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Civil Society
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
| By:
Marlies Glasius |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In the social sciences, the term 'civil society' has become almost as fashionable a buzzword as 'globalization'. However, nothing resembling a commonly agreed definition of this concept exists. Even that offered by the Centre for Civil Society based at the London School of Economics is controversial: 'Civil society refers to the set of institutions, organisations and behaviours situated between the state, the business world, and the family'. Some thinkers believe family life is part of civil society, while others believe that the business world should be included. Such debates may never be resolved by a single definition. In this feature, Marlies Glasius, lecturer at the Centre for Civil Society, traces the history of the concept 'civil society', and discovers that these disagreements are rooted in the very foundations of the idea. |
 he term 'civil society' has direct equivalents in Latin and Greek. What the Romans and Greeks meant by it was something like a 'political society', with active citizens shaping its institutions and policies. This also very clearly implied that, both in time and in place, there are people excluded--non-citizens, barbarians--who do not have a civil society. The term is occasionally used throughout European history, but it gains more prominence in the eighteenth century. Its most serious treatment is by the Scotsman Adam Ferguson, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society. What Ferguson tried to do with this book, in a society where capitalism was taking the place of feudalism, was to resurrect the Roman ideal of civic virtue. In order to have a civil society, men (not women, of course, in that age) needed to take an active interest in the government of their polity, instead of simply accumulating wealth and diverting themselves. That still has some resonance in the present use of the term. But the dividing line for Ferguson and his contemporaries was between civil society on the one hand, and despotism or 'savage' living on the other. |
Thus, there are already two connected, but slightly different, notions of 'civil'. Under the influence of Thomas Hobbes' classic work Leviathan (1651), it was generally thought that in primitive societies, men were constantly competing and trying to kill each other over food, possessions or women. It was thought that 'savages' had no forms of social organisation. (Ferguson, by the way, was more sophisticated than many of his contemporaries, recognising that mankind had always lived in groups.) Being part of a civil society, on the other hand, meant that you interact with fellow-human beings in more complex ways, and that you do not normally commit violence against other members. A problem with the modern use of 'civil society' is that we might want to preserve the connotation of non-violent interaction while we disavow the Euro-centric assumption of savages versus civilised people, but the two are historically connected. |
Hegel: civil society versus the state
Ferguson was widely translated, and made more of an impression in Germany than in Britain. The philosophers Kant and Hegel were among the readers. Hegel has a great deal to say about civil society, not all of which is easily understandable, but one of the most important points for the further development of the concept is that he saw civil society as something separate from, although symbiotic with, the state. Civil society for Hegel meant men trading and interacting socially, but it was separate from government and law. This also explains why Karl Marx, strongly influenced by Hegel, had a very negative view of civil society. He saw it in its German translation, Buergerliche Gesellschaft, as bourgeois society, and narrowed it to only economic life in which everyone pursues his own interests, becomes alienated, etc. If that had remained the prevailing idea about what civil society is, we would not be talking about it today. |
From Gramsci onwards: civil society between the state and the market
The concept was rescued for modern use by Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a member of the Italian parliament, and general secretary of the underground Italian Communist party when he was arrested by Mussolini in 1926 at the age of 35. He spent the next ten years in prison, writing. In his Prison Notebooks, he discusses civil society,offering an interpretation which goes back from Marx to Hegel, who saw civil society in all sorts of social interactions, not just in economics. Gramsci went a step further, and divorced the notion of civil society from economic interactions. He said that civil society consists of cultural institutions, notably the church (growing up in Italy, the church rather obviously gets in the way of a purely economic, Marxist view of society), but also schools, associations, trade unions and other cultural institutions. |
Gramsci was ambiguous about this civil society of his. On the one hand, it is through this 'cultural superstructure' that the bourgeois class imposes its hegemony, using it to keep the working class in its place. On the other hand, it is a kind of wedge between the state and the class-structured economy, which has the revolutionary potential of dislodging the bourgeoisie. |
So here one has the first germs of the idea that most people now have of civil society as 'between the state and the market'. Eventually, Gramsci thought, once there had been the revolution and society had entered the phase of communism, distinctions between the state, the economy and civil society would wither away, just like distinctions between self-interest and communal interest, but in the meantime, civil society could be used to work towards the revolution. |
The rediscovery of civil society
Now none of this argument is stated very clearly in Gramsci. It is stated very confusingly, is self-contradictory, and certainly not as one of his central theses. It seems almost like a miracle that Gramsci's idea of civil society as the non-state and non-economic part of social interaction, which he meant to be just temporary and strategic, has become the dominant one. There are a few related explanations. The term civil society very nearly died out in West European and American political thought. The nineteenth-century French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville used it, there were some followers of Gramsci (notably Althusser, Anderson and Bobbiol) who did likewise, and the American sociologist Talcott Parsons picked it up again in the 1960s, but there was little debate or interest. The term really resurfaced with dissidents against the authoritarian state both in Latin-America and in Eastern Europe for whom the idea of civil society as something separate from the state was strategically useful. Gramsci was a revolutionary hero with a Che Guevara-like status for people of the Left, and his prison diaries were widely read and very influential. So despite the fact that it is almost hidden in the text, his idea of resisting the state and the economy through permeating civil society was picked up in both places. |
