HistPhil (2025)

09/06/2025

New HistPhil post: The "political purpose doctrine," which states that if an organization’s main purpose is political then the organization cannot be charitable, is one of the main ways that the Common Law has policed the border between the charitable and the political. Matthew Harding and Jane Calderwood Norton offer an assessment of the doctrine, and examine how jurisdictions across the common law world have responded to it.

"We argue that no jurisdiction has confronted the public benefit (and detriment) of political advocacy adequately," they write, "and we propose greater recognition of the indirect or process benefits of advocacy, provided it is consistent with altruism and liberal democratic values."

Editors’ Note: Jane Calderwood Norton and Matthew Harding offer an assessment of the “political purpose doctrine,” which excludes organizations whose main purpose is political fro…

04/06/2025

New HistPhil post: What can the world's oldest democracy and the world's most populous democracy learn from each other with respect to the global shrinking of civic space? Ingrid Srinath examines the threats to civil society in the US and India and what each can teach about the defense against those threats. As she writes, "The only long-term guarantee of protection for civil society actors is a strong sense of ownership from their publics."

"This, in turn, requires high levels of trust and collaboration among a diverse population of CSOs. Finding common ground to build and strengthen networks within civil society is an urgent need. So too is the need to reach across divides to bring together faith-based organisations, secular NGOs and academia, with labour and grassroots movements. While a unified, grand coalition may not be likely, complementary assets and skills, shared diagnosis of the threats, and a common vision of the direction of change would suffice to ensure that resources and strategies are broadly aligned. This is far from simple or easy. It calls for extraordinary leadership characterised by humility, trust, and the capacity to take time and bandwidth from the urgent challenges of organisational survival in tough times to dedicate them to building the civic commons for solidarity, advocacy, peer learning, access to shared services and policy advocacy. And collective resolve to, in the words of Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, hold the line."

Editors’ Note: Ingrid Srinath asks what can the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s most populous democracy learn from each other about the shrinking civic space each is expe…

20/05/2025

New HistPhil post: Allison Tait revisits Henry Hansmann's classic 1990 law review article, "Why Do Universities Have Endowments?" At a moment when higher ed endowments are under unprecedented attack, thinking through what their purpose is--and should be--as Hansmann did and as Tait does here, is most urgent than ever.

Editors’ Note: Allison Tait revisits Henry Hansmann’s 1990 law review article, Why Do Universities Have Endowments?, at a moment when university endowments face unprecedented threats, e…

16/05/2025

New HistPhil Post: Michele Fugiel Gartner on the development of foundation staff roles, from the early 20th century philanthropoid to the 21st century foundation professional.

Editors’ Note: Michele Fugiel Gartner offers an outline of the history of foundation staff role development, adapted from an article, co-written with Tobias Jung and Alina Baluch, published i…

09/05/2025

New HistPhil post: Samantha May, author of Islamic Charity: How Charity Became Seen as a Threat to National Security (Bloombsury 2021), addresses the “undocumented and unseen violence” that has been produced when Muslim-led charities and humanitarian organizations are surveilled and disrupted, and when "specific geographies and entire peoples [become] 'unaidable,'" as part of the "Financial War on Terror."

"To potentially limit or prevent violent harm in the Global North, we risk introducing disproportionate harm on others who already suffer physically and economically in high-risk areas. At best, violence is thus not prevented but simply geographically relocated beyond Western audiences’ visions."

Editors’ Note: Samantha May discusses the “undocumented and unseen violence” that can be brought on by the regulation of Muslim charities as part of the “Financial War on Te…

06/05/2025

New HistPhil post: Carnegie philanthropy is famous for creating a worldwide system of public libraries, but Ian McShane explains that in the inter-war years of the 20th century, it was also deeply invested in the creation of a "Museum movement."

As he writes, "[C]ontrasting with a late-nineteenth century phase of major metropolitan museum and gallery development, the museum movement was more concerned with local museums, especially those in small communities or rural areas, as the sector most in need of professionalisation and modernisation, but also central to consolidating white settlement in a period when established racial hierarchies were under challenge."

