Civil Society Watch

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.

"Civil society," much more than "state," "government," "power," or even "democracy," is a term of art in political theory. There is no discovering what the concept means, let alone what it "really means." What instead is to be done is to see if we can forge some conceptualization or reconceptualization of civil society which would be useful, given, on the one hand, some important political or ethical purposes or, on the other, some theoretical purposes.

In ancient usage, civilis societas (in Cicero, for example) referred to the condition of living in a civilized political community: a community with a legal code, cities, commercial arts, and the refinements of living. For there to be a civil society, according to the ancient conception, is for there to be this kind of political community. Skipping a few centuries, by the time we get to contractarian thought, there is a considerable change. In John Locke, for example, political and civil society were taken to be the same thing (whether it was a society of refinement or not) and this contrasted with paternal authority and the state of nature. But still there remained the identification of political society and civil society.

The passage that Michael Walzer quoted from The German Ideology continues on from "doing just as one wishes to, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing after dinner" by indicating that one will be able to undertake these activities "without ever thereby becoming a hunter, a fisherman, or a critical critic." I mention this not to critique Walzer but to extend what I take to be one possible thrust of his comments. I take Marx's continuation in this passage to be an expression of anxiety on Marx's part. The danger with what one might call civil society, for Marx, is that one might become something fixed, a hunter, a critic and so forth. So the question latent in this passage is what one loses when one becomes a social category. I suppose that the answer to that, and a potential threat of a focus on civil society, is that one might stop being a human being. (Here we might hear echoes of Aristotle in Marx: if politics is the realm of the human for Aristotle, then civil society is lacking something of that quality. Perhaps this is not too high a price to pay).