of justice there needed to be sort of fundamental structural change to society and and their their claims that that philanthropy or charity as it was currently um uh set up was was not in a position to deliver that. Actually, when you look at how philanthropy develops after that, certainly at various times there there has been a sense in which philanthropy has been much more aimed on trying to address the underlying structural causes of things rather than just addressing their symptoms. You know, actually, fun fact, if if we look at the word philanthropy, um when it re-emerged into uh modern usage in the English language in the sort of late 17th century, early 18th century, it was actually associated much more with social campaigning and and reform than it was with giving money in the way that we might think of it today. So, you know, the first person generally acknowledged to have been called a philanthropist in the modern sense was the prison reformer John Howard. So he definitely did give some money um towards you know charitable causes, but that that wasn't at all the defining characteristic of what he did. Actually, it was much more about the way in which he went out and did um research and campaigning on his own to try and sort of drive prison reforms and and sort of fundamental reform to the way that prisons work, because he was concerned that these were hugely unjust. Um and similarly, when you look at people who were kind of labelled philanthropists, certainly in the 18th century, most of them were people like the anti-slavery campaigners William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp or the the prison campaigner Elizabeth Fry. And often their philanthropy involved just as much kind of political agitation and campaigning and mass mobilisation as it did giving donations. Now, it's absolutely true that once you get into the 19th century, philanthropy as a word came to be associated more over time with sort of monetary donations and wealthy people giving. Um, and that reformist campaigning notion of philanthropy did become a little bit overshadowed. But I think it's important to say it's never disappeared, um, and that you know there's definitely a fairly strong thread that we can follow through uh the 19th century into the 20th and and to the present day. Um I mean there were great examples, um, like in the 19th century, there was a thing called the Society for Superseding the Necessity for Climbing Boys, um, which was founded in 1803. Um, and the aim of this society was to try and find a solution to concerns about children being used as chimney sweeps. Um, and they did all kinds of things, focused on you know a lot on political engagement and and kind of campaigning, but they also uh you know did things like offered a prize for the invention of a machine that would do away with the need to send children up chimneys, and they they lobbied Parliament to change the law. Actually, they they lobbied the House of Commons uh in the UK successfully. The interesting historical note here is that this then got overturned in the House of Lords because so many of those lords at the time had big uh stately homes with lots of chimneys in, and they they didn't really want to have to uh pay more to have those chimneys cleaned, and they found it quite convenient to have small children going up them. Um but that's sort of by the by. But just in writing up this history, you know, some people have noted that this campaigning role of flunt pee has been really important. So Benjamin Kirkman Grey, who wrote um a history of English Flunt P, so he he was writing at the start of the 20th century about the the preceding times um up to about the 1860s, and he writes very interestingly about what he calls the role of the philanthropist as agitator. So he says, you know, the work of the agitator holds beyond all question the primacy and reform, and also that in the discharge of this effort, the philanthropist has proved himself preeminently successful. It will be of comparatively small importance if other functions, which he has also discharged, may appear to be not properly his function at all. So he's saying actually, you know, this is the most important aspect of what philanthropists do. And you know, this this focus on um campaigning and sort of social reform obviously continues, and we'll see in a minute about the the rise of social movements. Um it continues through the the 20th century um and you know certainly remains something that at times gets forgotten. So I would say I I think it's interesting that in the the early days of when I worked in the philanthropy world, there was a lot of emphasis in the UK on the role of uh charities and voluntary organisations working with the state and delivering services on behalf of the state, and perhaps not so much emphasis on their campaigning role. And I think over time and in recent years, people have come to realise that maybe that was a mistake and that we we got that balance wrong, and there was too much focus on sort of working with uh you know the system as it was, rather than fundamentally challenging that system on behalf of people and communities who were who were being left behind or were kind of subject to injustice. And actually, over the last few years I think there's been a very healthy rebalancing towards the idea of um you know a key part of the role of charities and philanthropy being to campaign and advocate and to challenge