CIVIL SOCIETY

Guido Hausmann and Manfred Hettling

The end of the cold war has signaled—for the time being—the end of one of the grand utopias of the nineteenth century. Although communist ideology in its many variations eroded before the end of the cold war, its demise accompanied as well as resulted from the end of utopianism. Beginning in the 1970s intellectuals from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and other states in the former East bloc proclaimed "civil society" as a new "political program," not as a utopia. Herein lies a cause for the post-cold-war attraction all over Europe of the "civil society" model of social organization. This social organization, rooted in European antiquity and the Catholic Middle Ages but also distinctly influenced by the Reformation, contains many local, regional, and national shadings. Variations of civil society emerged in eighteenth-century Europe and North America and spread to other communities.

THE TERM "CIVIL SOCIETY"

The various terms for civil society indicate the various traditions out of which it grew. Examples include the German bürgerliche Gesellschaft, the French société civile, the Anglo-American "civil society," the Italian civile condizione, and the Russian burzhuaznoe/grazhdankoe obshchestvo. Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century like Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in France; David Hume (1711–1776) and John Locke (1632–1704) in England; and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in Germany defined the essential attributes of civil society. Among these were the idea of contractual relationships, the reduction of religion to a private conviction, individual human rights, and political freedoms.

In the ancient tradition descending from Aristotle, the term societas civilis, or civil society, always designated a political society—that is, a community of citizens bound together in a governing political bond as free and equal participants. A later tradition of the term originated in the early nineteenth century and was related to the emancipation of the newly risen middle classes from the feudal social order. The term "civil society" designated a society of private individuals distinguished by their ownership of property: in this more modern understanding of "civil society," the term does not include the notion of political participation. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) declared, civil society and the state stand in opposition to each other. In the Anglo-American tradition, the ancient understanding of the term prevailed. Here civil society remained connected to political participation—ever a predominant theme—whereas the two were separate on the European continent for a long time. Use of the term since the late twentieth century calls for the ancient bond linking the self-organization of citizens for their economic benefit with political participation and seeks to overcome the separation of apolitical civil society from the politics of the state.

The various traditions of the concept share the designation of a self-organizing society; they differ in how much this community participates in the political rule of the state. The claim to a political voice did not necessarily call into question the legitimacy of traditional monarchies. Such a claim could lead to the antimonarchical, revolutionary pathos of post-1789 France, but the outcome could also be a long-lasting, highly stable monarchy—if such a monarchy accepted its transformation into a political institution that represented only the common political goals of civil society. In the German-speaking world the tradition stemming from Hegel and Karl Marx (1818–1883), which defined civil society as a philosophical and ideological category, continued to exercise significant influence; this tradition held an apolitical understanding of the concept and called for a relatively strict division of state and society. A stronger reception of Anglo-American contract theory first arrived in (West) Germany after 1945.

The cornerstone of civil society was the self-organizing individual who had the right to bond with others in free associations. The individual citizen was defined as free from religious rule and as entitled to participate in political institutions by virtue of being an individual. In the Anglo-American states the right and natural freedom of the individual was of primary importance. This idea grew out of the Protestant tradition that made religious freedom an individual's indivisible right. This tradition interpreted religious freedom not as the result of tolerance—an instance of grace by the state—but as an inalienable human right, one that preceded the actions of any social institution. In the French tradition a concept of human rights prevailed that protected the individual from the state: freedom is understood as the restriction of potential state interference. No effective Russian tradition of individual rights ever developed. Unlike in Poland, no trace of the Renaissance, of humanism, or of the Reformation left its mark in Muscovite Russia. Only in the eighteenth century, Scottish, English, French, and—transmitted through East Prussia and the Baltic—German sources spread the European concept of freedom. However, alongside the ideas that asserted the primacy of individual rights were the equally lasting European concepts that projected individual freedoms onto the collective—the nation, state, or monarchy. These fit into a wholly different tradition.

