Bruce Mazlish's study of "revolutionary ascetics"—of Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao—identifies a personality type of organizational leadership that has few "libidinal" ties of friendship and love. It is a commitment to purpose that excludes normal relationships. Everyone except the leader is expendable. The leader accepts his or her inexpendability without reluctance; the cause will fail without him or her.

Such extremes of commitment to the ethic of ultimate ends are fortunately rare, but my guess is that the personality type is most likely to be found, whenever it shows up, among the societally conscious.

The threat from revolutionary asceticism is not great, but the biographies of many of the greatest figures in the philanthropic tradition make it clear that reform and change are most often associated with unwavering commitment, persistence, dedication, and single-mindedness. John Howard, Dorothea Dix, and Martin Luther King are among the more admirable examples.

A more serious threat is "professionalism" itself. Those who live off philanthropy sometimes want to improve their standing in the community, if only to be taken more seriously by those whom they seek to persuade. Improved standing can come from title, but to be president or executive director of a small and impoverished organization seems to carry little weight. The quality of commitment, serious though it may be, often lacks the charismatic quality that makes a Gandhi or a Mother Theresa so powerfully attractive.

To be paid to work for a nonprofit, voluntary organization may carry no special status at all; in some cases it may be taken as a sign of inability to succeed in more challenging and competitive work.

To be a "professional," however, in the full sense of that word, is to lay claim to a place of some honor and distinction in our society, in spite of careless usage and in spite of the serious criticism of professional behavior, practice, and values. An important new book, The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schön, deals with "how professionals think in action"—and opens with a chapter on "The Crisis of Confidence in Professional Knowledge." Schön questions whether knowledge—and especially technical knowledge approached analytically—is an appropriate base for the professional, in contrast with the scientist. The new model of professionalism is borrowed from science: "The systematic knowledge base of a profession is thought to have four essential properties. It is specialized, firmly bounded, scientific, and standardized," according to Schön's summary of the position (p. 23). In some professions, such as medicine, this emphasis on specialized, scientific knowledge marks a trend toward "technical rationality," the domination of professional practice by scientific values.

In philanthropy this trend is most evident in efforts to make philanthropy a policy science and to apply such tools as cost-benefit analysis, quantification, and computer modeling. Most economists have approached philanthropic questions in this way for years. The concern that Schön and others express seems not only to result from a fear of "quantomania," but from the removal of other values from consideration. (It is significant, I think, that this thoughtful new book about "reflective practice" was recommended to me by the dean of a leading medical school.)

However, as Schön points out, philanthropy is not considered a "major profession" like medicine or a "near-major" profession like engineering; it is a "minor profession," along with those such as social work, education, librarianship, or town planning. The minor professions are said to lack intellectual rigor and depend almost entirely for their ideas on the academic disciplines of the arts and sciences. Most important, they pursue "ambiguous ends."

Philanthropy does not have clear and agreed-upon purposes, nor does it have firm intellectual foundations; it is susceptible to attack from political scientists about its purposes, and in the most fundamental way from economists of widely divergent ideological persuasions. Philanthropy is a tradition, first and foremost, and subject like all traditions to attenuation by neglect as well as to erosion by criticism. It is true of philanthropic as well as other traditions that they "are frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests" (Schön, p. 17). Such conflicts increase the vulnerability to as well as the likelihood of criticism.

The literature that deals with the philanthropic relationship emphasizes the priority of the giver and the receiver, the setting in which many of these conflicts arise. Very little attention is given to the role of the professional as agent or to the subtle but important changes in attitudes and values that occur when professionals speak and act for volunteers. Fund-raising professionals have studied more intensively than anyone else the motivations for giving, but most of us know precious little about the psychological changes that take place between an appeal made by a person in his or her own behalf, by a volunteer in behalf of that person, and by a professional in behalf of a volunteer in behalf of that person. We know even less about the psychological changes that take place when appeals are made by direct mail, sometimes "personalized," sometimes with the fullest bureaucratic anonymity.

