A version of this thinking has long guided conservative political philanthropists, whose distaste for government has not blinded them to the value of influencing it, and whose money helped create an entire infrastructure of research organizations in Washington in the 1980s and ’90s dedicated to shrinking government. In the last decade or so, it has also become received wisdom on the political left, as some major liberal donors began to shift money out of traditional charity and into political advocacy.

Increasingly, the same spirit is animating some of the largest philanthropies in the country. After early experiments with directly financing new experimental schools around the country, for example, some of the biggest advocates for charter schools, including the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation of Eli and Edythe Broad, shifted gears several years ago and began pouring billions of dollars into advocacy at the federal, state and local levels. One result: The Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” grant program, whose rules prohibited states from limiting the number of charter schools.

Of course, depending on the beholder, such philanthropy can seem either extraordinarily benevolent or extraordinarily undemocratic. The education scholar Diane Ravitch, in her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” criticized the charter advocates as a “billionaire boys’ club,” exerting enormous influence over education policy with little accountability.

“It’s sort of influence-peddling writ large,” said Richard L. Brodsky, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning research organization Demos and a former New York State assemblyman. “The notion that the society is better served by the super-rich exercising their charitable instincts is in the end anti-democratic.”

A middle path may be suggested by two other recent philanthropic efforts. Last fall, Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, volunteered to contribute $100 million in seed money to Newark’s troubled public schools. The city hopes to match this with other private money in an effort that would pump about $200 million over five years into a school system with an annual budget of about a billion dollars. And in August, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York said he would pump $30 million of his own fortune into initiatives aimed at helping young black and Hispanic men, matched by $30 million from a fellow billionaire, George Soros, and about $68 million in city funds.

The new effort, dubbed the Young Men’s Initiative, will funnel money through an array of programs, from social services to alternatives to incarceration for juvenile offenders, that affect a group of New Yorkers who are disproportionately incarcerated and unemployed. How the money is spent will be determined by government.