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The concept of civil society has recently become fashionable thanks to struggles against communist and military dictatorships, first in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and second in Latin America. Accordingly, to some, it seems to indicate what the West has already achieved, and thus the concept appears to be without any critical potential vis-a-vis the disfunctions and injustices in our type of society. I believe this mistaken view relies on a two-part model that opposes civil society to the state. And I want to argue that no version of the two-part model, whether liberal and/or Marxian, whereby civil society includes everything outside of the state sector, is helpful today. The stark polemical opposition between civil society and the state can only be a slogan, a starting point for analysis or for mobilization against statist regimes, but it is certainly not adequate for serious analysis or politics within civil societies.
Nevertheless, I do believe that the discourse of civil society involves a politics, a democratic politics potentially more engaging and mobilizing than the slogan "join the association of your choice" ( Michael Walzer).
I begin from a three-part model which differentiates between civil society, the state, and the economy. Its roots lie in Hegel, but theorists as different as Gramsci, Parsons and Habermas also make use of it. The three-part model has two advantages. First, it avoids an unpleasant ambiguity in the program of the defense of civil society against the state, for it allows one to distinguish between "civil" and the "bourgeois." On a three-part model, the autonomy of civil society is not the same as the autonomy of the market. To put it another way, a bourgeois society that places the market and property rights at its center is only one version of this, and a problematic one at that. The advantage of a three-part model is that it allows us to differentiate between the task of establishing or maintaining viable market economies (whatever the forms of property) and the project of strengthening civil society vis-a-vis the state and the liberated market forces. As we know from the West, economic power can represent as great a danger to social solidarity, social justice, and autonomy as the power of the modern state. So only a concept of civil society differentiated from the economy could become the center of a critical theory in societies where the market economy has already developed its own autonomous logic or is in the process of doing so.
Second, the three-part model also helps us to counter conservative conceptions of the social life. It allows us to see that the defense of civil society does not have to entail a traditionalistic hierarchy as opposed to a modern (egalitarian) life world. If civil society can take many forms, then it can also be a target of democratization. The politics of civil society can try to change the institutions of civil society in a direction away from hierarchical, inegalitarian, patriarchal, nationalist, racist versions toward egalitarian, horizontal, non-sexist, open versions based on the principles of individual rights and democratic participation in associations, and public. No one can argue convincingly that such a movement is realized anywhere in the West. However, with the demise of Marxism and the revolutionary rhetoric of communism, the question confronting political theorists everywhere is whether utopian thought and meaningful political projects are conceivable at all. Or are the great mobilizing ideals embedded in the earlier utopias consigned to the dustbin of the history of ideas?
The ideals generated in the age of democratic revolutions-liberty, political equality, solidarity, justice--were each embedded in totalistic utopias: anarchism, libertarianism, radical democracy, Marxism. Sober reflection on the history of the past century and a half should dissuade responsible persons from trying to revive any of these utopias in their original form. Yet a society without actionorienting ideals, without political projects, is equally undesirable, for the civil privatism or "realism" that would result would involve a political culture unable to generate enough motivation to even maintain, much less expand, existing rights, democratic institutions, social solidarity, or justice.
I believe that the discourse of civil society helps here. For this discourse reveals that collective actors and sympathetic theorists are still oriented by the utopian ideals of modernity, even if the fundamentalist revolutionary rhetoric within which they once were articulated is on the wane. Indeed, the movement of civil society is itself a new kind of utopia: the normative principles underlying it, plurality, publicity, legality, equality, justice, voluntary association, and individual autonomy, constitute a self-limiting utopia that calls for a plurality of democratic form, a complex set of social, civil, and political rights compatible with a highly differentiated society. It also calls for what I label a self-limiting, radical politics.