The German Enlightenment tradition mixed different interpretations of the individual. Kant's model of civil society described the individual in various functions and social conditions. In Kant's view the legal foundation for civil society lay in the following principles: the freedom of every member of society based on his or her being "human"; the equality of members as "subjects"; and members' independence as "citizens." As a human being, anyone has the right to pursue happiness in his or her own way. As a subject everyone has to follow the law. As a citizen, anyone is a "lawmaker"; that is, he or she participates in the formation of the political will of society (or, in the parlance of American pragmatism, he or she will make the decisions that directly influence others). Freedom is conferred on all people, and at the same time every person—whether man or woman, rich or poor, aristocratic or bourgeois—is bound to obey the law. For Kant, restrictions on these universal proclamations and decrees came only with a final distinction, the "quality" of citizens. With this addendum, Kant articulated what was and is contained in all concepts of civil society, that not all people, but only those who meet certain prerequisites, gain a political say. Since Kant, the criteria for the exclusion of individual groups have fundamentally changed. Estate privileges (aristocracy), legal categories (patriciate, citizen status), economic requirements (property), and sex (the exclusion of women) no longer set limits to participation. As before, however, there still exist restrictions based on age, capacity for rational choice, criminal record, and national citizenship.

Equality only prevails within these social restrictions; only those people selected by these filters can form through their associations the core social element of any civil society. Association is the complementary concept to civil society. Whereas Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in Leviathan (1651) placed the individual under the absolute sovereignty of the state in order to prevent civil war between individuals, all theorists of civil society—Locke in England, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) in France, Kant in Germany—have identified its uniqueness as the ability of persons to freely form associations among themselves in order to support one another and to regulate social life. The American pragmatism of John Dewey (1859–1952) also stands in this tradition.

Associations in civil society differ in principle from earlier forms of association in that the individual's identity is only partially defined by his or her participation in such groups. Associations and face-to-face communication exist in all societies; even totalitarianism could not do away with them. The aspect of association specific to civil society is based on functional differentiation: people participate only with a part of themselves; thus many different kinds of social circles can join together resulting in infinitely variable possibilities for interaction. The paradox is this: by limiting the common bond within associations, civil society makes an infinite variety of associations possible. Herein lies the tense relationship between particularity and universality that defines the dynamic of civil society.

Two decisive transformations have taken place in civil society since the eighteenth century: women gained the right to political participation in the twentieth century, and economic status is no longer a criterion for such participation. With these changes a central component of any conception of civil society as it had existed from the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century also changed: political decision making was no longer the exclusive domain of men with property. Every society contained different expressions of this same phenomenon. In England political exclusion based on ownership, which has been called the politics of "possessive individualism" (C. B. Macpherson), prevailed. In France the political privileges of the propertied bourgeois dominated for a long time, despite the universalist political pathos connected to the term citoyen. In Germany, too, and even more in eastern European societies, economic hurdles to political participation were raised.

These restrictive models of civil society defined "independence" as the decisive category for participation. They attached an economic and moral value to the term so that it signified one's permitted conduct as well as one's membership in society. Bourgeois optimism for progress in the nineteenth century mediated the growing tension between real social inequalities and the utopian nature of commonly held middle-class ideals. The attainment of utopia would liberate the excluded, who as individuals would one day fulfill certain criteria and enter civil society, so that they, too, could become fellow "lawmakers." Many reached this goal, many did not. The workers' movement and the women's movement grew out of the attempt to change civil society's rules of exclusion. Apart from economic barriers to political participation, in western European societies there were restrictions based on religion and national origin (if often on an informal level), while in eastern Europe—that is, the Russian Empire—there were formal restrictions against non-Christians ( Jews, Muslims), which provoked protest movements.

The development toward conferring the principles of civil society on those excluded from participation seemed to signal the implementation and redemption of the civic ideal of individual self-fulfillment and civic equality. This optimism broke down, however, in many European societies at the end of the nineteenth century. Optimism for civic progress turned into fin-de-siècle criticism of civilized culture, and in practice optimism deteriorated into the authoritarian regimes of the interwar period. Ultimately, in Germany and the Soviet Union, it contributed to Hitlerism and Stalinism. The utopian potential first reappeared at the end of the twentieth century in the societies of Eastern Europe but was restricted to a political program for the transformation of the then socialist societies. Both the social utopia of civil society, based on the independence of the individual through his or her participation in ownership and education, and the political utopia of civil society, based on equal participation of all members, had lost little of their attraction. Nevertheless, in no way did a mere "revolution to catch up" ( Jürgen Habermas) occur in Eastern Europe, as some observers in the West judged it. From its beginnings in early modern times, the concept of civil society has been flexible enough to produce very diverse forms of social organization.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

