Civil Society: Europe and the United States

An ancient term of Western political and social theory, civil society has enjoyed enormous popularity in recent years and has outstripped its geographic origins to spread all over the world. Public leaders, newspaper writers, religious figures, social theorists, political activists, and commentators from many different perspectives now use the term on a regular basis. The term's meaning has shifted dramatically over the centuries, and different historical periods have understood it in distinct ways.

Three distinct usages can be delineated. Civil society first appears in classical Greek and Roman thought, which considered it to be synonymous with a politically organized commonwealth—a view that was modified by the medieval church's distaste for purely political categories and came to describe a society organized around the primacy of religion. As powerful markets and centralized states began to erode medieval institutions, a second, and characteristically modern, liberal understanding arose that conceived of civil society as the arena of economic relations and institutions. Frightened by the consequences of the French Revolution and the advent of mass political activity, a third conception developed during the middle of the nineteenth century to describe civil society as a sphere of voluntary intermediate organizations that stand between the state and the citizen. Pioneered by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), this is the way civil society is understood in contemporary usage. Although chronologically distinct, each of these understandings contributes important insights to political and social life and sheds light on contemporary issues of democracy and equality.

Political and Religious Commonwealths

When Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) equated civil society with a politically constituted commonwealth, he expressed a powerful tendency to understand "civility" as the requirements of citizenship. His effort represented the most complete development of classical thinking about civil society. Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 b.c.e.) had attempted to articulate an invariant ethical center for public life, an effort that Aristotle (c. 384–322 b.c.e.) tried to correct by recognizing that people live their lives in different spheres and in multiple associations. Aristotle's respect for variation and distinction underlay a political theory that understood civil society as a moral-political association that improved the life of its citizens, but the Roman recognition of a legally protected private realm made it possible to equate civil society with republican virtues and political life. Imperial collapse led to St. Augustine of Hippo's (354–430 c.e.) devastating attack on the classical tradition's effort to organize a self-reliant public sphere, but Christian insistence that civil society could be understood only in terms of the requirements of faith and church made it difficult to organize human affairs with such depraved material as fallen man. St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) was more willing than Augustine to recognize that politics could sustain a measure of moral action and constitute civil society, but the corrosive effects of markets and the pressure of centralizing kings brought the first period of theorizing to a halt.

Markets, Individuals, and Interests

Niccolò Machiavelli's (1469–1527) rediscovery of classical republicanism and Thomas Hobbes's (1588–1679) insistence that only a single point of sovereign power could protect the calculating individual and his interests pointed the way toward a fully modern conception of civil society. It was not long before those interests became expressed as property, production, and acquisition. John Locke's (1632–1704) civil society was made possible by the sovereign power of states, but it was really the pursuit of private interest that made political liberty worthwhile. Locke's clear preference for economic activity anchored many later conceptions, and Adam Smith (1723–1790) articulated the first fully bourgeois theory of civil society as a sphere of production and competition that was driven by the self-interested calculations of isolated individuals. The state played an organizing and protecting role, but Smith's conviction that economic processes could organize social life expressed liberalism's suspicion of centralized political power and its assumption that civil society is constituted by the market. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) would try to infuse civil society—now equated with "civilization"—with solidarity and moral purpose, but it was plain that this tradition of thought understood civil society as a law-governed sphere where property, civil liberties, and political equality would enable self-serving individuals to make private decisions in conditions of freedom and security. If the classical view of civil society had been shaped by the ancient traditions of civil republicanism and came to an end with the fall of the Roman Empire, the second view was clearly related to the early framework of capitalism. Karl Marx's (1818–1883) desire to overcome civil society's foundation in the class relations of bourgeois society looked to a socialist state to democratize civil society itself and seemed to recapture a moment of the classical heritage. It also shed light on an important weakness in liberal theory by calling for democratic supervision of civil society's chaos and instability.

Intermediate Associations and the State

Drawing on Aristotle, Cicero, and Machiavelli for the theory of the mixed constitution, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) located intermediate bodies at the heart of his aristocratic theory of civil society. His fear of royal power fed Edmund Burke's (1729–1797) defense of local privilege against the leveling and centralizing French Revolution, but it was Tocqueville's claim that voluntary activity connected individualistic, self-serving Americans to the common good that proved particularly powerful. Tocqueville's insight has fed most of the contemporary interest in civil society, in large measure because of his desire to limit the thrust of the democratic state by preserving local freedom, protecting pockets of local privilege, and nurturing traditions of self-organization. His assumption of widespread equality of condition meant that he did not have to examine how inequality and voluntary activity might reinforce one another—a matter that has become vitally important, given contemporary economic and political trends. Nevertheless, powerful American traditions of suspicion of the state and a history of local volunteerism have all but guaranteed that Tocqueville finds a ready audience in this country—particularly in politically conservative periods.

Contemporary Issues

Interest in civil society was largely confined to academic circles until the early 1980s, when dissident Polish intellectuals and journalists began talking of "the rebellion of civil society against the state." It wasn't long before an influential body of Eastern European thought began to understand civil society as constitutional republics and intermediate associations. As Soviet-style socialism continued to be hostile to almost all spontaneous social initiatives, it made sense that dissidents would be interested in limiting state power and would be indifferent to the market's threat to freedom and equality. But their sunny optimism would soon fade away. As the East European civic forums, underground newspapers, student leagues, "flying universities," and other groupings began to yield to the logic of economics and the imperatives of politics, it became practically and theoretically imperative to understand how civil society can serve democracy in conditions of powerful markets and bureaucratized states. Voluntary organizations and social movements have contributed to freedom and equality in important ways, but the naive assumption that they constitute a democratic sphere of action in their own right has begun to yield to more sober questions of how local voluntary activity can serve democracy in an environment that is constituted by widening inequality and dominated by large, powerful institutions. It is important to understand how the local and the small can serve freedom and democracy with, not against, the universal and the large. Further intellectual and practical activity will be compelled to investigate how inequality and bureaucracy affect the ability to organize on the one hand, and how local activity can mitigate the effects of inequality and hold political structures to account on the other.

See also Citizenship ; Democracy ; Equality ; Society .

bibliography

Eberly, Don E., ed. The Essential Civil Society Reader: Classic Essays in the American Civil Society Debate. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.

Ehrenberg, John. Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Seligman, Adam. The Idea of Civil Society. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Skocpol, Theda, and Morris P. Fiorina, eds. Civic Engagement in American Democracy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

John Ehrenberg