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Civil society

Social science

Civil society, dense network of groups, communities, networks, and ties that stand between the individual and the modern state.

This modern definition of civil society has become a familiar component of the main strands of contemporary liberal and democratic theorizing. In addition to its descriptive properties, the terminology of civil society carries a litany of ethical and political aspirations and implications. For some of its advocates, the achievement of an independent civil society is a necessary precondition for a healthy democracy, and its relative absence or decline is often cited as both a cause and an effect of various contemporary sociopolitical maladies.

The meaning and implications of the concept of civil society have been widely debated. As an analytical framework for interpreting the social world, the idea that civil society should be understood as, by definition, separated from and opposed to the operations of the state and official public institutions has various disadvantages, not the least of which is that it inhibits appreciation of the complex interrelationships between state and society. Equally, the notion that the hugely diverse group life of Western capitalist societies promotes social values that are separable from, and possibly opposed to, the market is hard to defend. The forms of combination and association that typify civil societies in the West are typically affected and shaped by the ideas, traditions, and values that also obtain in the economic sphere.

Civil society and modernity

Historians of the idea of civil society suggest that these contemporary reservations have their roots in the complex and multifaceted intellectual genealogy of this term and the different modes of thinking that underpin its usage in modern Western thought. Both of the conceptions outlined at the start of this entry stem from a way of thinking about Western modernity that emerged in European thought in the 18th and 19th centuries—specifically, the idea that modern societies can be analyzed in terms of the development of three separate and rival orders: the political, the economic, and the social. Civil society is still invoked by many of its advocates as a synonym for the values of authenticity and belonging, neither of which, it is assumed, can be achieved in politics or economic life.

More generally, the entry of civil society into the language of modern European thought was bound up with the development and spread of liberal doctrines about society and politics. Since the 18th century it appeared in the context of the broadly individualistic, autonomous, and rationalistic understanding of the human personality that liberal thinkers tended to promote. For many liberals, it followed that social order and political obligation can be understood through the analogy of a social contract between ruler and ruled, that the rule of law is a precondition for the liberty of the citizen, and that the achievement of a commercial order requires and bolsters an improvement in the overall character of the interrelationships of citizens. This broad understanding of civil society as both a precondition for and marker of the distinctive trajectory of Western liberal democracy remains the predominant interpretation of it. That is not to suggest that this view is shared or admired by all. Critics observe the differentials of power and resource that characterize relationships within civil society, the apparent inability of liberal thinking to address the fundamental character of some of these inequities, and the skill and willingness of some states to orchestrate and occasionally manipulate civil society organizations for their own ends.

Origins and development

This skepticism about liberal ideas of civil society reflects, and has sustained, diverse conceptions of its meaning and potential; a host of more conservative, as well as more radical, ambitions have also been attached to this term. Indeed, the term civil society has carried a number of different associations in the history of political thought, and its original meaning in Western thinking was rather different from its current protean status. For the Roman author Cicero, societas civilis (itself a translation of Aristotle’s koinonia politike) signaled a political community of a certain scale (usually including more than one city in its compass) that was governed by the rule of law and typified by a degree of urbanity. This kind of community was understood in contrast to noncivilized or barbarian peoples. This conceptual usage was transformed by different European thinkers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, with the result that civil society came to acquire a rather different set of connotations. Here are identified three of the prevalent modes of thinking concerning this term that became established during this period, though this list is far from exhaustive.

A strand of thinking developed in the Enlightenment era in the writings of English figures like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke that presented the social and moral sources of the legitimacy of the state in relation to the idea of civil society. Though internally diverse, this tradition shared an aversion to the idea, widely held in ancient Greek thought, that societies could be characterized according to the character of their political constitution and institutions. Society, however conceived, was prior to and formative of the establishment of political authority.

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A different mode of thinking about civil society, which found its most coherent expression in 19th-century German thought, separated civil society from state in both ethical and analytical terms and regarded the two as separable and perhaps as opposites.

Standing between and partially overlapping with these perspectives, there developed a different, long-lasting conception in the thinking of some of the major theorists of the Scottish political economy tradition of the 18th century, including Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson. In their view, civil society should be conceived as emerging from the intertwined development of an independent commercial order, within which complex chains of interdependence between predominantly self-seeking individuals proliferated, and the development of an independent public sphere, where the common interests of society as a whole could be pursued. The development of the notion of a public that is in possession of its own “opinion” in relation to matters of common concern became an increasingly prevalent way of thinking about civil society, particularly in connection with the emergence of forums and spaces where the free exchange of opinions was observable—newspapers, coffeehouses, political assemblies.

Contemporary political discourse

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The second and third of these strands have been most influential in shaping the thinking of Western theorists since the late 20th century. After a period of relative philosophical disinterest in the term in the middle decades of the 20th century, the terminology of civil society became ubiquitous in political thinking during the 1980s. Many of the ideas of this phase of its intellectual history can be connected to the three traditions previously identified.