In the 1980s and 1990s the interpretations of Jürgen Habermas and Reinhart Koselleck fueled the discussion of civil society. It is perhaps no accident that these two thinkers emerged in Germany in the years after 1945. Both of them attempted to explain the collapse of civil society in Germany in the years before 1945. Reflection on this failure to build a lasting civil society provoked analysis of its structure in the postwar era. Another track in historiography follows the thought of Michel Foucault on the disciplinary and regulatory character of civil society. This mode of analysis uses the opposition between the promise of a universal society and the redemption of the particular individual to formulate a rigid critique of bourgeois ideology. It sharpens critical skepticism toward the paradoxes and unfulfilled potential of civil society, but in the process often forgets that this kind of self-criticism is a founding principle of civil society.

Historical research beginning in the 1970s and 1980s concentrated on analyzing various organized associations in the eighteenth century, the media, and individual social support networks. Investigations of the social substrata of civil society, including the bourgeoisie or middle classes, led to wide sociohistorical analyses of bourgeois professional groups and numerous microhistorical studies of cities as the space of middle-class activity. The economic and social heterogeneity of these professional groups, brought to light by empirical research, led scholars since the mid-1980s to analyze more closely the cultural practices, symbols, and images that dominated this world, in order to show the homogenizing forces presumed to operate within a differentiated society. Some researchers pose the question whether one could even speak of a middle class ("bourgeoisie") or whether the plural form, "middle classes," ("bourgeois societies") was more suitable. Much work concentrated on analyzing patterns of behavior and the cultural molding of individuals; an international comparative history of terminology also slowly developed.

ELEMENTS OF A BOURGEOIS SOCIETY: THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND SOCIABILITY

Four characteristics define an ideal type of civil society, and the political theorizing of the eighteenth century already described them all: criticism, functional differentiation, sociability, and the media.

Nothing is more necessary for the process of enlightenment—for the gradual formation of a bourgeois society—than the freedom to criticize. In Kant's formulation, criticism is the potential "for reason in all matters to be put to public use." Free criticism, the results of which are open and to which all people are entitled, is the conditio sine qua non for the proper dynamic of a civil society.

Criticism is free, but a restriction exists. The freedom to criticize is conferred on an individual only in a socially compartmentalized function performed by the individual: for example, on a scholar within the literary and journalistic marketplace but not within an official public office. The attribute of a critic is conferred, potentially, on any person, regardless of sex, social position, or religious worldview. Historically, this means that within the existing estate-based social system of the eighteenth century, a sphere was constituted to which all persons had access, while at the same time they remained bound by the restrictions and regulations of their social environment.

Civil society occurs within designated, bounded social spheres and provides "spaces of interaction" (Koselleck) in which sociability can take place. In these spaces of interaction a specific form of face-to-face communication arises. Here society determines—ideally for all, but in fact for the few—that the restrictive social conditions of daily life are suspended. In their absence individuals interact with no prescribed or imposed purpose. Bourgeois sociability is based on this tension between the equality gained within these spheres of interaction and the continued inequality in the outside world. This tension gives rise to the impetus and promise of bourgeois self-improvement. The arenas of sociability complement the division and regulation of individual roles required for society to function.

Civil society is based not only on the sociability within spheres of interaction. It also links these spheres and enables them to communicate. The linking of disparate spheres of interaction takes place both in direct exchanges between people and also through institutions that make interaction possible. Both aspects, sociability as face-to-face communication and as mediated forms of networking, are required for the functioning of the public sphere in civil society.

One should not underestimate the role of the media in the exercise of sociability in the eighteenth century. Letters, printed writings, newspapers were indispensable for sociability. They created an intellectual horizon that stretched far beyond the daily world and made possible the first public world of readers in which the freedom to criticize could flourish. Similarly, one should not underestimate the fundamental significance of interpersonal communication in the personal sphere within the mass-media world of the twentieth century. Both are crucial for civil society.

