Philanthropy's Inherently Political Nature

Philanthropy stands at a conflictual position when it comes to its relationship with democracy. The point of juncture, and therefore the source of their opposition, is that these two forms of collective decision-making aim at the same ends: public purposes. But if many scholars have discussed the normative question of why philanthropy might or might not be desirable in a democracy, few have paused to address the prior and more fundamental analytical question of what makes philanthropy inherently specific. The potential danger that philanthropy might bring to democracy is generally described in consequentialists terms. Contrary to that, I argue that this conflictual relation is less related to its consequences and more connected to the way philanthropy is exercised. The way one can derive authority from gratuitous donations will always be incompatible with democratic credentials. In one hand, democratic decisions will apply jointly over each citizen while instantiating a direct relation of accountability between them. In the other hand, philanthropic acts allow individuals to influence the public by their own preferences. I offer a political definition of philanthropy as acts carrying a form of authority characterized by two individually necessary but jointly sufficient constitutive rules: plutocracy and third personality. By plutocratic, I understand that philanthropy’s authority is derived from material resources that are external to the democratic decision process. Therefore, philanthropy instantiates a fundamentally asymmetric form of decision-making because the source of this authority (i.e., wealth) is unequally distributed between people. Philanthropy is also third-personal in the sense of appealing to relations of accountability that are linked to personal reasons that are relative to individual agents. To the question: Who should be providing public goods, third-personality answers: ‘‘Voluntary individuals because of their love for humanity’’ where democracy would respond ‘‘all citizens themselves through a collective system due to their interrelations of accountability’’.