Philanthropy In Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel Of Wealth

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“Mainstream philanthropists now need to awaken to this reality. Philanthropy need not be incompatible with democracy, but it takes work to ensure that is the case.” (Valley 41). Philanthropists have consistently been a controversial topic in the mainstream media, dating back to the 1800’s, from Andrew Carnegie to Mark Zuckerberg. The discourse around philanthropy has led to a multitude of articles defending and deconstructing the concept of philanthropy. Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth takes the defensive position on his philosophy of philanthropy. In contrast, Paul Vallely delves into the negative side of philanthropy in his article How Philanthropy Benefits the Super-rich. Another article that takes a closer look into the known and …show more content…

The presentation of them has just shifted with societal growth. Vallely admonishes that: For all their munificence, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and the great industrial philanthropists of that era were notable – even in their own day – for avoiding the whole question of economic justice. Then, as now, a huge percentage of wealth was in the hands of a tiny few, almost completely untrammelled by tax and regulation. Carnegie and his fellows, their critics said, neglected the great ethical question of the day, which centred on “the distribution rather than the redistribution of wealth”. Carnegie, then the richest man in the world, was criticised in his day for distributing his unprecedented largesse because his fortune was built on ruthless tactics such as cutting the wages of his steel-workers. i.e. a syllable (Valley 31). Vallely voices criticism that has grown in the past few years. Weaponizing philanthropy allowed them to disregard any economic injustices influenced by them. He agrees with multiple critics that one person’s mass accumulation of wealth leads to those people becoming outliers in the mass struggle a society could

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