The public sphere thrives in social arenas that are structured to promote sociability and connected by forms of media. Within these distinct spaces, individuals conduct themselves according to a functional division of roles. In the arena of sociability, the object criticized and the mode of rational criticism must be free of constraints. No restrictions can exist other than that the actors satisfy the requirements of their roles.

One can distinguish in this way the public sphere in civil society from similar forms of public conduct in premodern times. There were premodern forms of the "representative public sphere" where individuals decided the rules of civic conduct. There were also spheres dedicated solely to the enjoyment of public life; indeed, public life in the Middle Ages encompassed more areas of daily life than it does today. During the Middle Ages, individuals met at public gatherings and communicated as equals; for an example one need only refer to village communes. In these diverse forms of community the form of the public sphere did more than merely recreate the representational courtly model. Three elements distinguish the modern public sphere and bring it into an effective relationship with the rise of bourgeois society. First, the principle that criticism could be voiced on all issues; second, the functional division of roles; third, the growing significance of mediating institutions. (For example, the itinerant preacher no longer communicated the news; information was transmitted in writing.)

Sociability, the public sphere, and civil society do not stand one after the other in a tight causal relationship throughout European history, however. Eighteenth-century thought considered the opposite of rational conduct, "asocial sociability" (Kant), an important, complementary expression of the human craving for individualization. Forms of sociability also pervaded premodern societies, existing throughout the lower social strata to the same degree as in the middle and higher social strata. Pubs in market squares, restaurants, folk festivals, folk theaters, and religious festivals and celebrations offered a variety of options as diverse as the sociability at the courts. The spectrum of social forms has changed, but sociability as face-to-face communication has lost none of its importance. The public sphere in its more narrow sense as a political public space, however, holds a unique position in the development of modern civil society. In this sphere, the "lawmakers," that is, people making decisions for those who cannot directly participate, can address one another (Dewey).

The outward forms of the bases of civil society have been historically variable. Crucial moments in the history of such interaction would include the spread of the movable-type printing press in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the explosion of a reading public, the emergence of salons, academies, lodges, public gathering places, and so on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the transformation of media in the nineteenth century with the spread of daily newspapers that gradually pushed the censors aside. The rise of the commercialized press and sensational journalism hindered direct political interference in the media. In the United States and France such mass journalism spread in two waves, in the 1830s and again from the 1860s to the 1880s; in Russia and Germany it made its appearance in the final third of the nineteenth century. Print mass media focused on the novelty value of a news item rather than on an ideology. This tendency permitted the rise of an economically independent media market; at the same time, this initiated a dangerous process in which the individual reader was no longer an active, rational participant but a passive consumer of information conveyed through the marketplace. Many describe this as a decline, but civil society has always developed mechanisms to foster the independent political decision making of individual citizens, even under conditions dominated by the marketplace. In the twentieth century came the rapid spread of new media forms such as film, radio, television, and the Internet—all accompanied by intense public discussion about the dangers and consequences these would have for the political functioning of civil society.

Two examples, coffeehouses and reading societies, can be sketched briefly to illustrate how sociability and the journalistic public sphere were linked. The English coffeehouse emerged in Europe as the first institution that promoted the public exercise of reason. Late-twentieth-century research has supported and also modified Habermas's thesis on this phenomenon. From the mid-1660s coffeehouses spread not only in London (where there were already more than eighty in 1663) but also in many English, Scottish, and Irish towns; their triumphant march could barely be halted by a temporary prohibition against them in 1675. Not only men but also women, and not only members of the urban upper classes were among the rising number of visitors. Patrons discussed national and international events (what became known as coffeehouse politics) as well as local issues. Behind this phenomenon were rising beer prices, which made the coffeehouse a money-saving alternative to the pub and a popular place for the circulation of news. It competed with traditional social venues such as cockfights, lawn-bowling lanes, and "church-a les." As a drink, coffee not only was less expensive than beer but also symbolized the advance of rationality and the sober calculation of self-supporting people, where alcoholic drinks would be pushed aside.

The reading societies that arose in France and Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century contributed to public sociability and promoted the public sphere of journalism. Here members of the middle classes met to read (newspapers, reference works, and books were too expensive for everyone to buy for themselves), and this created spaces in which people could converse about issues of general interest outside their narrow professional interests or family ties. Reading societies became classic arenas for enlightened reasoning. They also allowed the possibility for entertainment, such as smoking, billiards, and card games, which increased their attractiveness.