government policy and and practice um in order to sort of meet those wider requirements of justice. But I guess an important uh element of what philanthropy can do when you look historically, that's related to what we've just said, is that as well as their own campaigning efforts, I think philanthropists can often play a really important role by s supporting wider movements for social change and reform. So in the late 19th and early 20th century, as we've said, we there's lots of well-known reform campaigns, and lots of these are driven by sort of mass mobilization and grassroots movements, like you know, the fight for universal suffrage, for instance, or votes for women, where philanthropy definitely played a really important role. You know, often the role is not just in often the role is uh is in providing resources in the particularly in the early stages of a movement developing. So this is the point often where it's kind of crucial to develop public awareness and support and to build you know the machinery that allows that public support to build and the movement to be developed and organised, and that's what eventually leads to sort of political pressure and and change. Um and that role I think is one that philanthropy has played in lots of other examples of successful social change, you know, things like the the legalization of abortion, securing the right to roam on public land, um the fight for LGBTQ plus rights, and all kinds of other examples. And what you see in all of them, to one extent or another, is this picture where philanthropy often provides vital funding at an early stage, and that might be philanthropy from within a community, at least initially, and then over time it might be philanthropy from outside the community. And what that allows then is that the issue can can sort of be taken on this journey from the margins through to the mainstream, um, and eventually that can lead to sort of pretty transformative political or social change. And there's a quote I really like here because it's sort of support for this idea from a slightly surprising quarters, which is um Friedrich Hayek, who was a you know uh Austrian school economist who was uh beloved of um of Margaret Thatcher, but he writes in in one of his books, he says, um, we cannot attempt to recount here the long story of all good causes which came to be recognised only after lonely pioneers had devoted their lives and fortunes to arousing the public conscience, of their long campaigns until at last they gained support for the abolition of slavery, for penal and prison reform, for the prevention of cruelty to children or to animals, or for a more humane treatment of the insane. All these were for a long time the hopes of only a few idealists who strove to change the opinion of the overwhelming majority concerning certain accepted practices. So I think there's a really good argument for that potential role of philanthropy in sort of you know driving uh marginal uh ideas or sort of supporting marginal causes that, you know, in a way that kind of brings them to public attention and eventually drives change. There's a couple of things I think it's worth noting here. An important one is that clearly, in in order for philanthropy to play this particular role and and you know, potentially to sort of further social justice in this way, it has to be able to support minority views or or causes or unpopular ideas that go against the status quo of a particular time. And that then gets us into a whole series of other debates about philanthropic pluralism. Um, so you know, is do we accept the idea that we have to allow a thousand flowers to bloom and that philanthropy can kind of support all kinds of different ideas and causes in order to be able to provide the you know the the the soil in which Which some of these can sort of um turn into uh to issues that then kind of get driven forward and move society towards progress. You know, and also link to that, to what extent are we comfortable then allowing philanthropy to be essentially anti-democratic? Because the thing is, you know, the the good version of this when you look back with the benefit of hindsight is that uh a philanthropist or you know a series of donors support a kind of marginalized cause or idea and then you know over time drive public support and opinion and awareness and and you know drive political pressure and that leads to a change. And when you agree with what's happened, that's the picture that you have. When you disagree with it, it looks like people you know with financial resources using those in an inappropriate way to kind of exert influence um that subverts you know democracy and the democratic process. Now, the these are these are issues that we've covered in quite a lot of depth on a previous episode around pluralism, so I'm not going to dwell on them so much here, um, but they're obviously very important, and I think we need to acknowledge them here. I think what I will say, just to add to that, is that there are a couple of bits of grit in the oyster here that we also need to be aware of when it comes to this idea of you know the campaigning and advocacy role of philanthropy being, you know, the basis of an argument for how it can further justice. Um one is that you know the idea that philanthropy can help to further justice over the long run by supporting social movements might well hold water and be correct, but we do need to be aware that