Producing the Common Good: Philanthropic Investment Practices in 20th Century Denmark

Since the beginning of the 1990’s, civil society has been defined in a variety of ways as; a normatively privileged site of communication and ‘the public sphere’, a resource for democratization processes and social cohesion safeguarding the common good, as well as a provider of welfare services from a welfare state in dire straits. However, such a view of civil society as a privileged sphere outside of the state and the market, predominant in both political discourse and academic debates, upholds a sharp distinction between the three sectors with each their inherent separate and distinct logic. In contradiction to this, this article claims that civil society is not a pre-existing or given sector. Instead, it argues that civil society as an empirical location, with boundaries separating it from state and market, is produced through conceptual, organisational and donation practices.