We have, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1996: 212) put it, ‘a mania for spying on the morals of others’. This emerges in various ways: from judging the social welfare recipient who dares to own a television, to criticising the millionaire footballer who decides to buy some household products from a pound shop. And we judge people's charity, all the time. Some people give nothing to charity, feel no remorse when walking past someone begging on the street, and see no reason to look out for elderly neighbours. Society judges these people as cruel, heartless and lacking the inner happiness that comes from empathetic action. And at the same time we judge those who do an enormous amount that is charitable, dismissing them as ‘mugs’ for allowing themselves to be walked over. Or we look at the billion-dollar donations of the mega-rich as merely a way of ingratiating themselves into celebrity and political hierarchies, drawing admiring fawning as a cover for their tax avoidance. Some of these observations may be fair, others not: the point is that they will continue to take place whether we point them out or not, whether accurate or not, the quick moral judgement a long-established part of human nature.

This book is a sociology of charity. Charity is a subject largely untouched by modern sociologists (with some notable exceptions, which will be discussed throughout), often left instead to the policy analysts who seek to understand the logic of charities, their management, their delivery of services, their resourcing. Charities, the non-profit bodies themselves, are fascinating organisations, vital for understanding how modern society is organised and how we address our desire to improve it. But in focusing mainly on charity and not on charities, I want to re-examine that more ephemeral notion, and bring a new theoretical lens to how charity operates and works in modern society. This includes a desire to focus on the social reaction to acts of charity, and how that reaction plays out in the internal monologue of the charitable individual.