the the nature of pluralism means that philanthropy will be on the side of you know the things that eventually kind of uh win out and and result in social progress, but almost certainly along the way we'll find philanthropy on the other side of those arguments as well, supporting you know causes that we think are not progressive or not desirable. So, you know, an example here historically is one we've already talked about, suffrage and votes for women. Yes, philanthropy did play a vastly important role in supporting that, and there's a whole fascinating story about the you know the role of female philanthropists and wealthy women in supporting those causes and what it meant for the role of women in the public sphere and all this sort of stuff. But there's also an equally fascinating and less wholesome uh story about the uh the role that philanthropy played in the anti-suffrage movement, and actually, interestingly, the role of female donors in supporting calls for women not to get the vote for various reasons. And that's not a unique phenomenon by any means. You know, whenever you look at any sort of campaign for social change, you can almost always find philanthropy on the converse of that, you know, and this is something that we're really struggling with at the moment around contentious issues like um you know the the right to birth control and abortion in the US, where you know there's been lots of uh progressive funders on the side of that over over many years, and now you know the balance has perhaps shifted towards more conservative funders that have been funding work to kind of roll back those rights. Similarly, around climate, you know, there are lots of organizations, not enough by any means, but focusing on issues around climate breakdown. But unfortunately, you know, there are philanthropists and wealthy philanthropic donors funding work that is designed to stymie those efforts and to do you know engage in sort of climate change denial. So, you know, the fact that is one of the the sort of prices of pluralism, essentially, I guess, is that you are going to get philanthropy on both sides. Um, and the question then becomes to what extent are you willing to accept that as the price of pluralism or is is that cost too high? But again, that's taking us into the whole debate about pluralism that we've covered on on that other episode. I guess another thing to say is that the relationship between philanthropic funders and social movements is by no means always an easy one. Um and this is somewhere where there are plenty of warnings from history about what can go wrong, even when the engagement's done with the best of intentions. And I'm thinking here of examples like the work that Megan Ming Francis has done looking at the relationship between the Garland Fund and the NAACP in the early 20th century, where she argues that that a process of what she calls movement capture took place where this very well-meaning progressive funder funded you know the NAACP and its work on sort of civil rights, but but it w it sort of used its funding to shift them away from the emphasis that they they wanted to pursue on kind of anti-lynching and instead towards educational causes. So it kind of softened the edges of what they were doing. Um and then similarly, there's other work by people like Karen Ferguson looking at the Ford Foundation in the 1960s and the way in which they engaged with the Black Power Movement, but again, kind of you know more deliberately, I think, in that sense it's thought, tried to sort of tame what they were doing and their the way in which they chose particular organizations or leaders to fund and the demands they made in terms of what kinds of tactics they were able to use, I think shows that there are potentially these sorts of power dynamics at play when foundations particularly or donors engage with social movements that can be quite problematic. So I guess that brings us to the final bit that I want to talk about, which is you know, are there then examples we can find of of philanthropists who are genuinely trying to work towards social justice and what does that look like? And I think the answer to that is yes. I mean, let's not get carried away. You know, they're not necessarily by any means the majority, and the fact that the same examples certainly historically tend to get pulled out by people like me suggests that maybe there aren't as many of them as all that. But I think they are interesting and they demonstrate, you know, potential ways in which you can do philanthropy that address some of the concerns we've been talking about. And also, maybe we'll see at the end, they point to the fact that you know maybe we're at a point in time where some of these ideas and approaches are becoming more mainstream than they ever have before, and we're actually at a particularly interesting moment um when it comes to the question of philanthropy and social justice. So let's have a bit of a look just at what the history of this more radical approaches to philanthropy might look like. And I think it's just there's a few examples I want to look at here. So one is we mentioned in passing just now the the Garland Fun, and the story here is the one of uh a man called Charles Garland, a remarkably attractive man, as you'll see if you uh ever uh find photos of him, uh which I occasionally uh do post because I think he's probably the most attractive historical philanthropist there's