Other forms of association were the academies and learned societies, while Masonic lodges served as middle-class forms of association par excellence. The principle of free association quickly proved very attractive to many different social groups, greatly contributing to the success of civil society. It was even attractive and useful to those who sought to oppose it. For instance, freedom of association benefited emerging free-market societies, and opponents of the free market in a short time banded together in associations designed to curtail its effects. All modern organizations and political parties since the nineteenth century grew from these roots.

The extent to which such associations defined public life can distinguish individual societies. They dominated public life in countries where state institutions were weak, such as England, Switzerland, the United States, and also the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In countries with a strong statist tradition such as France, Prussia, and especially Russia, they competed with the hierarchical structures of state authority. In Russia up to 1917 middle-class associational life could operate only in large cities. This was also one reason why in Russia no "bourgeois" social order could succeed. For a long time in southern Europe patriarchal clientele relationships and kinship networks were more significant than anything else.

Critics of Habermas argue that a single (middle class) public sphere never existed, only various sectional public spheres that competed with one another. In a historical perspective, there is no question that numerous communications networks developed in Europe. However, these various sectional public spheres were politically successful within the evolving national civil society only if they adopted its structural organization as their model. Just as political opponents of free association quickly adopted it as their organizational principle, public associations that resisted the free market served as the political decision makers that helped integrate into society the very free-market relations they sought to oppose. This in no way excluded differentiations between competing publics, but the many communication networks were always linked to one another. In this respect, the Internet is only the latest example of this type of interaction that provides all individuals with a potential connection as individuals to one another.

SOCIAL STRUCTURES OF THE BOURGEOIS MIDDLE STRATA

One cannot understand civil society without understanding the extensive social and economic transformation that seized European societies from the end of the eighteenth century. With literacy, secularization, industrialization, and urbanization, among other processes, came new professional groups and social strata based on education and property that increasingly eroded the traditional order based on birthright. Included in the new order were the entrepreneur and the salaried employee, the manager and the rentier, the lawyer and the engineer, the doctor and the teacher. This does not mean that in the European Middle Ages and in the early modern era there was no social and geographic mobility. Yet the bases for the new bourgeois social order were different: they were rooted far more firmly in individual attainment of property and educational credentials rather than in an estate-prescribed social position. It depended less on estate-based rank and lifestyle than on class condition. Place in the market economy determined social stratification in middle-class society. Late-twentieth-century studies have hotly debated the extent to which different social groups—the bourgeoisie (the economic middle class), the old urban citizenry, and the professions or the university educated (the "free professions")—formed this class. Are government officials, pastors, and priests included as well as lower-wage employees and handworkers? It is disputable whether one can designate heterogeneous occupational groups with a collective singular noun, such as "bourgeoisie" or "middle class." For this definition it is of central importance to establish its outer limits vis-à-vis the lower strata (peasants and manual laborers) as well as against the aristocracy, although it includes the notion of mobility for all and embraces the integration process (of becoming part of the bourgeoisie). Moreover, as a rule the demarcation from the lower classes was much stricter than from the upper classes. In Germany, though, the threshold into aristocracy was always higher than in England or France. In Russia from the early eighteenth century the Table of Ranks of Peter I (1672–1725) allowed the possibility of rising into the personal or hereditary nobility, and the non-Russian elites (the Cossacks elders of the Ukraine, the Polish aristocracy, the Baltic German barons, and so on) were also incorporated into the imperial aristocracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As it did in other European countries, the aristocracy in Russia up to the twentieth century shielded itself from the lower classes.

However, even when by demarcating the boundary with the aristocracy and the lower classes a distinctive social profile of a middle social stratum is produced, it still displays an important degree of inner heterogeneity. While in Germany the traditional corporate urban citizenry still had great significance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in England, where highly skilled master craftsmen had never played a comparable role, the importance of this old urban citizenry had long vanished.

