Practising the Common Good: Philanthropic Practices in Twentieth-Century Denmark
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Practising the Common Good: Philanthropic Practices in Twentieth-Century Denmark Liv Egholm 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Since the beginning of the 1990s, civil society has attracted both scholarly and political interest as the ‘third sphere’ outside the state and the market, strongly amplified by the sectorial conceptualisation of state, market and civil society. In contrast, this article shows that civil society is and has never been a pre-existing location separated from state and market. Its boundaries are constantly produced through practices interweaving political, economic and moral components. This will be studied through an exemplary Danish historical case of the Egmont Foundation 1920–2018. The study shows how different and changing philanthropic practices took part in producing distinction between state, market and civil society by demarcating categories of deserving and underserving needy as part of the ‘common good’ through changing donation practices and organisational forms. As a consequence, we can trace ongoing re-distributions of power relations in society over time. The study’s contribution to develop a post-sectorial concept of civil society is twofold: first, by showing how political, economic and moral components are interlinked through the ongoing stabilisation of the ‘common’ and the ‘good’; second, by showing how these interlinks and transgression constantly re-distribute power relations in society and in turn create possibilities and limits for actions both in past, present and future. Keywords The common good . Philanthropy . Processual-practice theory . Boundary drawings . Power relations . Post-sectoral concept Since the beginning of the 1990s, civil society has been defined in a variety of ways: as a normatively privileged site of communication and ‘the public sphere’, a resource for democratisation processes and social cohesion, and a provider of necessary welfare services This article is written as part of the project ‘Civil society in the shadow of the state’ granted by the Carlsberg Foundation and based on uncensored archival material to which I was generously granted access by the Egmont Foundation.
* Liv Egholm [email protected]
1
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy Copenhagen Business School, Porcelanshaven 18a, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Egholm
in a welfare state in dire straits—in other words, as safeguarding the common good of society and as a bulwark to state and market forces. However, such a view of civil society as a privileged sphere outside the state and market, predominant in both political discourse and most academic debates, upholds a sharp distinction between the three sectors, each with its inherent distinct logic. Conversely, this article claims that civil society is not a pre-existing or given sector. Instead, it argues that civil society as an empirical location, with boundaries separating it from state and market, is produced through conceptual and organisational practices and action. Studyi
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