Rediscovering ‘ civil society’
Aradio reporter in New Orleans said on the air two weeks ago that there was “a complete breakdown of civil society” in the city. Since then, comment on civil society and Hurricane Katrina has proliferated, most conspicuously in George Will’s column in Newsweek on Sept. 12, which drew on Thomas Hobbes’s account of the state of nature. And a think-tank scholar said on Townhall.com,“Rebuilding the civil society of the Big Easy will require just as much effort” as rebuilding the city’s infrastructure.
I am impressed by such faithful usage of the phrase “ civil society,” because, in the past 15 years or so, people have often spoken and written as if its definition were “NGOs, collectively.” For example, a Christian Science Monitor op-ed this month said, “ These are the forces of civil society — community groups, trade associations, labor unions, churches, and other voluntary associations in the non-profit sector.”
Civil society was not always a swarm of non-governmental organizations. When it first appeared as a Latin translation of a phrase in Aristotle’s “civil society” emphatically included government.
The shift began when John Locke wrote to prepare the way for the British revolution of 1688 (the one called “Glorious” with a capital G).
Government could be dissolved, Locke taught, but civil society could still survive to set up a new regime. In this way he pried the concept loose from what we now call “the state.” By “ civil society,” he meant more or less what we mean by “society.”
After that, 18th-century thinkers made much use of the phrase, notably two Scots, Adam Ferguson and his student Adam Smith. Under their influence, G. W.F. Hegel, in the early 1800s, wrote of “civil society,” meaning the whole region of human activity that lies between family life and the state. “Civil society is the battlefield where everyone’s individual private interest meets everyone else’s,” he said (clearly ranging far beyond “the nonprofit sector”). In one enthusiastic passage, he called it “the territory of mediation where there is free play for every idiosyncrasy, every talent, every accident of birth and fortune, and where waves of every passion gush forth, regulated only by reason glinting through them.”
More prosaically, Hegel included trade associations among the leading features of civil society. This is the source for the recent, over-specific usage; for us, “civil society” has come to mean all voluntary associations as a group — but especially those that try to influence government and politics.
Karl Marx went further than Hegel, saying, “Civil society is the true source and theatre of all history,” though historians had busied themselves with the “highsounding dramas of princes and states”; in other words, politics disguises the “real relationships.” Not that Marx praised civil society; he thought it was a mere precursor to the “human society” of the future.
“Civil society” went into partial eclipse for a century or so. Its revival was beautifully summarized by Michael Ignatieff, in
magazine in 1995: “ When the dissident East European intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s were trying to imagine what kind of community they wanted in place of communism, they turned back to the concept of civil society, an archaic term rooted so far back in the Enlightenment that most West European intellectuals had forgotten its meaning. Instinctively, however, East Europeans knew what it meant: the kind of place where you do not change the street signs every time you change the regime.”
The dissidents were not only thinking of life after communism; they were also trying to evade the state with communities of their own, as if to ignore it.
The concept has suffered from its new success. People who form or join choirs, amateur rock groups and hockey teams, reading groups, knitting circles, religious sects and neighbourhood residents’ associations are not usually trying to reshape whole societies, and do not apply for grants, for example, from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. With the widespread talk of civil society, the waves of passion Hegel wrote about are gushing less spontaneously.
But some columnists and bloggers writing this month have got back to the fuller, richer concept. “Marriage is the cornerstone of civil society,” said one, à propos of New Orleanian single parenthood. “Government has a role to play,” said another, about emergency preparedness and disaster relief, “but civil society — which means you and me — can be far more effective.”