Let me briefly redefine more clearly my conception of civil society and point to the possible politics this entails. I understand civil society as a sphere of social interaction distinct from economy and state, composed above all of associations (including the family) and publics. Modern civil society is created and reproduced through forms of collective action, and it is institutionalized through laws, especially subjective rights that stabilize social differentiation. While the active and institutionalized dimensions can exist separately, in the long run both independent action and institutionalization are necessary for the reproduction of civil society. I do not, however, identify civil society with all of social life outside the state and economic spheres. First, one must distinguish civil society both from what I call a "political society" of parties, political organizations, and political public spheres (parliaments) and from an "economic society" composed of the organizations of production, distribution, and associated publics, usually firms, cooperatives, institutions of collective bargaining, unions, councils, etc. The actors and institutions of political and economic society are directly involved with state power and economic production. They cannot afford to subordinate strategic and instrumental criteria to the patterns of normative integration and open-ended communication characteristic of civil society. While the associations of civil society are communicatively coordinated, modern political and economic institutions must be coordinated through the media of power and money, however much communicative interaction can be found there. Even the public spheres of political society involve important formal and temporal constraints in processes of communication. In turn, the political role of civil society is not directly related to the conquest of power, but to the generation of influence, through the life of democratic associations and unconstrained discussion in a variety of cultural and informal public spheres. Thus, the mediating role of political society between civil society and the state (political society sets up receptors for the influence of civil society) is indispensable, but so is the rootedness of political society in civil society. In principle, similar considerations pertain to the relationship of civil and economic society, even if historically, under capitalism, economic society has been more successfully insulated from the influence of civil society than political society, despite the claims of elite theories of democracy. Of course, I have now apparently replaced a three-part with a five-part model, but it should be obvious that the concepts of political and economic society are mediating categories between the three core terms of my framework.
Indeed, I want to stress that under liberal democracies it would be a mistake to see civil society in opposition to economy and state by definition. My notion of economic and political society refers to mediating institutions through which civil society can gain influence over political/administrative and economic processes. An antagonistic relation of civil society or its actors to economy and state arises when these mediations fail, or when economic or political institutions insulate decision making and decision makers from the communication with and influence of social organizations, initiatives, and discussions.
This conceptual framework obviously translates categories of general social theory into political sociology. The point of this translation is to get beyond a strictly dichotomous framework and the one-sided models of politics that flow from it. On the dichotomous model we are left with a rather varied set of theoretical choices: the defense of civil society against the state, participation in the political system on strictly strategic terms, or attempts to dispense with the opposition altogether in the name of a republican model of participatory democracy. The first position is typical of the antipolitics of some components of the new social movements, the second of elite theorists of democracy. What both have in common is a view that severs the link between civil and political society. The third model is based on a republican conception of political society, which tends to denigrate civil society as individualistic, apolitical, and privatistic. The politics of civil society looks far more promising on the three-part model. As I said at the beginning, civil society is a project, a terrain and target of democratic politics. The institutions of civil society can and ought to be the target of democratization, of egalitarian projects aimed at expanding rights and solidarities, and the institutions of political and economic society can and ought to be the targets of actors in civil society seeking to render them more receptive to their influence. In short, I can identify, on my conception, four types of politics which I call the politics of identity, influence, inclusion, and reform, which address civil, political and/or economic society, the economy, and state, respectively. All of these comprise the policies of civil society.
Contemporary collective actors consciously struggle over the power to construct new identities, and to reshape institutions, cultural and normative expectations accordingly. Civil society proper is the terrain and target of this politics of identity. It is here that collective actors defend spaces for the creation of the new identities and seek to render more egalitarian and democratic the institutions and social relations in which identities are generated. It is through such action that traditions are reassessed, renewed, or revised, and inegalitarian social relations or forms of domination within civil society properly challenged.
The target of the politics of influence is public opinion in civil and political society. Or rather, the politics of influence aims at making the actors in political society (or in economic society) responsive and receptive to those in civil society. In short, the politics of influence seeks to alter the universe of political discourse such that it keeps up with the basic principles and cultural changes articulated in civil society. The politics of influence indicates how actors of civil society can accomplish something on the level of the political or economic system without losing their identity as civil actors or social movements.
In political society, actors get to participate through political inclusion in the form of parties, lobbies, and recognized partners in bargaining forums. A similar point can be made for economic society. Collective action aimed at the expansion of political or economic society to include new actors, in order to gain access to power or benefits, is what I call the politics of inclusion. Finally, recognized actors seek to accomplish some of their goals through strategic action in order to make policy: this is the politics of reform, at least in the case of actors arising from social movements.
I believe that all of the important contemporary movements can be analyzed in these terms. I also believe that construed in this way, the concept and politics of civil society take us beyond the unattractive alternatives of soulless reformism and revolutionary fundamentalism. Utopian ideals are not on the wane, political projects are still possible, we need not indulge in resignation, for a democratic and egalitarian civil society is still a project worth fighting for.
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