Transnational Asymmetries: US Philanthropic Foundations and the German School of Politics in the 1920s and 1930s
Peter Weber analyzes the relationship between the German School of Politics and US philanthropic foundations. The intellectuals close to the School of Politics were positioned at the critical intersection between private initiative and public action and a
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Transnational Asymmetries: US Philanthropic Foundations and the German School of Politics in the 1920s and 1930s Peter C. Weber
Philanthropic institutions play crucial societal roles in modern societies. Philanthropy complements the actions of states and markets in providing services to the general public. Most importantly, however, philanthropy is a form of expression and engagement. Philanthropic foundations can mobilize resources and connect different social actors in ways that either reinforce government action or legitimize and support alternative sociopolitical perspectives. At the turn of the twentieth century, philanthropists and their institutions gained important roles in Western societies, as the transformations of industrialized societies opened new possibilities to influence public affairs and public policy. In the United States, in the decade preceding the First World War, philanthropic foundations operated privately in place of the government and addressed industrial society’s problems by focusing on the training of leadership (Karl and Katz 1981, 242–243; Karl 1997: 211). They established channels of communications between various societal spheres, thus operating at the intersection of academia, business, and politics. At the turn of the twentieth century, philanthropy under the institutional form of the general-purpose foundation became the backbone of America’s institutional matrix (Zunz 1998: 33). In this context, philanthropic foundations provided an important institutional link between academic theory and practical implementation. By contrast, in the same period, Germany lacked general-purpose foundations, although it had an equally long philanthropic tradition. Individual actors such as public intellectuals and philanthropists rather than institutions played an increasingly crucial role as figures in-between academia, politics, and industry. For example, private philanthropists supported the development of a technical education that better fit the requirements of an industrial society in Imperial Germany (Fuchs & P.C. Weber (*) Nonprofit Leadership Studies Program, Murray State University, Murray, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 G.R. Witkowski, A. Bauerkämper (eds.), German Philanthropy in Transatlantic Perspective, Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40839-2_5
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Hoffman, 2004: 103–119). A noteworthy institutional exception was the German School of Politics (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, or DHfP), which was founded in Berlin in 1920 by Ernst Jäckh with the help of both national and international philanthropy. As Germany’s first school of public affairs, the DHfP positioned itself at the intersection of academic theory and political practice, aiming to develop democratic practices of governance through the training of democratic leaders. International philanthropic institutions thus became crucial actors in interwar Germany. International philanthropy represented a projection of values and insti
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