Editors’ Note: Ian McShane introduces his new book, The Museum Movement: Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and Museum Development in the Anglosphere, 1920-1940 (Routledge, 2024). The focus of An…

21/04/2025

New Histphil post: Reflecting on the novel challenge the Trump administration now poses to civil society, David Morse reflects on the distanced traveled from a White House gathering in 2003, organized by the director of the WH Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) and the president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, and which defined the embrace of voluntarism by Trump’s last Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

Editors’ Note: Reflecting on the novel challenge the Trump administration now poses to civil society, David Morse reflects on the distanced traveled from a White House gathering in 2003, one …

21/03/2025

Have you been following the standoff this week between DOGE officials and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP)? In denying a temporary restraining order directed at DOGE efforts to take over USIP offices, a distinct judge acknowledged that USIP was a "very complicated entity." In a new HistPhil post, Ellen Aprill explains why this is the case, and why USIP's hybrid nature--a cross between a charitable and government agency, like the Smithsonian, the Red Cross, the National Gallery of Art, and other prominent institutions--is at the heart of the dispute.

Editors’ Note: Ellen Aprill explains why the hybrid nature of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), both a government and nonprofit entity, was at the heart of the standoff between Dep…

18/03/2025

I've noted on several occasions that one novel element of the current political moment is that the Trump Administration, for all the disruption it is causing within the nonprofit sector, does not seem to have a compensating theory of civil society it is advancing.

But in a new HistPhil post (the first in a two-part series), Michael Hartmann and William Schambra argue that even if Trump doesn't articulate a theory of civil society, the populist New Right, one of the political forces fueling the MAGA movement, does in fact have one. "[I]t harkens back to an earlier understanding. Risking oversimplification, it’s a pre-politicized, Tocquevillian conception" It's one that views charity as "subversive of the state—not a part of or even allied too closely with it, much less part of or allied with one faction at work to control or direct it."

And Hartmann and Schambra suggests that there might be grounds for an alliance on these grounds between populist progressives and conservatives.

Editors’ Note: In the first of a two-part series, Michael E. Hartmann and William A. Schambra reflect on the populist New Right’s conception and relation to civil society. Generally, Re…

10/03/2025

One thing that's become increasingly clear is the need for progressives to be more attentive to attacks on nonprofits and philanthropy percolating in the right-wing media and advocacy ecosystem--which now have a good chance of being directly channeled to those who hold power within the Trump Administration.

It is in that spirit that I reviewed an especially impressive distillation of those attacks, from a journalist at the Daily Signal: Tyler O'Neil's The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government. As I explain in the review, I don't think it's a good book, but it's a dutiful one, in terms of how it reflects and amplifies the animus directed toward progressive nonprofits from the Right. So I think there's a good deal to learn from it, especially about how right-wing conspiratorialism has matured past a preoccupation with a few singular malaevolent individuals or institutions toward a focus on networks, funding intermediaries, and broader systems of power and influence.

Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis reviews Tyler O’Neil’s The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government (Bombardier Books, 2025). &n…

05/03/2025

New HistPhil post, part of a new forum on the shrinking space for global civil society: We know governments can constrict civil society through formal laws and regulations, but they can also use informal rules--created through norms, expectations, and practices--to do so. Merrill Sovner explores how this occurred in Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. As she writes, the experiences of CSOs in EU countries in Central and Eastern Europe provide important lessons--and perhaps warnings--for established democracies everywhere.

Editors’ Note: Merrill Sovner adapts a 2019 report she co-wrote to address a particular timely question: how informal rules can be used to constrict civil society, focused on the examples of …

17/02/2025

If you want to understand the historical context behind the Trump Administration's antipathy for the nonprofit sector, there's no better place to start than this new HistPhil post from John Miles Branch. He traces the feud between two prominent mid-century libertarian thinkers, Murray Rothbard and Richard Cornuelle, and shows how their divergent views of civil society anticipated our current moment. The views of Cornuelle, who coined the term "Independent Sector," championing voluntarism and private initiates as an alternative to the state, lost out to Rothbard's belief that voluntarism simply “cloaks and camouflages the viper of statism." But Branch warns against simply reinvigorating Cornuelle's emphasis on "nonprofits’ distance from the state and the importance of their autonomy and independence."

As he writes: "[S]uch an approach carries risks: the constituency for this narrative, forged in the political environment of the Cold War and the reaction to the growth of the administrative state, seems to be disempowered and shrinking. In its place is a movement that, in Rothbardian fashion, prioritizes personal enrichment and unchecked private power over the very notion of shared social obligations."

It's a must-read.

Editors’ Note: John Miles Branch explores the feud between two prominent mid-century libertarian thinkers, Murray Rothbard and Richard Cornuelle, as a way of understanding the contemporary ri…

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