| After the American Revolution, when its meaning was being contested, justice defined, and authority reconstituted, Americans debated the role philanthropy should play in this republic. It was a crucial conversation because the development of civil society, government, and social solidarity hinged upon its outcome. Federalists and Whigs argued that philanthropy was needed to build a civilization that could withstand democracy. They stressed that for the nation to be durable and just, the largesse of social elites must be vested with public authority to create a civil society dominated by civility, refinement, and a solidarity cemented by attention to human need. Others had a very different conception of democracy, civil society, and they distrusted private philanthropy. Democrats claimed that civil society must be rooted in individual rights not in conceptions of need, and insisted that majorities not elites must make decisions affecting social development. This was a moral conception of civil society, too, but it would replace a moral economy with masculine, unsentimental competition between formal equals.;This dissertation reinterprets American liberalism by exploring the relationship between philanthropy and democracy in the nineteenth century through analysis of legal-, constitutional-, and political-historical evidence. It argues that political and ethical debates about the meaning of the nation and about definitions of justice and social solidarity were resolved largely through the litigation of myriad disputes involving who could give what to whom and how. It contends that private philanthropy existed because jurists sided with those who understood civil society as a space that must be controlled and cultivated by elites partnered with the state. It shows how jurists defined justice in social and not solely individual terms, and elaborated elements of state authority that were as paternal as they were necessary to making private giving real. This dissertation details the ways in which philanthropy and a pastoral state grew together in partnership but in tension with democracy, as advocates of philanthropy prevailed in their pursuit of a class-bound imagination of moral community that was based upon meeting needs and an organic conception of the relationship between the individual and the collective. |
