of unequal access to resources and opportunities on the health and functioning of civil society. This is an important insight, and scholars have built on these ideas to construct a comprehensive critique of the neo-Tocquevillian tradition that focuses on the structural obstacles that prevent some groups from articulating their interests; the ethnocentrism or simple unreliability of assumptions about associations and their effects; and a failure to account for the impact of globalization, economic restructuring, political corruption, and power relations of different kinds.6 Even this critique, however, reaches back through history to connect with much earlier debates about the ideas that developed during the Enlightenment.
Hegel was the first of these early critics, focusing on the conflicts and inequalities that raged between different economic and political interests within civil society that required constant surveillance by the state in order for the “civil” to remain. This was a theme taken further by Karl Marx, who saw civil society as another vehicle for furthering the interests of the dominant class under capitalism, and therefore something that had to be “democratized” itself – and eventually abolished in order to make way for communism.7 But it was Antonio Gramsci – the person who “may be single-handedly responsible for the revival of the term civil society in the post-World War II period”8 – who was most responsible for a break with the liberal tradition. In Gramsci’s view, civil society was the site of rebellion against the orthodox as well as the construction of cultural and ideological hegemony, with both processes expressed through families, schools, universities and the media as well as voluntary associations since all these institutions are important in shaping the political dispositions of citizens. Hence civil society is just as much a site for politics and conflict as the formal political sphere, and it stands in an integral relationship to the state rather than being seen as separate. Although many later adherents to these ideas fail to credit Gramsci by name, his influence is clear for all to see in the vocabulary of radical social movements, activist intellectuals and progressive politicians. In the pages that follow, I have tried to weave these same themes of power and contention, inequality and conflict, throughout the three models of civil society that I analyze, providing at least a partial counterweight to the dominance of liberal thinking.
Philosophers in the United States such as John Dewey and Hannah Arendt took Gramsci’s ideas about civil society as an arena for contestation and developed around them a theory of the “public sphere” as an essential component of democracy. By the “public,” Dewey meant the shared experience of social and political life that underpinned public deliberation on the great questions of the day. Anything that eroded this public sphere – such as rising cultural and political polarization or the fracturing of the media into separate ideological communities – was to be resisted. Such ideas continue to resonate today among those committed to “deliberative” and “dialogic” democracy, but it was in Europe that the theory of the public sphere reached its highest levels of articulation through the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas combined the Marxist tradition that exposes domination in civil society with the liberal tradition that emphasizes its role in guarding personal autonomy, and he drew these different threads together through a series of theoretical constructs concerning “communicative action,” “discursive democracy,” and the “colonization of the life world.” For Habermas and other “critical theorists,” a healthy civil society is one “that is steered by its members through shared meanings” that are constructed democratically through the communications structures of the public sphere.9
This whistle-stop tour through history shows that ideas about civil society have passed through many phases without ever securing a consensus, even leaving aside all the other variants of civil society thinking that I have omitted in order to focus on the basics – such as non-western theories or theories about non-western societies, scholarship about African-American civil society in the United States, feminist contributions to the debate and others. I will get to these contributions a little later, though most of my analysis will be skewed toward North America and Western Europe and the literatures that they have spawned. Although work on civil society outside these contexts is growing, it has not yet reached a level at which systematic comparisons can be made. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the civil society debate will continue to divide scholars in fundamental ways and, although such divisions are never watertight, I want to focus in the rest of the book on three contrasting schools of thought that emerge from this brief discussion: civil society as a part of society (the neo-Tocquevillian school that focuses on associational life); civil society as a kind of society (characterized by positive norms and values as well as success in meeting particular social goals); and civil society as the public sphere. After each of these schools is explored in greater detail, the latter part of the book shows how they are related to each other and where a more integrated approach can take us in terms of policy and practice.
All three schools of thought have a respectable intellectual history and are visible in the discourse of scholars, politicians, philanthropic foundations, and international agencies, but it is the first – civil society as associational life – that dominates the debate. It is Alexis de Tocqueville’s ghost that wanders through the corridors of the World Bank, not that of Habermas or Hegel. Indeed, the first two schools of thought are regularly conflated – it being assumed that a healthy associational life contributes to, or even produces, the “good society” in ways that are orderly and predictable. This messy melange of means and ends will be challenged extensively in the pages that follow, but before embarking on this investigation it is important to understand why such lazy thinking is so common. Why has this particular interpretation of civil society become so popular since the Cold War ended?
The rise and fall of civil society
There is no doubt that neo-Tocquevillian ideas about civil society have been a prime beneficiary of wider political and ideological changes that have redefined the powers and responsibilities of states, markets, and voluntary associations since the early 1960s. At the broadest level, there are three ways in which societies can resolve collective problems – through rules or laws enforced by the coercive power of the state, through the unintended consequences of individual decisions in the marketplace, and through social mechanisms embedded in voluntary action, discussion, and agreement. The weight attached to each of these models has shifted significantly, with state-based solutions in the ascendancy from 1945 to the mid-1970s (the era of the welfare state in the North and centralized planning in the South), and market-based solutions in pole position from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s (the era of Reaganomics in the North and “structural adjustment” in the South). Disaffection with the results of both these models – the deadening effect of too much state intervention and the human consequences of an overreliance on the market – required a new approach that addressed the consequences of both state and market failure. This new approach, which gained strength throughout the 1990s and 2000s, went by many names (including the “third way” and “compassionate conservatism”), but its central tenet is that partnership between all three sectors of society working together – public, private, and civic – is the best way to overcome social and economic problems. Civil society as associational life became central to the workings of this project, and this project – as a new way of achieving social progress – became identified with building “societies that are civil.” Most recently, there has been a resurgence of neoliberal thinking which has tilted the balance back toward the role of markets in promoting social as well as economic goals without removing the need for civil society completely.
Second, the political changes that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s gave the idea of civil society a prominence it had not enjoyed since the Enlightenment but in a manner that also encouraged the conflation of ends with means. Civil society became both a rallying cry for dissidents – a new type of society characterized by liberal-democratic norms – and a vehicle for achieving it by building social movements strong enough to overthrow authoritarian states. The paradigm case for the conflation of these two perspectives was Solidarity in Poland, though here, as more recently in Latin America and the Middle East, civil society tended to be disregarded or neutered once the dissidents had been elected into office. Nevertheless, the rise of direct democracy
