CIVIL SOCIETY

The term civil society is an elusive and often contradictory abstraction that has been used by various philosophical traditions, and different types of civil societies have existed under a variety of regimes. Civil society may be briefly defined as a web of self-organized voluntary arrangements outside the direct control of the state that structure individual and collective action. A particularly important component of civil society is the public sphere—the domain of civil society that emerged during the Enlightenment, separate from and often antagonistic to the state, where public opinion can be formed. To many twentieth-century theorists, associations constitute the institutional core of the public sphere of civil society. Civil society is understood to be a construct of the educated and propertied classes, or bourgeoisie (bürgerliche Gesellschaft). The public sphere is also usually understood to be bourgeois but, if lacking a basis in private property, it may also be plebeian. Civil society is frequently tied to certain assumptions about individual autonomy that are Western or "liberal." Neo-Tocquevilleans regard civil society as the locus of individual liberty, initiative, and non-state sources of community. The concept is also attractive to the post-Marxist Left as a non–class based locus of grassroots political activity, more welcome than the socialist movement to the participation of marginalized groups, that seeks to influence state policy and democratize the social and political order.

civil society in european thought

Philosophers have imagined civil society as that which something else is not. To ancient political thinkers such as Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) and Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.), civil society was coterminous with the political community (polis, civitas); it was not the family and household. In early modern political thought, civil society was gradually separated from the political community, or state. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) theorized a civil society that protected certain prepolitical natural rights such as equality, freedom, and property. Thus, civil society was not the state of nature. Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723–1790), as well as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), theorized a sphere of human relationships, institutions, and associations of autonomous individuals that satisfied needs and pursued (Enlightened) self-interest through the work and exchange of commercial society. Civil society meant "civilized" society, in contrast to barbarism or "rude" society. Philosophers of the Continental Enlightenment such as Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) regarded the intermediary bodies of civil society as a bulwark against despotism and the abuses of political power and privilege. Civil society also signified a society of civility and religious toleration.

According to Hegel, civil society mediated between the family and the state. For the past two centuries this has been the dominant model. However, Hegel believed that for regulation and ethical guidance, civil society was dependent on the state. Like the Scots before him, Hegel saw a darker side of civil society—a possessive individualism and atomized relationships based on property. This was civil society as understood by Karl Marx (1818–1883)—egoism, individual isolation, disorder, and corruption, a "battlefield" where private interests struggled against each other. Marx reduced civil society to a product of the bourgeoisie and to the market relations of property, labor, and exchange. Marx's revolutionary project was to abolish capitalistic relations and to fuse state and society into one under socialism.

By the mid-nineteenth century, society largely replaced civil society as a concept, an indication that in western Europe propertied and educated men were secure in civil society. In the twentieth century the Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) restored civil society as a conceptual framework. Gramsci detached civil society from the capitalist economy and made the former a contested arena of identity formation and cultural reproduction that mediated between the latter and the state and transmitted a bourgeois ideology, thereby permitting the bourgeoisie to achieve "hegemony."

The model of the public sphere of Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is very close to the civil society of Gramsci and has influenced many historians. Habermas defines the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) of civil society as that space where private people, freed of duties and obligations to the ruler, come together voluntarily as a public to deliberate matters of common concern, voice opinions, and represent interests. It emerged under royal absolutism in the network for communicating information—the institutions and practices of market capitalism, a lively print culture, and new structured urban spaces where propertied men sought sociability, among them the salons, cafés, Masonic lodges, stages, and academies of London and Paris. Yet in the same way that it subjects the state to pressure, the public sphere is used as a vehicle of empowerment by groups, such as women and the propertyless, excluded from participation in civil society.

The usages of the term contain many contradictions. It is frequently unclear what is a condition, or prerequisite, for the existence of civil society, and what is a consequence of its development. It is often used to describe an existing state of affairs, but it may equally describe an ideal. When contrasted with the state, civil society signifies elements of the private world; when contrasted with the family, it signifies the public realm. It can signify an individualistic, amoral, neutral space; yet it is also seen as the site for the formation of civic virtues and community. It may be regarded as the site of property and market relations or as the noncommercial sphere. Civil society and the state may be in relations of harmony or conflict, or both over time within the same polity.

