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 two-fold: 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.
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Notes
This problem was intensified throughout the Danish ‘war on the Constitution’ up to 1901 and not solved until 1915.
This did not include women or domestic servants until 1915.
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Archival material
From the Egmont Foundation’s private archive, I have used the following: the original charter, 1920, and the following revisions of 1957, 1979, and 1991. Egmont’s original Will, 1914, Minutes from board meetings 1914–2018, including the board meetings quoted here, Board meeting 34, 53 & 54. Interviews; 4 semi-structured interviews were conducted with the duration of 1–2 hours each during the spring 2014 with the CEO of Egmont, the CEO of the Foundation, the vice-CEO of the Foundation and the juridical counsellor, who had been working with the foundations over 3 decades.
From other archives
The state archive (Rigsarkivet); all entries about Egmont and the Egmont foundation
The archives of Ministry of civil law; all entries about Egmont and the Egmont foundation
From the ministry of social affairs archive: Social acts and legislative work from Danish Legislative practices: including the social act from 1933, 1956, 1976, 1998
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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.
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Egholm, L. Practising the Common Good: Philanthropic Practices in Twentieth-Century Denmark. Int J Polit Cult Soc 34, 237–252 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-020-09374-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-020-09374-4