This article offers a new framework for understanding the role that nonprofit organizations play in American life. Popular sentiment and contemporary nonprofit theory suggest that nonprofits hold a special purpose: They provide assistance when the typical functioning of the economic and political institutions fails. Drawing on the critical perspective afforded by genealogy and on Foucault’s writings on government and liberalism, this article proposes an alternative reading of the development of the nonprofit sector. This alternate history suggests that the nonprofit sector and the contemporary theory that underpins it function as a part of a dispositif, the aim of which is to perpetuate the discourses associated with neoliberalism.
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