In Latin America, the situation of the dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s was very similar to Gramsci's. They fought fascist dictatorships, where capitalists were, by and large, colluding with the state in a Catholic culture where the church could be both an instrument of hegemony and a realm of subversion. With the Central Europeans, however, it was somewhat different. It might seem rather strange that they used the thinking of a Marxist icon to voice their opposition to the communist regimes, but intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were deeply steeped in Marxist lore. Moreover, in a totalitarian state, where the distinction between the interests of the people and the interests of the state was categorically denied (hence people's republics), they began to believe that conceiving a 'civil society'--as association between people away from the tentacles of the state--was the way to begin resisting the state. |
After events in Latin America and Central Europe came to a head, the idea of civil society began to catch on like wildfire. People have apparently felt the usefulness of the concept particularly in dictatorships, or countries emerging out of dictatorship, such as in the Philippines and South Korea, South Africa, and the Arab world. It has become equally popular, however, in places that have not recently experienced dictatorship, such as Western Europe and North America, but also, for instance, in India. In Western Europe and North America this has something to do with concern over the erosion of democracy through the apathy and disillusionment of the electorate. The civil society idea was seen as a way of revitalising democracy. It was clear that fewer people were joining political parties, and more of them joining environmental, peace and human rights groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and Amnesty International. The name increasingly given to this phenomenon is 'civil society'. Both the Leftist great hopes of the all-powerful, all-providing state, and the rightist belief that economic growth alone will bring benefit to all, have lost appeal, so along with the 'Third Way', we may be seeing a third hope in civil society. For the developing world, there is also a rather more cynical explanation: since donors have adopted the dogma that strengthening civil society is good for development, using the language of civil society is good for funding applications. |
Empirical and normative conceptions
One thing that helps to explain the present universal popularity of civil society is its very fuzziness--it can be all things to all people. In particular, there is a conflation of an empirical category--often referred to as the voluntary or non-profit sector--with a political project. In the first meaning, it is simply a label for something that is out there, or a category that is both non-profit and non-governmental. On the other hand, in the way the Central Europeans and Latin Americans were using the term, it is more a political project, or a sphere through which to resist, pressure or influence the state, and increasingly also the market. |
This ideal type can have various characteristics, all of which are hotly debated. First, it is argued that the fact that people are getting together regularly for a variety of purposes, from playing cards to saving the environment, generates trust between people in a society. This is also referred to as 'social capital'. More politically minded proponents usually insist (like Adam Ferguson) that civil society consists of active citizens, who take an interest in public affairs. Also based partly on the classical, eighteenth-century notion, civil society is seen as essentially non-violent, and resisting violence, for instance, through Gandhian forms of civil disobedience. Finally, and this is a more modern component of the ideal, being part of civil society is sometimes seen as a commitment to common human values that go beyond ethnic, religious or national boundaries. |
This goes quite against Ferguson, for whom defining civil society was part of building the concept of the nation-state. But for those dissidents in the 1980s it was strategically necessary to link up with others across borders, those who could speak up for them in international forums. Environmental groups have also stressed the transnational or perhaps even global nature of their activism, but for a slightly different reason. For them, the problems are global. One Chernobyl, or one state's misbehaviour on CO2 emissions, affects us all. The newer anti-capitalist movement has taken the same tack. In fact, one of their slogans is 'globalise the resistance'. In the 1990s, that deliberate transnationality also took on more than a strategic meaning and became a moral-political statement against ethnic nationalism. Some people have begun to refer to this idea of civil society as 'transnational civil society' or 'global civil society'. |
The problem with a purely normative definition of civil society is, however, that defending civil society as a 'good thing'--which these people do--becomes tautological: 'civil society is a good thing, because it espouses the values we hold. Anyone who fails to hold these values, is not part of civil society'. And whose values, anyway? The desirability of absolute non-violence, for instance, is not something about which everyone agrees. |
Is civil society a good thing?
A middle ground between these two conceptions could be to conceive of civil society as an empirical category with normative traits. Both a bridge club and a human-rights group would then be part of civil society, because they are non-governmental and non-profit. One may think that the human-rights group is a more important part of the political project. However, the bridge club, too, may generate social capital, and in a totalitarian society, it too may have a subversive edge because its existence means that citizens are getting together for reasons other than for the greater glory of the state. Something of this kind seems to be happening in China, for instance, where the self-conscious, pro-democracy movement was almost destroyed, and now a purportedly apolitical meditation-and-yoga group, the Falun Gong, is emerging as the main challenge to the authoritarian state. |
This kind of conception would appreciate that civil society contains elements of public-spiritedness, social trust, non-violence and tolerance. Unlike the purely normative conception, however, it would not exclude self-interested, narrow-minded, violent and fanatical manifestations of social interaction from civil society. It would recognise that these groups also exist, and move in the same sphere, as the 'nice' groups. |
If one wishes to advocate civil society as a 'good thing', one must either simplistically exclude from it everything that is disagreeable, or show, empirically or by way of reasoning, that there is somehow more good than bad in this 'non-governmental, non-profit' category. Whether civil society is a 'good thing', and how this can be demonstrated to be the case, will be one of the most interesting debates in the social sciences in the coming years. |
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