From various social subgroups a special petite bourgeoisie emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in many European societies. Out of the old middle stratum, self-employed master craftsmen, small businessmen, and shopkeepers, a quickly growing throng of salaried employees and officials completed the new middle stratum. Those with university educations (the free professions) are another subgroup that developed its own diverse traditions and social positions in all the European countries. At the end of the nineteenth century in France one segment began to establish a separate social identity as "intellectuals" critical of the existing social order. But in Germany at least to the end of the nineteenth century the majority of the educated middle class understood themselves to be members of the bourgeoisie and sought employment in civil service. In Italy the university educated, especially lawyers, referred to themselves from 1875 as borghese and ceto medio (middle class), terms which had formerly served to describe the medieval and early modern middle class. In the twentieth century the university-educated in Italy first differentiated themselves as borghesia umanistica, and the term borghese increasingly referred to an economically defined social class composed of industrialists, businessmen, and bankers. In Italy and Germany the middle class long had a strong connection to the state and only gradually emerged more self-conscious and independent. In Russia a segment of those with a higher education considered themselves the intelligentsia and obtained their own social identity through their criticism of the aristocracy, the merchantry, and especially the autocratic political order. But in the Russian Empire well into the nineteenth century only civil service offered a means of subsistence. The rapid growth of the free professions, the limited possibilities of making a living by offering one's services on the free market, and the barriers to mobility in civil service led in Germany and Russia to increasing fragmentation and social isolation from the end of the nineteenth century. These also encouraged the political radicalization of a segment of university-educated intellectuals who could no longer be integrated into society.

The question of the economic, social, and cultural homogeneity of the "middle classes" remains one of the more difficult subjects for historical analysis. Some scholars study the specific forms of association and community in order to discover the networking and overlapping of social milieus that were once separate. Over time it has become clear that the analysis of these middle strata has for a long time been done too much from the perspective of a marxist-influenced view of class conflict. Studies have shown the crucial importance of the merchant strata in all Western societies well into the nineteenth century. The property owners, the overwhelming numbers of economically independent actors, clearly dominated the nineteenth century and were collectively the characteristic social type for the structure of the middle classes. The fundamental social roots of all civil societies—with the exception of Russia up to the beginning of the twentieth century—go back to the traditional figure of the property owner.

The common moral and social value system of the middle strata lay in the notion of ownership. Yet this included no common political value system for a class that had been described as taking political action in earlier times in pursuit of "possessive individualism." By the end of the nineteenth century the link between this social type and any distinct political value system disappeared. With this the far-reaching transformation of civil society took place. The increasing heterogeneity within the middle classes, which were the core of civil society, dissolved any close, direct link between political participation and economic status. Though many contemporaries at the time perceived this as a crisis, the societal form of civil society proved flexible enough to carry out this new social openness in a creative way.

In the twentieth century on the one hand the social-welfare state guaranteed a minimum economic status for its citizens (though there were and are huge differences between individual countries). On the other hand the spectrum of institutions and bureaucratic organizations was differentiated to such an extent that both participation and protest produced numerous possible reactions. It almost seems that the principal problem facing modern civil society after the twentieth century is no longer the social question but how to mobilize individual citizens into living politically engaged lives. Traditionally, engagement was not a problem because engagement—the role of the "lawmaker"—was for the propertied class inextricably wedded to the pursuit of their self-interest. The survival of civil society was based on dissolving this traditional bond between economic and political interest. Yet contemporary civil societies must reclaim individual citizens, whom no direct economic interest mobilizes into political action, for involvement in the public sphere. Optimists like Albert O. Hirschman trust that this phenomenon merely reflects the inevitable swing between the pursuit of private interests and the active shaping of public life. Insofar as civil society has lost its direct link to social support groups since the end of the nineteenth century, greater room has been created to find different political answers to social problems. This is the basis for the continuing stability and attractiveness of civil society as a societal model.

CULTURAL VALUES, BOURGEOIS IDENTITY, AND CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS

One of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber (1864–1920), claimed that self-interest guides the actions of people, but ideas function as the switchmen that determine the rails on which the dynamic of self-interested action moves. Civil society always was and is based on a system of values, practices, and relational models. According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, its citizens are said to be "tangled in self-spun webs of meaning." Civil society requires such a system of rules, or "ideal types" of values and behavior models, that cultivate a specific "quality" in the character of the citizen and shape a "civil" way of life. This "bourgeois identity" always formulated a kind of ideal or utopian design for its conduct in the world. An image of utopia determined the direction in which the individual first develops into a citizen and defined the vision according to which any society will change into a civil society.