Despite the paradoxes of civil society, historians from a variety of national fields of nineteenth-century Europe use the concept, along with the public sphere, to examine the relationship between society and the state, and in particular society's gradual emancipation from state authority and the prospects for liberal democracy; class, gender and the construction of citizenship; sociability; the pursuit of science and learning; and movements for improvement and reform. The concept of civil society offers a way to study the capacity for individual initiative and the methods by which talent was mobilized for public purposes, civic cooperation, and interest group articulation and representation.

civil society and the state

The relationship between civil society and the state, especially on the Continent, was ambivalent throughout the nineteenth century. Civil society in most of Europe evolved from a state-enabled and often state-guided entity to one dominated by private initiative. Civil society was more likely to grow in scope when it avoided political activities that directly challenged authoritarian states.

In France, different regimes were suspicious of any spontaneous public initiative that might contradict state goals and repressed the intrusion of seemingly harmless associations of private persons into realms, such as religion and politics, considered to be the domain of the state or the established church. From 1810 to 1848 French civil society was highly regulated and, after a brief moment of freedom in 1848, again regulated under the Second Empire. Labor and industrial organizations, benefit societies, and scientific, literary, and artistic associations sprang up anyway in the Third Republic; though not officially authorized, some associations were tolerated and existed in a legal limbo. As the authoritarian state retreated during the second half of the century, the institutions of civil society were able to operate despite government restrictions and scrutiny, although it was not until the law of 1901 (contrat d'associations) that an association could be formed freely without prior authorization. Thus, France provides the example of a statist political culture underlying several regimes—monarchy, empire, republic—that combined tolerance with a high degree of regulation and supervision of civil society.

A similar pattern prevailed among the paternalistic authoritarian states of central Europe. German liberals sought a harmonious collaboration between civil society and the state in many enterprises, such as the provision of charity and the dissemination of new farming techniques. Prussia lacked freedom of association until 1849, and even then the authorities carefully scrutinized civil society; freedom of association was not granted until 1908. Because the German states prevented organized society from participating in political matters, seemingly innocuous activities acquired political implications; what began as collaboration and deference by the 1840s increasingly became confrontation and rebellion against authoritarian rule.

By creating and framing public opinion, exposing abuses of power and privilege, and making accountable the actions of officials, emerging European civil societies became breeding grounds for democratization. Clubs, reading societies, and cultural and patriotic groups along with universities and the press were basic building blocks of liberal political culture. But the institutional guarantors of civil society canonized in Western political thought—freedom from personal dependence and arbitrary domination, inviolability of person and domicile, the rule of law, civil rights, and a parliament or assembly of the estates—were present in only a few polities of western Europe and North America. States everywhere put up resistance to democratization, and the capacity of civil society to democratize the political order and state institutions varied greatly. This capacity was greatest in Great Britain, where civil society was strong, monarchical power was limited, and political society—that is, political movements and parties, parliamentary institutions, and elections (highly contested terrain between civil society and the state)—had already successfully claimed to represent the nation.

In southern, central, and eastern Europe, civil society offered a substitute for a highly controlled or denied popular representation. The public sphere of an emerging civil society was the site of individual and group assertion of rights against authoritarian regimes unwilling to recognize institutional limitations to their power. But the effort to create civil society was coterminous with the struggle for representation in political society, making the strength of the former and the democratization of the latter problematic. In many parts of Europe, civil society failed to create or secure democracy because of state resistance; fragile, fragmented, and polarized political institutions; and the character and dynamics of civil society itself. Low levels of urbanization and literacy, ruling oligarchies, the power of local notables and patronage networks, and low participation in public affairs were reasons for unsuccessful democratization, especially in southern Europe. In central and eastern Europe, institutions of civil society were divided along class and confessional lines and could not work toward consensus building. Although civic activism intensified throughout Europe, so too did political polarization.

civil society, class, and gender

Historians and social theorists of both liberal and Marxist persuasions have long postulated a link between the institutions of civil society and the middle class. In a venerable liberal sociological narrative, market capitalism and the bourgeoisie are the preconditions for civil society, the public sphere, and successful liberal democratic states. In the Marxist narrative the bourgeoisie carries out its historical mission by wresting economic and political power away from the landed aristocracy, thus effecting the "bourgeois" revolution. In much late-twentieth-century work, inspired by Gramsci, culture trumps capital, identities trump income, and values trump vocation. From this perspective, the hierarchies of value in civil society, commonly attributed to the bourgeoisie, were articulated through voluntary associations by a wide spectrum of liberal landowners, professionals, and government officials; the key markers are not class but education, urbanization, and sensibility.

