The pioneer revisits her classic
Governing Nonprofit Organizations: Federal and State Law and Regulation. Marion R. Fremont-Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. 550 pp. $95.00 cloth.
Whose Public?: Parochialism and Paternalism in State Charity Law Enforcement
This piece was inspired by the increasing tendency of State attorneys general - backed up by courts and legislatures - to effectively confiscate the assets of wealthy nonprofits through overreaching enforcement actions. The article develops a legal framework for ascertaining the proper State role. It reviews many case studies including, most notoriously, the thwarted diversification of the Milton Hershey School Trust out of Hershey Foods Corporation (an investment worth over $5 billion) - thereby preserving the local operations of a publicly traded company. While few state attorneys general have the funding and inclination to engage in aggressive charity enforcement, the very lack of state involvement with the organization and operation of nonprofit entities might explain how legislatures, attorneys general, and even courts can misconstrue their proper roles in the regulation of charities and other nonprofits. Assets of nonprofit organizations are not governmental assets. Rather, a given nonprofit serves the indefinite class of beneficiaries chosen by its creators, funders, governing board, and, in some cases, members - but not by the local community, the state, or any other public that constitutes the constituents of an attorney general, a legislature, or a judge. Inevitably, if the proper legal bounds of legitimate enforcement do not become clearer, the role of charities in society could suffer. Charities facing state attorney general inquiry worry about loss of donations, loss of contracts and patronage, and retention of staff and volunteers. If, though, charities too quickly accede to state demands over matters of discretionary governance, the sector as a whole can see a degradation in charities' willingness to take risks, and in volunteer board members' willingness to serve.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory
Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.