Among the greatest challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century is that of sustaining a healthy civil society, which depends upon managing the tension between individual and collective interests. Bruce R. Sievers explores this issue by investigating ways to balance the public and private sides of modern life in a manner that allows realization of the ideal of individual freedom and, at the same time, makes possible the effective pursuit of the common good. He traces the development of civil society from the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, analyzes its legacy for modern political life, and explores how historical trends in the formation of civil society and philanthropy aid or impede our achievement of public goods in the modern era.
“Bruce Sievers has made a distinctive contribution to our understanding of civil society.”
James Allen Smith, Rockefeller Archive Center
This book will be considered important reading for political philosophers, doctoral students, and theorists interested in the connection of civil society and philanthropy. It outlines more clearly than most previously published work the implications of the conception of philanthropy as pursuit of the common good by private means.
Bruce Sievers has made a distinctive contribution to our understanding of civil society. With seventeenth-century Holland as his point of departure, he discusses the ways in which values and institutions have interacted and melded to shape modern civil society.
BRUCE R. SIEVERS is a visiting scholar and lecturer at Stanford University and adjunct professor at the Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management at the University of San Francisco.
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