The traditional English sense of ‘charity’ is made clear in that great definer of the language, the Authorised Version. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ ‘And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’ (1 Cor 13:1)
Charity thus is the love of one’s fellow person(s). More recently, Roget makes it synonymous with philanthropy.
Yet common parlance, and the Oxford English Dictionary, make a useful distinction. Charity is gifts or benevolence, often unstructured, to the poor and unfortunate. Philanthropy suggests additional, wider, and more composite delineated purposes: the advance of arts, sciences or education, and missions on behalf of civilisation or culture. Of course the categories overlap. Curing the diseases of the unfortunate may advance science; education may benefit the poor and civilisation is supposedly a universal blessing. Motives and methods are equally complex; witness Alfred Felton and Sidney Myer, and the trusts they established.
The traditional critique of charity is that there is too little of it to meet needs, and that often it is inefficiently distributed. The more subtle critique, that it may perpetuate the evils it seeks to alleviate, is also not new. The 19th century spoke of ‘pauperisation’, the late 20th of ‘welfare dependency’.
Philanthropy attracts additional criticism. In moving beyond ‘mere’ charity it seeks to influence and alter societies, their beliefs, and their policies, as well as individual circumstances. Theorists of economics, class and culture speak of hegemony. More instinctive democrats simply resent the distinctions of wealth, and the power to make decisions that influence others.
The locus classicus of the critique of philanthropy is the great American foundations. The immense, untaxed fortunes of Gilded Age America were often dissipated in every sense of that word, but some became trusts in perpetuity, intended for the world’s betterment.
Understandably, many doubted both the motives and capacity of ‘robber barons’ and their lieutenants, who claimed to know what was better and could pay for it. And pay on a scale that could significantly alter society.
In the early decades of modern foundations, and of the 20th century, the successful Rockefeller campaign against parasitic disease was largely uncontroversial. No one, after all, was in favour of hookworms. But the radical reform of medical education, accomplished through financial inducements arguably defined modern ‘scientific’ medicine as