Gender was also a factor in the formation of civil society and the public sphere. Reason, civil rights, property ownership, and the ability to judge and represent others in civil society corresponded discursively to the capacities of men, while the private sphere of nature, passion, and dependence corresponded to the capacities of women. Nineteenth-century civil societies were considered to be associations of free men, and insofar as most women—and many men, as well—were not legally free in their person, property, or labor, they were not considered fit for membership and were relegated to the private world of the household economy and family. Gender analysis provides an insight into the way in which the disenfranchised could and did enter the public realm despite exclusionary laws or practices. Especially in Great Britain, but also later in France and Germany and even Russia, women could join philanthropic, moral, and reform societies.

science and sociability

Inspired by Habermas, many historians have noted the significance of new forms of sociability that mushroomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A variety of new settings, including literary clubs and societies of science and philosophy, nurtured new forms of sociability that stressed reciprocal and egalitarian Communication. Beginning in the eighteenth century Continental monarchs enabled, if not created, the institutions of civil society to encourage and patronize scientific, charitable, and cultural activities that could further national progress and demonstrate their "enlightened" reigns. In the nineteenth century, associations as well as other components of civil society aspired to assist and advise states in the collection of knowledge and in the improvement of the natural and human world for the public benefit. Despite the fact that on the European continent associations required government permission, tens of thousands of associations existed by the end of the nineteenth century. By providing new models of moral and cultural authority, science enlarged the space of a secular climate of opinion. Such institutions offered new forms of sociability, self-definition, and private initiative. In this way, scientific and learned societies enabled men to display distinction and gain recognition from others in civil society for their experience, talent, expertise, self-mastery, cultural stewardship, and civic leadership.

Civil society was the locus of movements of individual and social reform, especially efforts to provide education, to promote self-improvement and rational leisure as well as a thirst for positive knowledge, and to mobilize a public for reform causes. In this way, the poor, for example, could be removed from the state of nature in which they were commonly regarded as living and enter civil society. Private initiative founded associations to promote technological development and economic growth; to improve public health; to found public libraries and museums; to organize national congresses, public lectures, and scientific demonstrations; and to pursue sport and recreation. Major cities were the sites of an unofficial art public, a network of private persons outside state art academies that cooperated to patronize, produce, distribute, evaluate, and consume works and performances of art. Physicians, teachers, engineers, and lawyers, among others, developed in civil society a professional consciousness and fashioned a new ideal of public service. In this process, while men of science undoubtedly acted for personal and professional interests, they also claimed to represent the public or the nation.

conclusions

Theories of civil society rarely provide a perfect fit to the historical experience. Most theories of civil society presuppose the existence of civil rights guaranteed by a state based on law; likewise, the public sphere requires a certain degree of publicity regarding affairs of state and of access to the public arena. By these criteria, only a few polities of western Europe have spawned robust civil societies. Elsewhere, notably in southern, central, and eastern Europe, the development of civil society was more contested.

The growth of civil society presumes the autonomy of the self-directed individual—the propertied nineteenth-century man. But civil society was also the site of internal conflict, as marginalized groups struggled for their own autonomy. The institutional core of civil society constituted by voluntary associations frequently preceded constitutions and representative bodies. The growth of civil society challenged the habit of authorities to demarcate "separate spheres," to borrow a term from gender history, of the state and of private life. By compelling the state to legitimate itself before public opinion, a voluntarily constituted, self-organized civil society acted as a counterweight to authority based on tradition, force, and ritual.

See alsoAssociations, Voluntary.

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Joseph Bradley