Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg
PAUL VALLELY
(BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM, 768 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £25 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The question of what we do about wealth, our own and other people’s, faces all of us. Yet it is often a subject on which we are curiously reticent. If you have worked in a charity or encountered poverty directly, the question becomes urgent and reticence gives way to unembarrassed asking. The realities, whether of people sleeping on our streets, or Amazonian communities finding their rainforests plundered, or a ­thousand other situations of destitution and injustice, compel us to give and to press the wealthy and powerful to do more. For those who belong to faith traditions, the impulse of charity is intrinsic to a faith-determined life, but philanthropy and charitable giving testify that such instincts are found across humanity. So too is the tendency to see giving as morally praiseworthy, which, as this book explains, is sometimes dubious.

These questions and instincts need critical examination in an era in which extreme wealth coexists with what social geographer Danny Dorling, quoted in this book, describes as “peak inequality”. We value and take part in the ordinary generosity that keeps our charities and communities going and enriches our common life. We should not avert our gaze from what the seriously wealthy are doing.