The English strand has been powerfully reappropriated in the contemporary period by various neoliberal theorists and ideologues. For them, civil society stands as a synonym for the ideal of the free market accompanied by a constitutionally limited, but powerful, state. This last idea figured powerfully in the idealization of civil society that prevailed in eastern European intellectual circles following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In these settings, civil society signified either the survival (in countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland) of a web of autonomous associations that were independent of the state and that bound citizens together in matters of common concern or a necessary means of achieving the economic prosperity and civil freedoms of Western democracy.

The German strand’s concern with the sources and importance of the ethical ends learned through participation in the corporations of civil society reemerged in the work of a body of American political scientists and theorists who came to view civil society organizations as sources of the stocks of social capital and mutual reciprocity that a successful democracy is supposed to require.

And, third, the Scottish conception was powerfully revived by left-inclined thinkers who hoped to provide a more pluralist, and less statist, reformulation of a socialist ideology that was experiencing a profound political recession among Western publics.

As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor observed, these and other influential ways of thinking about civil society rested upon the twin assumptions that, in empirical terms, independent civil societies did come into existence at various points from the 18th through the 20th century and that their existence depends, in part, upon the separation of the concepts of state and society in the Western political imagination. Neither of these assumptions is uncontentious. While there clearly does exist a plethora of groups, communities, and associations in relative separation from the state, the boundary between state and civil society in many countries is rarely as clear or firm as the first assumption suggests. In various democracies, the state and other public authorities succeeded in incorporating institutions and organizations from civil society—for instance, trade unions, environmental groups, and business associations—into key networks of influence and decision making. Equally, individual groups and even oppositional social movements often expend considerable resources and energy attempting to interact with government officials, elected politicians, and state bureaucracies. The notion that the state–civil society distinction exists in all Western societies therefore requires considerable clarification and qualification in empirical terms.

Likewise, the idea that a fundamental intellectual distinction between state and society underpins the model of liberal democracy begs some rather large questions. Quite different accounts of the distinction and interrelationship between society and the state guided some of the major ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries and sustained clashing theories about politics, sovereignty, and social order. Above all, the idea that a portion of any societal complex should be portioned off, endowed with ethical, even emancipatory, significance, and understood as the fundamental opponent of political authority and institutional life looks increasingly problematic in the early 21st century.

One of the most interesting and contentious manifestations of the terminology of civil society arises from its increasingly common application to non-Western societies. Are supporters of civil society in the West and in newly democratizing states throughout the world talking about the same things when they invoke this term? Can a Western-derived term be usefully employed as a framework for analyzing societies with forms of sociability and state-society relationships that differ markedly from those of the West? Equally, the assumption of some Anglo-American theory that a network of independent associations, cultural practices, and organizations is a necessary feature of a stable democracy is open to considerable doubt when viewed from elsewhere in the world (think, for instance, of East Asian countries that have many of the features of civil societies but are not democratic in their political structures).

During the 1990s, in particular, many authors, politicians, and public authorities keen to find solutions to some of the different kinds of problems facing developing countries seized upon civil society as a kind of panacea. Relatedly, this term became a conceptual mainstay of academic thinking about democratic transitions and a familiar part of the discourse of global institutions, leading nongovernmental organizations, and Western governments. The ideological character and political implications of such ideas have become increasingly clear over time. Such thinking helped sustain various attempts to kick-start civil societies from “above” in different African countries, for example, and simultaneously served to legitimize Western ideas about the kinds of political structure and economic order appropriate for developing states. In philosophical terms, applying civil society in this kind of way raises the profound question of whether it can be removed from its status within the Western political imagination and applied in ways that are appropriate for the indigenous developmental trajectories and political cultures of some of the poorest countries in the world.

It is impossible to divest the notion of civil society of normative connotations. The concept remains powerful, in part, because of its (often unstated) contrastive character. A civil society is typically seen as a superior alternative to a barbarian, natural, despotic, traditional, or premodern societal “other.” This kind of idea constitutes an inexorable part of the term’s appeal within the Western political imagination. The achievement of a dense forest of groups, networks, and organizations that appears to stand beyond the boundaries of the state and outside the reach of the family and clan remains, for many political thinkers, a major part of what makes Western modernity unique and desirable. When examined closely, this generic idea gives way to a host of different kinds of projects, fantasies, and anxieties about politics, society, and the economy.

Since the 1990s, civil society has moved to the centre stage of Western political debate, assuming the character of both the diagnosis for and the solution to the various malaises of Western society—rampant individualism, rising crime, consumerism, and the decline of community, among other maladies. In more philosophical terms, it has held out two different kinds of promise to intellectuals, political actors, and, occasionally, social movements. On one hand, it offers the dream of reconciling some of the major discursive tensions in Western thought—between, for instance, self-interest and the public good, the individual and the community, freedom and social solidarity, and the private and public domains of life. And the second promise, the idea of civil society as a distinct third sector of Western societies (distinct from both the state and the private realm), has come to fire parts of the radical imagination in contemporary ideological debate. In this context it offers the thinly veiled promise of the achievement of a collective emancipation from the constraints, compromises, and disappointments of politics. With a growing awareness of the limitations and dangers of both of these ideas has come a desire to rethink the boundaries of civil society and reconsider which political and moral values it promotes.

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