ever been. But he was the the inheritor or the potential inheritor of a fortune from his father, who was a Wall Street bank. But Garland had various kind of fairly radically progressive views at the time, this is in the the 1920s, and essentially it said, you know, um in uh a paper that Mil Curte wrote about this back in the 50s, um he said he refused, he, Garland, refused to take money from a system which starves thousands while hundreds are stuffed, a system which leaves a sick woman helpless and offers his services to a healthy man. It is such a system, he said, that offers me a million dollars and he wanted no part of it. So essentially he's sort of saying, you know, at first at least he's like, but look, there's all this injustice in the world, why would I buy into that system, you know, and and become part of the problem? Interestingly, in Garland's case, it was actually a whole group of um uh sort of progressive activists and writers and thinkers, whoever, who got in touch with him and people like Sinclair Lewis, who convinced him to take the money, you know, they were more pragmatic. They sort of said, that's all fine, Charles, but you know, it would be better if you took this money and gave it to people like us working on progressive causes, rather than just turning it down, and then that money doesn't go and do any good in the world at all. So Garland did take the money, and what he did with it was set up this uh thing called the American Fund for Public Service, or which became known as the Garland Fund. And it was really interesting because it's uh it was a limited life foundation, I think it was only set up for 20 years. He appointed um a board to make all of the decisions um about how the money was spent, and this was made up of kind of you know progressive activists and thinkers, and he handed over all of the power and grant-making authority to them, so he he was entirely hands-off. You know, the only things he said about it, you know, he interestingly said at one point, um, I feel personally that the money should be distributed as fast as it can be put into reliable hands. There's nothing that stands in the way of sensible expenditures of money so much as does the possession of too much money. And the longer you have it, the harder it is to see straight. I feel that if the money is not spent now, it will be spent too much by mind and too little by heart, which you know there's a lot of interesting stuff in that quote, and one of them is about that sort of balance of head and heart. But again, it's sort of his argument for why it needed to be limited life and why it needed to be done quickly, I think is really interesting, and and as we'll see in a minute, maybe it kind of has echoes in the way in which people like Mackenzie Scott are choosing to do their philanthropy today. And then there are other examples that are really interesting from the early 20th century, and and one of them is Julius Rosenwald, who was a Jewish donor um who ended up owning the Sears and Roebuck um sort of mail order company. And Rosenwald's an absolutely fascinating figure and probably unappreciated, I think, in the history of philanthropy, although that's maybe changing now. And um just recently Darren Walker, the outgoing president of the Ford Foundation, um wrote a really interesting piece for the Atlantic magazine where he talked about uh Rosenwald as a sort of fascinating historical precedent and and his focus on social justice. And Rosenwald did all kinds of different things, but the the two main ones that are really interesting is the the sort of first phase of what he did was focused on building schools in the the deep south during Jim Crow, the s sort of segregation era. And you know, obviously at the time to some extent this was you know flying counter certainly to the law that was in place in in those places, it wasn't breaking that law, but it was clearly you know uh supporting uh things that very much went uh kind of counter to the idea of that and challenged it as a form of injustice, although you know some have critiqued uh Rosenwald for not going further and being more active in sort of speaking out against that injustice and feel that though, you know, actually even if what he was doing was achieving good, uh he was still working within the system uh you know as it was and and leaving that status quo untouched. But then even more interesting to my mind is the sort of second phase of Rosenwald's philanthropy, um, where through the Rosenwall Fund, which was a limited life foundation, he gave these sort of small, no strings attached cash grants to individuals who were doing all kinds of interesting things in the arts and the sciences and all kinds of different fields. And particularly a lot of that money ended up going to um to black individuals who would have found it extremely difficult to get that money from anywhere else. And when you trace what those individuals did, not just with that money, but then what it sort of enabled later on, the ripple effect of what that Rosenwald fund did was phenomenal because it resulted in all kinds of sort of black intellectuals and artists who became very important cultural figures, and subsequently many of the sort of leaders of the civil rights movement into the the 50s and the 60s in the US had at some point received money from that fund. So it's a really fascinating example of sort of short-term philanthropy in that it was it was time