The question of how to connect these two sides of the civil society equation – collective action and the good society – has exercised the imaginations of thinkers and doers for hundreds of years, generating a vast literature and a universe of diverse experiences in the process. As we shall see, a third dimension of civil society – the public sphere – can play a major role in answering this question, but there’s no doubt that this debate is full of confusions and contradictions. Depending on whose version one follows, civil society is either a specific product of the nation-state and capitalism that arose spontaneously to mediate conflicts between social life and the market economy when the industrial revolution fractured traditional bonds of kin and community; or a universal expression of the collective life of individuals, at work in all societies but expressed in different ways according to their history, politics, and culture. Some see civil society as one of three sectors (along with the state and the market), separate from and independent of each other though sometimes overlapping in the middle. Others emphasize the “fuzzy” borders and interrelationships that exist between these sectors, increasingly characterized by hybrids of various kinds. Some claim that only certain associations are part of civil society – voluntary, democratic, modern, and “civil” according to some predefined set of normative criteria – while others insist that all associations qualify for membership, including “uncivil” societies and traditional associations that are based on inherited characteristics like ethnicity. Are families “in” or “out,” and what about the business sector? Is civil society a bulwark against the state, an indispensable support for government reformers, or dependent on state intervention for its continued existence? Is it the key to individual freedom through the guaranteed experience of pluralism or a threat to democracy through special-interest politics? Is it a noun (a part of society), an adjective (a kind of society), an arena for societal deliberation, or a mixture of all three?
It is not difficult to find support for all of these positions since civil society is popular across the political spectrum and among radically different intellectual traditions. “One man’s dirty trick is another man’s civic participation,” as the US Republican Party operative Roger Stone told the Guardian newspaper in 2017.1 Admittedly, that’s an extreme position, but what is to be done with a concept that seems so unsure of itself that definitions are akin to nailing jelly to the wall? One response would be to ditch the concept completely, but that would be a serious mistake. It would leave us short of the analytical tools we need to understand what happens in politics and social change, which cannot be explained or addressed through state-centric thinking or market-centric models by themselves. A second response would be to choose one interpretation of civil society and forget about the rest, but that would deprive the debate of all the richness and diversity that makes it so interesting and engaging. So the best way forward is to struggle through all the different theories and experiences with a critical and focused mind in order to see where that leads us. Ideas about the civil sphere can prosper in a rigorous critique so long as we abandon false universals, magic bullets, and painless panaceas. The goal is not consensus (something that would be impossible to achieve in the civil society debate) but greater clarity. And greater clarity, I hope, can be the basis for a better conversation about these ideas in the future.
Civil society: a very brief history of an idea
The first step in achieving greater clarity is to identify the origins of different contemporary understandings of civil society in the history of political thought. This is not a theoretical book, nor a book about civil society theory, but, in order to appreciate the ways in which theory has been muddled and misapplied in practice, a quick tour through theory is essential. As Keynes’s famous dictum reminds us, “practical men in authority who think themselves immune from theoretical influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” just as present-day “civil society builders” are motivated, consciously or not, by ideas that are deeply rooted in the past.
Fortunately, we are blessed with a number of books that provide excellent and detailed accounts of the history of this idea.2 They show how civil society has been a point of reference for philosophers since antiquity in their struggle to understand the great issues of the day: the nature of the good society, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the practice of politics and government, and, most especially, how to live together peacefully by reconciling our individual autonomy with our collective aspirations, balancing freedom and its boundaries, and marrying pluralism with conformity so that complex societies can function with both efficiency and justice. Such questions were difficult enough to resolve in small, homogeneous communities where face-to-face social interaction could build reciprocity and trust, but in an increasingly integrated world where none of these conditions apply they become hugely more demanding. Yet the discussions that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or in the ferment of the Arab Spring during 2011 and 2012, or around the contentious mid-term congressional elections in the United States in 2018, would surely have been familiar to Aristotle, Hobbes, Ferguson, de Tocqueville, Gramsci, and others in the long roster of civil society thinkers that stretches back two thousand years. Though the profile of these ideas has certainly waxed and waned, arguing about civil society has always been a part of political and philosophical debate.
In classical thought, civil society and the state were seen as indistinguishable, with both referring to a type of political association that governed social conflict through the imposition of rules that restrained citizens from harming one another. Aristotle’s polis was an “association of associations” that enabled those individuals that qualified as citizens to share in the virtuous tasks of ruling and being ruled. In this sense, the state represented the “civil” form of society and “civility” described the requirements of good citizenship. Late medieval thought continued this tradition by equating civil society with the value of “politically organized commonwealths,” a type of civilization made possible because people lived in law-governed associations protected by the state.3 The alternative was social Darwinism – the “survival of the fittest.”
Between 1750 and 1850, ideas about civil society took a new and fundamental turn in response to a perceived crisis in the ruling social order. This crisis was motivated by the rise of the market economy and the increasing differentiation of interests it provoked, as “communities of strangers” replaced “communities of neighbors,” and by the breakdown of traditional paradigms of authority as a consequence of the French and American revolutions. In contrast to Aristotle, Plato, and Hobbes, the thinkers of the Enlightenment viewed civil society as a defense against unwarranted intrusions by the state on newly realized individual rights and freedoms, organized through the medium of voluntary associations. In this school of thought, civil society was a self-regulating universe of associations committed to the same ideals that needed to be protected in order to preserve its role in resisting despotism, a theme taken up by a host of thinkers including James Madison (in his Federalist Papers) and Alexis de Tocqueville (probably the most famous civil society enthusiast of them all), and – much later in time – by the “small circles of freedom” that were formed by dissidents in Eastern Europe, by the writers who celebrated them in the West (such as Ernest Gellner), and by academics such as Robert Putnam who began to investigate the condition of associational life and its effects in Italy, the United States and elsewhere, spawning a whole new debate on “social capital” in the process. The dominant theme in this debate was the value of voluntary associations in curbing the power of centralizing institutions, protecting pluralism, and nurturing constructive social norms, especially “generalized trust and cooperation.” A highly articulated civil society with overlapping memberships was seen as the foundation of a stable democratic polity, a defense against domination by any particular group, and a barrier to anti-democratic forces.4
Today, this “neo-Tocquevillian” tradition is particularly strong in the United States, where it dovetails naturally with preexisting traditions of self-governance, suspicions about the state, and concerns about public disengagement from politics and civic life, and is closely linked to other schools of thought such as communitarianism, localism, and the “liberal egalitarianism” of Michael Walzer, William Galston,
