Philanthropy as Political Liquidation

The threat of all-encompassing market mentalities lies within some of the very activities often assumed to transcend them or at least provide alternatives, undermining our truly political capacities to inhabit a world larger than our individual selves. The primary focus of philanthropic behavior is now the self, and the characteristics each donor wishes to portray or claim, rather than communal solidarity. Turning to Hannah Arendt’s portrait of the ways the social realm devours the political, this article explores how civil society has become a vehicle for a consumerism that transforming personal attachments into publicity, and co-opts what appears to be worldly concern into another marketplace for individual gratification.