Summary Of The Philanthropic Revolution

In The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity, Jeremy Beer succeeds in his two-pronged effort to delineate charity from philanthropy, both in their actual practice and in their distinct origins, and to expose the long-ignored skeletons of philanthropy’s deep, historical closets. All of this is achieved in no more than 110 pages, and amounts to nothing less than a sheer testament to Beer’s intellectual acuity. Delicately balancing descriptive, historical narration and normative analysis, Beer portrays philanthropy’s protracted effort to effectively crowd out traditional charity while emphasizing those “personalist” goods that were lost in the caustic conflict. Beer quickly sets himself apart from what he perceives to be the three primary intellectual tendencies to have tread the same path before him. These are, namely, the
Thus, the Protestant ethos, with respect to charity, was to become largely, if not perfectly, compatible with any consequentialist one which ignored those duties we hold regardless of consequence. This is a crucial point for Beer to make, as it allows for him to explain why so much of the thought done on giving in America, a Protestant-majority country, would emphasize the same distinction made by Andrew Carnegie between the “deserving” and “undeserving poor”. Put simply, assisting those in need became a secular affair. For those Protestants, Jews and atheists who did not share the duties of the Catholic, efficiency dictated that the concerns and methods of charity were unfounded. As such, historical opposition to charity was often undertaken in concert with, or as a result of, anti-Catholic bigotry throughout much of the 19th and 20th