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Article contents
Blurring the Boundaries. A Review Essay
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2010
Extract
Until recently, historians tended to think of government, the market, and the nonprofit sector as discrete entities. When they ventured into the voluntary sphere, they almost always focused on individuals and institutions, rather than the mechanics of government or the economy per se. Thus, the 1960s and 1970s saw a windfall of works on social control; scholars in the 1980s examined class relations; and those in the 1990s studied issues of political culture, nation building, and citizenship. With both Marxism and civil society paradigms now in retreat, a new crop of books has begun to reexamine the ties between the sectors in new ways, moving away from traditional “charity to welfare state” models that held that when the state moved in, philanthropy withered. Although written about very different geographical regions and times, each of the three books reviewed here delves into the jumbled “mixed economy” between markets, philanthropy, and the state, and combined, they provide a fresh lens for assessing historical developments.
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References
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