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Philanthropy stands as a social and political organization. Formerly European, it has been developed on an unprecedented scale in the United States. The French state has long contained intermediary organizations, whose private interests rose suspicion as they threatened to weaken the state’s monopoly in the production of the general interest. France and the United States are traditionally opposed as far as conceptions of state, religion and democracy are concerned. This review article proposes to nuance these sociological dynamics. It shows that in both countries, philanthropy was the product of social and political dissent. The profound transformations of these societies over the course of the nineteenth century called for the creation of a political economy. Americans addressed urbanization by developing moral and scientific philanthropic organizations. In France, the central administration concentrated the production of this knowledge for action by controlling the foundations more than by annihilating them. Philanthropy appears as a genuine democratic industry in the US, as it materializes as a civic involvement relatively disconnected from politics. The French tend to assimilate civil and political action; hence a non?democratic perception of philanthropic initiatives. This historical resistance has been dwindling for the past 30?years, and more recently with local authorities being made eligible for philanthropic donations.