to replace the nation-state (a fantasy akin to “grasping at straws,” according to David Rieff).19 As these critics point out, voluntary associations of different kinds make a fundamentally important contribution to social progress, but they only tell one part of the civil society story.
As a result of these criticisms and disappointments, there have been signs that interest and support for civil society have begun to wane, confirming Alan Wolfe’s judgment that the “idea of civil society failed because it became too popular.”20 “Civil society is passé” was the conclusion of a senior German government official in private conversation; “it had its moment in the 1990s but now it’s time to move on to something else.”21 Or take China, where the role of NGOs was placed on a par with the nation-state in official communiqués from 2002, but where “civil society” had been added to the list of “things it is now forbidden to discuss” a mere eleven years later.22 In this sense, the years after the fall of communism may come to be seen as the high water mark of the civil society movement.
Whether the idea of civil society recovers from these setbacks depends on how successfully these doubts and criticisms are addressed moving forward, but the critiques themselves are helpful. They remind us that civil society is, and should continue to be, the subject of debate. Yet in this debate it is no longer possible to regard civil society as irrelevant to politics and economics, or to dismiss it as the preserve of a subset of privileged individuals or regions of the world – the citizens of the Greek polis, white male property owners in eighteenth-century Europe, or the West, the North, or the South. Ideas about citizen action, the good society, public participation, the power of protest, and freedom of information and association have spread across the globe to become a powerful reference point in political debates and an inspiration for activists worldwide. However, these debates continue to be dominated by a narrow and disputed interpretation of what civil society is and does, and this narrowness threatens to erode its potential as a force for positive social change. Building on this potential requires a simultaneous broadening of the debate to include other, less dominant, perspectives and a much greater specification of how each of these perspectives contributes to a clearer understanding overall. And the best place to start that process is by breaking apart the assumptions that underpin the orthodox interpretation of civil society as the world of associational life.
Notes
1 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/25/roger-stone-a-master-of-the-political-dirty-trick. See Ehrenberg (2011). 2 Seligman (1992); Keane (1998); Foley and Hodgkinson (2002); Hall and Trentmann (2005); Alexander (2006); Edwards (2011); and Ehrenberg (2017). 3 Ehrenberg (2017: xi): Putnam (1993); and Tarrow (1996). 4 Cohen and Arato (1992). 5 Post and Rosenblum (2002); and Chambers and Kymlicka (2002). 6 Edwards, Foley, and Dani (2001). 7 Ehrenberg (2017) provides a good overview of these philosophical developments. 8 Foley and Hodgkinson (2002: xix); Gramsci (1971). 9 Chambers (2002: 94); Hirst (1994).10 Bellah (1995: 277).11 Edwards (1999a); Acemoglu and Robinson (2012).12 Lakey (2017).13 Salamon (2010: 187).14 McNulty and Wampler (2018); Cortright, Greenberg, and Stone (2016).15 Brass (2017); O’Regan and Itodo (2018).16 Sharkey (2018).17 Boulding (2016); Wischermann et al. (2018); Pinckney (2018).18 Edwards (2000b); Jordan and van Tuijl (2006).19 Rieff (1999); Chandhoke (2003).20 Wolfe (1998: 18).21 The conversation was reported to me by Professor James Manor of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex.22 Huasheng Shidian, China’s semi-official news magazine, Autumn 2002; “7 things you can’t talk about in China,” GlobalPost, June 03, 2013.
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