As we moved from the simplicity of the direct face-to-face relationship to the characteristic behavior of large organizations and mass communication, the qualities of professionalism changed drastically. In what way can the philanthropic professional be said to have "clients"? Who is the client? If the client is the ultimate recipient, then what is the professional's relationship to the prospective contributor? In what way do professionals in large organizations have "autonomy" as the traditional professional is thought to have it? The medical practitioner's professional opinion presumably does not change whether the professional is teaching in a classroom; or working in a professional clinic, hospital, or MASH unit. There is no question who the client is, and there is usually little question of what the professional's responsibility is in the relationship.

"Clientage" (there is such a word) is presumably the relationship seen from the vantage point of the client rather than from the perspective of the professional. The professional offers knowledge of a special and esoteric kind with certain implied guarantees of trustworthiness. The quality of the service is also expected to be the same regardless of the social standing, ethnic background, or ability to pay. Professionalism has fallen under attack because of lapses from that high standard. Is that, too, a problem for us?

Professionals in philanthropy face other problems. What is the place of ambition in our work? It seems to be rarely spoken of. Our ambition is assumed to be directed primarily to the cause we serve, rather than primarily to ourselves. Some comment has been made about the relative lack of opportunity for people on the contributions side to rise professionally; the career ladder is very short. Grantmaking foundations with very large endowments sometimes have very small professional staffs. Corporate contributions professionals are by definition working outside the mainstream of their companies' business interests; if they win promotion, they are often promoted out of the contributions area, back into the corporate mainstream.

Those employed in volunteer-based organizations are often in small professional staffs with not more than a step or two between the lowest and highest ranks. There is some lateral movement from one organization to another, but few organizations offer much opportunity for advancement.

How, then, does ambition manifest itself in the independent sector? Presumably the energies are turned toward program goals, and professional satisfaction is to be found and ambition rewarded in the progress made toward those goals.

Do we now begin to talk about the differences among work in this sector, work in the private sector, and work for government? The conventions of behavior are different; they must be, if the goals of power, wealth, and recognition that are expected to motivate people to further effort and achievement in the other two sectors are thought not to apply in the same way here.

That, it seems to me, is the root issue of Ralph Nader's labor union and of the question of strikes and slowdowns in hospitals. The line between managerial/professional/technical and office/secretarial/clerical and their expectations of treatment becomes unclear in the independent sector. Some people welcome such ambiguity; it often seems to lead to discord and unhappiness. Who within the paid staff of a nonprofit, voluntary organization is living for the cause and who may be said to be living off it?

The "revolutionary ascetic" mentioned earlier is a person who believes his or her personal ambition to be exactly congruent with the advancement of his or her cause. The two proceed together; separated, neither will survive.

The "philanthropic ascetic" rejects those things that appear to detract from or to demean the cause. There is a single-mindedness about the importance of the cause itself; only lip-service is paid to competing causes. Some philanthropic professionals appear to have fashioned their lives in such a shape, denying themselves income that they might be able to use—without challenge or criticism—for their own comfort or convenience, in order to apply even more available resources to the work that must be done.

We are dealing with a force that does not fit well with the narrower versions of self-interest, especially when selfinterest is expected to reveal itself as for material benefit. This is, I think, an example of "rational noneconomic behavior," behavior of an almost garden-variety familiarity in the independent sector. Clean air, metaphysics, or adoption services can be even more powerful than an extra week of vacation, a new car, or even a personal computer (or a rock concert, suntan, or advanced degree).

The search for self-fulfillment may lead ever more people toward work that combines material reward and spiritual satisfaction. If so, the boundary between work in the marketplace and government and work in the independent sector may become even more blurred.

John D. Rockefeller presented a philosophy of business philanthropy that asserted the creation of honorable and honest work for people to be the highest sort of contribution a person could make. That aspiration for business has not been shared by many people in business; many if not most people outside business would not accept Rockefeller's philosophy as representative of the thinking of business leaders generally—and perhaps not even representative of Rockefeller's own views.

Economic work is necessary, and self-interest is said to be what motivates and guides it. It isn't necessary for other values to enter in. Take it from the horse's mouth:

By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, [every individual] intends his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter 2)

Smith believed that the businessman was better qualified to judge his interests than any government could be. In his other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he makes this view universal:

Every man, as the Stoics used to say, is first and principally recommended to his own care; and every man is certainly, in every respect, fitter and abler to take care of himself than of any other person. (Part VI, Section II, Chapter 1)

The reason for asking the question is to turn it around:

To what extent is any man better able to take care of another than that person is able to take care of himself?