There is no more important issue for us to clarify than to determine to what extent the people of our two countries are free to form associations whose purpose is to provide welfare services or to influence welfare policy, and to what extent they must model or manage their activities according to legislative guidelines or administrative rules and requirements. What are the rationales offered in each country? How does each of our countries justify "voluntary action for the public good") There is a religious rationale; there is a political rationale. We should illuminate both.

In the United States, a role for philanthropy is supported by a broad social philosophy, based on the religious and political rationales. We assume that philanthropy has a role to play in matters of social welfare. But we debate about the relative weight to be assigned to each of the four sources of assistance: self-help, mutual aid, government assistance, and philanthropy. Self-help: Most Americans assume that each person has an obligation to meet his or her own individual needs, or to make an earnest effort to do so. Mutual aid: People also have formal reciprocal relations with others--family first, of course, but other close social and economic relations as well. Government assistance: Many things exceed the capacity, the will, or even the interests of individuals and their allies in the groups to which individuals belong; these things can only be achieved, or can best be achieved, by obligatory joint action through government.

At the moment there is profound disagreement about the proportion of responsibility to be assumed by each of these four dimensions, especially by the federal government. The dramatic shift in the political leadership of the Congress to a Republican majority for the first time in decades leaves us with a Democratic president reacting to a competing political agenda. The Republicans, under the rubric of a "Contract with America," have made welfare policy a leading target. Federal welfare programs, they contend, are wasteful, inefficient, and even harmful to the people they are intended to serve. The result is alleged to be a vast bureaucracy, which contributes to an unbearable burden of annual deficits and accumulated debt. Their argument denounces welfare programs for undermining the family and for encouraging teenage pregnancy, juvenile crime and delinquency, and other social pathologies. Many Democrats have joined with Republicans in this all-out assault on welfare policy.

There is a heavy moral tone in this debate. The argument is that welfare is based on a philosophy of paternalism that breeds dependence; in the nineteenth century, the process was called "pauperization"--one creates a pauper by taking persons who are temporarily in need and making them permanently dependent. worse, laziness and lack of self-help are not only tolerated but excused; people are on welfare as if the system rather than the individuals were responsible for their plight.

These are familiar arguments to American ears, but they may not be familiar at all to a Polish audience that is comfortable with its own welfare philosophy. For my own part, I would urge that we all engage in a serious critique of the principal arguments for and against both public and private welfare provision. And we should not allow our personal and professional preferences to distort our analysis as politics and ideology presently bias the American debate.

The Republican victory in November 1994 may or may not have marked a "defining moment" in modern American history, analogous in importance to the "Great Society" programs of the 1960s and the "New Deal" of the 1930s, but it has caused the reigning assumptions about welfare policy to be challenged so effectively that they will not soon recover--or perhaps even survive. For example, it is now broadly accepted that mothers on welfare should work, reversing a policy that mothers should receive assistance in order to be able to remain at home with their children. In the past it was assumed that, for mothers who did work, neighbors and relatives nearby could provide daycare. That seems no longer possible, especially in the inner city where the need is greatest. Old policies appear to have been abandoned before new policies have been developed--assuming there will be support for new policies and their costs.

Because the largest number of Americans living in poverty are children, the new view of welfare will affect children more than other age groups. Children are the ones who suffer most from poverty, and the violence and neglect that poverty breeds. If it is true, as a social philosopher once said, that a civilization is best measured by the way it treats its children, then contemporary American civilization will be measured and found wanting. (If that hard judgment is flawed or misconceived, the work of our seminar will do much to show its falsity.)

There are other matters of concern for those of us who try to understand and interpret the American philanthropic tradition. Doubts about the sector's present state of health suggest that the tradition may be in jeopardy. As Dwight Burlingame has brought out in our discussions, trends in philanthropic giving may be in decline. One explanation is demographic: the increase in the number of retired people, among whom giving predictably declines.3 There are other factors also, cultural factors, which are much more difficult to measure. Cultural factors are as important as demographic ones; we must avoid the temptation to concentrate on the latter because of the research problems encountered in the former. For example, it would be of great interest to know whether philanthropic giving among Roman Catholics in Poland has increased, reflecting the leadership of John Paul II. (In the United States one informed observer of philanthropic giving estimates that giving among Roman Catholics has declined significantly because of the Pope's opposition to birth control and to admission of women into the priesthood. Scholars in the United States and Poland will have serious difficulty in eliciting accurate information on such a sensitive topic, which makes the topic no less important or interesting. A distinguished American historian writes of "the elastic, inexact character of truth, and especially of truths about human conduct," which makes history so much more difficult than natural science.)