limited, but with long-term aims and ambitions, and a kind of you know willingness to fund things on that basis. And interestingly, with Rosenwald, the story continues after his death, certainly. So his daughter, um Edith Rosenwald Stern, was a really interesting philanthropist as well. Um, initially not so much, because she was married to a man called Edgar Stern, who was um from from the South himself, and he was quite sort of you know liberal um and willing to support um causes helping black people, but in a way where it was a relatively um sort of charity-focused view. So again, he it was very much, you know, play it safe, address the symptoms, you know, don't do anything radical to address the underlying structural causes of injustice. Thankfully, in a way, for the history of uh of social justice philanthropy, Edgar Stern died well before his wife, and at the point at which he did, and she got his money, or actually got her money back because she was the wealthy one, and in that weird way that these things happened because he'd married her, the money had then become his as the husband, but then it passed back to her ownership after he died, which you know again is a side about gender justice. But she became much more radical in her philanthropy, so she started doing things through her Stern fund like um supporting voter registration drives in in the South in the 60s and this kind of thing, lots of sort of civil rights work. So sh it was really interesting and kind of continued that Rosenwald legacy. Um and then as you move further into um the sixties and certainly in the 1970s, you get interesting examples like George Pillsbury. Um so he, as the name might suggest, was the heir to the bakery fortune of Pillsbury Doughboy fame. And he was one of a breed of of sort of inheritors of wealth that emerged a bit in the 1970s, who were quite again, you know, maybe they'd been through the sort of more radical times of the 60s and and bought into some of those kind of you know countercultural ideas and and critiques, um, and they were quite uncomfortable with the wealth that they were inheriting. Um, and actually, one of the things Pillsbury did was set up um a new organisation called the Funding Exchange, which brought together uh lots of sort of radical funders and foundations of the time, including many who were um from kind of well-known uh families or kind of families that had made their wealth through well-known companies. And in particular, one of the organizations Pillsbury helped set up was a thing called the Haymarket People's Fund in Boston. This is kind of quite well known as one of the first and you know ongoing examples of participatory grant making. So the model it it took was one where people within the community there in Boston were given the power to decide how money was spent, and obviously, you know, that was very radical at the time and remains relatively radical now. And you know, just as a sense of whether this was a slightly wider phenomenon, I found a really interesting article in the The New York Times from 1975, I think, where the headline was um it was about the Haymarket fund primarily, but it's um and it's got a brilliant picture where everybody looks incredibly 1970s. But the title is you know, Reluctantly Wealthy, they fund radical groups. So that there was definitely a sense that there was something bubbling under at this point. And there's a few interesting books as well I've that I've tracked down over the years that try to tell some of the stories of of this drain of social justice philanthropy in the US. So there's one called Um Robin Hood Was Right, which originally came out in 1977 and there was an updated edition much later. And there's another one that's really interesting called We Gave Away a Fortune, which is stories of people like Pillsbury and sort of saying why it was they had inherited money but then decided to give it away in this kind of radical social justice focused way. And so that then brings us, I think, towards the present day, and you know, where do things stand now in terms of the modern context for philanthropy and social justice? So I think there's a few obvious examples that point to some interesting uh things that are going on and and potential trends. We've mentioned already Mackenzie Scott, and again, this is something I've covered in depth elsewhere, so I won't labour the point here, but you know, everyone listening to this, I would imagine by this point is aware of Mackenzie Scott and who she is and what she's been doing over the last few years. But she is giving away very, very large sums of money, um, you know, in the same way as as uh sort of Charles Garland explained, because you know, she feels as though that is the best thing to do is to rather than sit on the money now, is to distribute it quickly. And doing so in a way that is focused on kind of unrestricted gifts and trust-based relationships, and you know, and so that I think represents you know one particular aspect of how you make uh philanthropy more justice-focused. You try to sort of shift power towards the recipients. You've got people uh again like Leah Hunt Hendricks, um, who's really interesting. So she is the heir to a huge oil fortune, but you know, has kind of disavowed in in many of the aspects of how that wealth was made, and certainly you know the conservative views of some of her forebears. And you know, she's been involved in social movements