Joan Roelofs begins her examination of the influence of grant-making foundations with an unusual disclaimer: “My philanthropy studies have been financed entirely by my position as professor at Keene State College” (p. x). The reason quickly becomes apparent: The thesis of her book is that virtually anyone who receives a foundation grant, participates in a foundation-sponsored conference, or joins a foundation-supported organization risks—and often succumbs to—being co-opted by the dominant, usually capitalist, elites who create and govern foundations. Whether in community organizing or international development, supporting the arts or advancing human rights, foundations, as she sees them, have had an overwhelmingly baneful effect, channeling those who might otherwise have been critics, innovators, and radicals into tame bureaucrats, defenders of the status quo, or promoters of causes inimical to their “real” interests.

If philanthropic money is corrupting, the disclaimer with which Foundations and Public Policy begins is meant to show that its author is incorruptible. But so one-sided is her argument, so selective is her evidence, and so strained are her conclusions that one might be tempted to believe that she is really trying to settle scores with donors who have not supported her favorite causes.

Roelofs' main point—that foundations serve the interests of their donors—is hardly novel. Indeed, it is rooted in the thinking of the early-twenteeth-century Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci, who maintained that economically dominant groups exercise political influence by establishing cultural “hegemony,” especially through patronizing intellectuals, broadly understood. His writings attracted a following among 1960s radicals and generated a number of books and studies, aimed at demonstrating that foundations are critical links in this process. Roelofs draws these together and adds some examples of her own to build her case.

Thus, for example, the money foundations spend on international activities goes mainly, as she sees it, to the cultivation of local elites who will be friendly to American—read, “capitalist”—interests. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are the principal villains. With the foundation (and U.S. government) money they receive, they recruit and indoctrinate aspiring leaders, drawing them away from potentially far-reaching avenues for social change, such as protest movements or class-based political parties, to work within existing channels of political power. Despite their claims to fight abuses of personal and civil liberties, human rights organizations, Roelofs argues, actually reinforce the status quo by treating political conflicts as legal issues or regime-sponsored terrorism as aberrant behavior, rather than the way elites habitually quash dissent. Though widely praised elsewhere for his work in former Soviet-bloc countries, financier George Soros is portrayed here as a philanthropic imperialist, bent on “civilizing” the new leaders of these nations in order to shape the decisions they will make, including, of course, on monetary matters (p. 177).

Similar examples abound on the home front as well. Thus, Roelofs writes, “radical activism often was transformed by grants and technical assistance from liberal foundations into fragmented and local organizations subject to elite control” (p. 121). Thanks to foundation and government support, “neo-populist” neighborhood groups, such as those associated with Saul Alinsky, turned into social service agencies. And militant civil rights organizations, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, hungered for support, while those willing to work within the political system, such as the NAACP or the National Council of La Raza, prospered. Indeed, in the author's eyes, foundation efforts to assist minority groups are inherently problematic because they foster “identity politics,” rather than class consciousness (p. 134).

These are mostly well-worn tales that have been told before (and less anecdotally) by J. Craig Jenkins, Barry D. Karl, and other scholars. Except for a survey of the impact of grants given in the late 1970s by a social-change—oriented donor called the Haymarket People's Fund, Roelofs has done no primary research on foundation giving patterns, though data are readily available through the Foundation Center and other sources. Even the survey reveals more about the obstacles radicals face in bringing about social change (such as the difficulties of sustaining momentum and building organizations) than the role foundations play. And many of the foundation-supported groups she accuses of being tools of moneyed interests would undoubtedly take exception to that characterization.

Such demurrals would not matter much to Roelofs, whose analytic stance allows little deviation from the Marxist paradigm. Any grant that does not serve class interests is ipso facto one that is inimical to them. This would come as a great surprise to the leadership of most large foundations, who believe their aim should be, as an American Assembly report several years ago proclaimed, to redress inequality wherever they might find it. To be told, for example, that promoting women's rights in patriarchal countries is simply a way of ameliorating a fundamentally unjust society would strike them as absurd. And it is: Not all social changes need be sweeping ones to be valuable, and some that seem quite small—for example, the investment foundations made in the agricultural research that led to the “Green Revolution,” which developed hazard-resistant crops for Third World countries—may have extraordinary effects, for good or for ill.

Roelofs—and ironically, more than a few foundation executives—would prefer that grant makers were more overtly political in their giving. Indeed, in her eyes, among the forces that have stunted foundations is their embrace of the Progressive-era ideology of change through knowledge and planning, which was at its pinnacle when the archetypal foundations, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, were born. This not only blinded grant makers to the importance of political engagement but also biased them toward the views of educated elites and technocrats, limiting the range of acceptable options (and, not coincidentally, reducing potential disaffection among intellectuals).

But whatever might be said about the consequences, the importance foundations have placed on developing and applying knowledge to public problems also legitimized the role of professional staff and expert consultants in advising donors or their trustees about how to give away their money. As a result, the more interesting question may be not whether foundations serve the interests of the wealthy, as Roelofs argues, but whether they have been used by intellectuals to advance their own interests. In the struggle for cultural hegemony, foundations may more often be the weapon of the educated classes than the moneyed ones.