Civil Society Watch

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The words "civil society" name the space of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks-formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology--that fill this space. Central and East European dissidence flourished within a highly restricted version of civil society, and the first task of the new democracies created by the dissidents, so we are told, is to rebuild the networks: unions, churches, political par ties and movements, cooperatives, neighborhoods, schools of thought, societies for promoting or preventing this and that. In the West, by contrast, we have lived in civil society for many years without knowing it. Or, better, since the Scottish Enlightenment, or since Hegel, the words have been known to the knowers of such things but they have rarely served to focus anyone else's attention. Now writers in Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, and Poland invite us to think about how this social formation is secured and invigorated.

There is an ambiguity in the idea of "civil society" as the arena of private economic and social relations, rather than of government. First, there is the idea that these relations are freely chosen. Civil society, as Michael Walzer puts it, is "the space of uncoerced human association." But second, there is the idea that these relations depend upon shared values. Civil society is therefore also "the set of relational networks--formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology--that fill this space." ...The idea of civil society, then, can receive both liberal and communitarian interpretation, depending on whether one emphasizes individual liberty or associational solidarity.

How are these two interpretations of civil society related? Walzer suggests that in a liberal polity, when ties of family, religion, and nationality dissolve, there is really not much left beyond the marketplace, with its conception of the good life as a life of consumption. But the market alone has little incentive to provide the "social minimum" required to give everyone a piece of the good life so conceived.