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Recently, the Metropolitan Museum announced that it would no longer accept gifts from members of the Sackler family that owns the company that makes the painkiller OxyContin. The museum had accepted gifts from the family for 50 years. The museum’s decision follows others in the US such as the Guggenheim and the Tate in Britain.
We don’t know how Irving Kristol would have reacted to these decisions, but it is a safe bet that he wouldn’t be surprised. For Kristol was a keen student of what he called the problem of doing good, a subject he addressed in a 1977 Wall Street Journal essay. His deep understanding of consequential philanthropy was one of the many ways he contributed to AEI.
Kristol gave the first of AEI’s Bicentennial Lectures in 1973. In 1976, AEI’s President William Baroody, Sr. appointed him to chair the advisory council of the AEI Center for the Study of Government Regulation, and he joined the Institute that year. He wrote for the first issue of AEI’s Regulation magazine when it was launched in 1977. He gave the Institute’s first Bradley Lecture in 1989.
Kristol’s understanding of the proper basis for philanthropy was especially important. His 1977 column is notable for many reasons, as it introduced to a wider Wall Street Journal audience a new-ish term: the New Class. The New Class were people who, in Kristol’s words, “displayed a habitual animus to the business community.” The New Class, residing in universities, foundations, and in the media, was in large part hostile to business. In the essay, Kristol argued that business needed to support interests that were friendly to corporate survival. In 1980, Kristol expanded on the op-ed’s themes at the annual meeting of the Council on Foundations. “It really is possible to do good. Doing good isn’t even hard. It’s just doing a lot of good that is very hard. If your aims are modest, you can accomplish an awful lot.”
He urged greater modesty in gift-giving and less grandiose ideas. Under the direction of AEI’s Robert Goldwin who convened a series of CEO seminars at AEI in the 1980s, Kristol spoke to executives about defining a proper philanthropic role and appreciating the terrain in which they operated.
In 2010, the Hudson Institute convened a seminar on Irving Kristol’s philanthropy that explored his many gifts to conservatism.
This Summer, AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley touched on a similar issue of gift-giving and public philanthropy for the New York Post along with James Piereson. In this op-ed, the authors state:
Irving Kristol recognized a problem with consequential philanthropy 40 years ago. Institutions today must weigh the pros and cons of an intended good deed and how it will be judged in the court of public opinion.
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Irving Kristol was a keen student of what he called “the problem of doing good,” a subject he addressed in a 1977 essay in The Wall Street Journal.
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