herself, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, um, and has subsidy subsequently through her philanthropy and things like the Solidaire Network, done a lot of work kind of trying to fund movements in quite radical ways, and uh has just written a really interesting book with Astra Taylor um about the the concept of solidarity and the sort of history behind that and how it can inform philanthropy today. And then there are there are others, there's lots of, you know, I say lots of, there's there's a sufficient number of foundations doing really interesting work. So people like Tides Foundation, Katali Foundation, Chorus Foundation. They're doing various different combinations of things like spending down or or being set up with a limited life, um, you know, with the the the aim of not perpetuating any kind of intergenerational injustice. They're using their grant making to try and shift power by doing it in an unrestricted way, they're funding social movements and activists and all this kind of stuff. So it's very heavily sort of framed around the idea of social justice. And then the the other one uh that's just worth flagging up, and again, I've mentioned it before in various contexts on the podcast, is the the emergence of kind of interesting examples of trying to democratize philanthropy in radical ways by bringing on board citizens' panels or kind of engaging you know citizens in making decisions about how money is spent. So the best known global example of this so far is uh Marlene uh Engelhorn, who's the Austrian heiress who inherited the the Basf uh chemical fortune. But you know, because of her own existing views about uh taxation and and sort of progressive politics, when when she inherited that money, she decided she wanted to give it away because currently in Austria in Austria she didn't feel as though she was able to pay as much as she wanted through taxation, so that's sort of interesting in itself. And and in order to kind of make that philanthropy as uh democratic and justice focused as possible, she decided to bring together a panel of 50 randomly selected Austrian citizens uh in order to kind of make the decisions rather than her. And there's been some you know really interesting analysis and write-ups of of that. And I should say there's you know, on a much smaller scale, a similar but really interesting experiment that some of you might be aware of um in Liverpool where I live, where a donor named David Clark um did a similar thing where he decided to give away £100,000 of his own money and brought together a group of randomly selected residents of a particular postcode. And certainly I spoke to David on an episode of the podcast all about that whole um experience and the idea behind it and some of the things that he'd learnt. So do check that out if you're interested. And you know, and this seems to be a wider phenomenon, um, and it's not just me saying that. So there, you know, I've read a few articles, but there was a really interesting one in the Financial Times a few months back looking at the idea of radical philanthropy and sort of wealth inheritors, and there were some, you know, great um examples in that that I would say weren't the usual suspects, which gives a sense that maybe, you know, there's a sort of momentum behind this idea. So where where does that all leave us finally? I guess the core idea that philanthropy can and maybe should be aimed at social justice is obviously not new in some sense, but it does seem as though it's more front and centre now than it has been certainly for a long time and perhaps ever before. There you know, there have always been individual isolated examples of radical donors or people you know trying to do philanthropy in different ways, but they've always very much been in a clear m minority. And perhaps that's the thing that's changing. Um yeah, I I definitely wouldn't want to suggest that all philanthropy is suddenly going to become radically democratic, limited life, social movement focused or anything like that. But it does feel like those sorts of ideas are filtering more out into mainstream practice, and as a result, maybe norms are shifting. I guess only time will tell. If you are interested in what I've been talking about and you managed to make it to this point, well, firstly, well done. But secondly, I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can read more. If you're interested more broadly in anything to do with philanthropy and civil society, do just check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. It's all kinds of articles, including some of the ones I'll link to, back episodes of this podcast, including the ones that I'll link to, and many, many more, and all kinds of other stuff that you can find there. You know, follow me on socials, uh just you know, LinkedIn's the main one, but try some others as well. So if you can find me there. If you've got ideas for people I should talk to on the podcast, uh, or you know, things that I should uh extemporise at length into my laptop about, um, you know, drop us a line, the email address is there at the website. Other than that, just like, follow, subscribe, uh, do tell all your friends about it, because I think personal recommendation goes a long way. If you're so minded, go to where you get your podcasts and leave us a nice review, five stars, preferably, please, because that'll really help. And other than that, I'll see you next time.