Every civil society requires an ethic of civic consciousness, a system of ideal types, of values and practices that mediate between the various ways of living in the world. After religion had lost its comprehensive role of explaining the world and structuring life, competing spheres of values and ways of living existed side by side in a tense relation. Such cultural symbol systems served as "switchmen"; their institutionalization into actual ways of conducting one's life (religion, relationships, economy, politics, law, art, love/sex, science, nature) has the force to structure in advance the direction in which motivations lead human conduct. Individuals carry out the "civic" direction of their lives along the idealized path of a given symbol system guided by the self-interested dynamic of their specific way of life. Thus there is only an apparent conflict between society and the individual. The urgent struggle between liberalism and communitarianism could therefore probably be only settled violently, because it has reduced the age-old interlocking of ideas and interests into an imaginary contradiction. From the outlook of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal theorists of civil society, this opposition still appeared as an impermissible curtailment of individual freedom.

Since its beginnings, the cultural system that regulates civil society has undergone many transformations. Following industrialization and urbanization, the web of signification, in which and with which people interpreted their experiences and directed their actions, became dysfunctional. The decades around 1800 and around 1900 can both be understood as times of such radical change. Around 1800 "bourgeois identity" emerged as a cultural system that was adequate for a specific kind of social structure and social interaction and that interpreted societal experiences in an intelligible and tension-reducing way. From the 1890s the critique of cultured civilization, articulated by citizens and often indebted to their civic ideas, gave expression to the widening gap and growing tension between the mechanisms of social interaction and the systems that endowed them with meaning. The third fundamental period of radical change within civil society began in the 1960s, with the sweeping transformation of the values of western societies. Criticized by the orthodox of the left and right as destroying values and promoting social erosion, this transformation can also be understood as a process in which civil society's cultural system of rules provided new "switchmen" for human conduct.

This radical change caused many to diagnose a critical juncture in the history of civil society. Habermas, for example, perceived a "structural transformation of the public sphere" but later changed his diagnosis. He originally assumed a collapse of the public sphere and the disappearance of critical journalism. The more the public sphere extends outward, and with it the values of civil society, the more it loses its primary political function: to place all public events under the control of a critical public. In mass democracy and under the influence of mass media, critical public opinion turns into conformity and the cultivated, rational public turns into a cultural consumer. Habermas revised this thesis in 1990 after the transformation of values since the 1960s and the beginning of the collapse of communism in the Eastern European states. Yet others have continued with dire predictions. The idea that the independent individual—the critical citizen—would not survive in the public sphere of the mass media, as well as the argument that the public sphere as a genuine space of civil society would succumb to a tyranny of the private sphere, has found proponents (Sennett). De Tocqueville's insight, developed in his book on America, again proves valid: civil society delivers itself from danger with the same principles that threaten its continuation. However, the German example in the twentieth century indicates that civil society's capacity for self-preservation is imperiled under certain conditions. The structural transformation of the public sphere has not yet proven to be such a threat.

Looking back on the twentieth century, one can understand the astonishing vitality of civil society today in the following way. Late-nineteenth-century critics perceived a crisis in the no longer reconcilable tension between the value system (with its standards of conduct always oriented to the property owner) and the prevailing logic of business. One cannot understand the political crises and the movements opposing civil society of the twentieth century without understanding these insecurities. The ongoing transformation of values at the beginning of the twenty-first century will establish a new system of values that will prescribe new "switchmen" for different forms of behavior.

OPEN QUESTIONS

Those who emphasize the multifaceted and non-utopian character of civil society recognize the variety of cultural traditions and influences that have contributed to its character. At the same time elements such as the social contract, individual human rights, and political freedoms are core concepts of the European tradition. How civil societies in the twentieth century in the middle of Europe could break apart despite participating in this tradition will be the focus of future research. These studies will also seek to determine the prerequisites for a lasting civil society. A question of particular urgency will be how societies on Europe's periphery or outside Europe can build a civil society. These societies have already to some extent been in continuous contact with Europe. Often, however, neither the elites nor the tradition-bound majorities of these countries permit an open discussion of this question. This resistance hinders consensus building on subjects such as how to retain and change particular traditions and how to integrate "new" elements of civic, political culture so that the formation of a civil society is not perceived as a hegemonic takeover. The questions of modern nation building and middle-class society, of individuals and associations, and of the civic public sphere and civic consciousness indicate in any case that a complex image of humanity and a system of values form the basis of civil society. It does not merely concern a liberal economic system and the making of a middle social stratum. In the end, civil society's potential rests in its ever-changing character over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially its capacity to reform itself through open discussion about its own principles and procedural techniques, including the transformation of its own mechanisms of exclusion with regard to women, the lower classes, other nationalities, religions, and races. From here there are many possibilities for further research. In the center of it all are the elements of middle-class society and their relationships to one another throughout historical change: the public and freely accessible use of reason, spheres of direct social interaction, and mediated interaction. Prospective research will focus less on classic social history than on its connection with cultural, political, and economic history. There is less potential for research within a narrow national-historical perspective than in a comparative perspective that encompasses both European and non-European societies.

Translated from German by Mark Georgiev

See alsoMiddle Classes; New Social Movements; Professionals and Professionalization (volume 3);Reading (volume 5); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

General

Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

Geertz, Clifford. Interpretations of Culture: Selected Essays. New York, 1973.

Gellner, Ernest. Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals. London, 1994.

Goodman, Dena. "Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime" History & Theory 31 (1992):1–20.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Hirschman, Albert O. Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Princeton, N.J., 1982.

Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles amongWestern Publics. Princeton, N.J., 1977.

Keane, John, ed. Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives. London, 1988.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Oxford and New York, 1988.

Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes toLocke. Oxford, 1962.

Michalski, Krzysztof, ed. Europa und die Civil Society: Castelgandolfo-Gespräche. Stuttgart, Germany, 1991.

Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York, 1977.

Weintraub, Jeff, and Krishnan Kumar, eds. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago, 1997.

On Individual European Societies

Bácskai, Vera, ed. Bürgertum und bürgerliche Entwicklung in Mittel- und Osteuropa. 2 vols. Budapest, Hungary, 1986.

Banti, Alberto M. Terra e denaro: Una borghesia padana dell'Ottocento. Venice, 1989.

Clowes, Edith W., Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds. Between Tsar andPeople: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton, N.J., 1991.

Daumard, Adeline. Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France depuis 1815. Paris, 1987.

Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of theEnglish Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago, 1987.

François, Etienne, ed. Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et enSuisse, 1750–1850: Geselligkeit, Vereinswesen und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1750–1850. Paris, 1986.

Frykman, Jonas, and Orvar Löfgren. Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology ofMiddle-Class Life. Translated by Alan Crozier. New Brunswick, N.J., 1987.

Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.

Hall, Catherine. White, Male, and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Hausmann, Guido. Universität und städtische Gesellschaft in Odessa, 1865–1917:Soziale und nationale Selbstorganisation an der Peripherie des Zarenreiches. Stuttgart, Germany, 1998.

Hettling, Manfred. Politische Bürgerlichkeit. Der Bürger zwischen Individualität undVergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918. Göttingen, Germany, 1999.

Hull, Isabel V. Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Im Hof, Ulrich. Das gesellige Jahrhundert: Gesellschaft und Gesellschaften im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Munich, 1982.

Kaplan, Marion. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. Oxford, 1991.

Kocka, Jürgen, and Allen Mitchell, eds. Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-CenturyEurope. Oxford, 1993.

Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y., 1988.

Lindenmeyr, Adele. Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in ImperialRussia. Princeton, N.J., 1996.

Pilbeam, P. M. The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914: France, Germany, Italy, and Russia. Chicago, 1990.

Price, Roger. A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France. London, 1987.

Rieber, Alfred J. Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982.

Ringer, Fritz K. Education and Society in Modern Europe, 1815–1960. Bloomington, Ind., 1979.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York, 1981.

Siegrist, Hannes, ed. Bürgerliche Berufe. Zur Sozialgeschichte der freien und akademischen Berufe im internationalen Vergleich. Göttingen, Germany, 1988.

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Vols. 1–3. Munich. 1987, 1995.

The authors wish to express their thanks to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for its support of a conference comparing civil society in east and west Europe.