civil society

civil society, dense network of groups, communities, networks, and ties that stand between the individual and the modern state.

This modern definition of civil society has become a familiar component of the main strands of contemporary liberal and democratic theorizing. In addition to its descriptive properties, the terminology of civil society carries a litany of ethical and political aspirations and implications. For some of its advocates, the achievement of an independent civil society is a necessary precondition for a healthy democracy, and its relative absence or decline is often cited as both a cause and an effect of various contemporary sociopolitical maladies.

The meaning and implications of the concept of civil society have been widely debated. As an analytical framework for interpreting the social world, the idea that civil society should be understood as, by definition, separated from and opposed to the operations of the state and official public institutions has various disadvantages, not the least of which is that it inhibits appreciation of the complex interrelationships between state and society. Equally, the notion that the hugely diverse group life of Western capitalist societies promotes social values that are separable from, and possibly opposed to, the market is hard to defend. The forms of combination and association that typify civil societies in the West are typically affected and shaped by the ideas, traditions, and values that also obtain in the economic sphere.

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Civil society and modernity

Historians of the idea of civil society suggest that these contemporary reservations have their roots in the complex and multifaceted intellectual genealogy of this term and the different modes of thinking that underpin its usage in modern Western thought. Both of the conceptions outlined at the start of this entry stem from a way of thinking about Western modernity that emerged in European thought in the 18th and 19th centuries—specifically, the idea that modern societies can be analyzed in terms of the development of three separate and rival orders: the political, the economic, and the social. Civil society is still invoked by many of its advocates as a synonym for the values of authenticity and belonging, neither of which, it is assumed, can be achieved in politics or economic life.

More generally, the entry of civil society into the language of modern European thought was bound up with the development and spread of liberal doctrines about society and politics. Since the 18th century it appeared in the context of the broadly individualistic, autonomous, and rationalistic understanding of the human personality that liberal thinkers tended to promote. For many liberals, it followed that social order and political obligation can be understood through the analogy of a social contract between ruler and ruled, that the rule of law is a precondition for the liberty of the citizen, and that the achievement of a commercial order requires and bolsters an improvement in the overall character of the interrelationships of citizens. This broad understanding of civil society as both a precondition for and marker of the distinctive trajectory of Western liberal democracy remains the predominant interpretation of it. That is not to suggest that this view is shared or admired by all. Critics observe the differentials of power and resource that characterize relationships within civil society, the apparent inability of liberal thinking to address the fundamental character of some of these inequities, and the skill and willingness of some states to orchestrate and occasionally manipulate civil society organizations for their own ends.

Origins and development

This skepticism about liberal ideas of civil society reflects, and has sustained, diverse conceptions of its meaning and potential; a host of more conservative, as well as more radical, ambitions have also been attached to this term. Indeed, the term civil society has carried a number of different associations in the history of political thought, and its original meaning in Western thinking was rather different from its current protean status. For the Roman author Cicero, societas civilis (itself a translation of Aristotle’s koinonia politike) signaled a political community of a certain scale (usually including more than one city in its compass) that was governed by the rule of law and typified by a degree of urbanity. This kind of community was understood in contrast to noncivilized or barbarian peoples. This conceptual usage was transformed by different European thinkers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, with the result that civil society came to acquire a rather different set of connotations. Here are identified three of the prevalent modes of thinking concerning this term that became established during this period, though this list is far from exhaustive.

A strand of thinking developed in the Enlightenment era in the writings of English figures like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke that presented the social and moral sources of the legitimacy of the state in relation to the idea of civil society. Though internally diverse, this tradition shared an aversion to the idea, widely held in ancient Greek thought, that societies could be characterized according to the character of their political constitution and institutions. Society, however conceived, was prior to and formative of the establishment of political authority.

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A different mode of thinking about civil society, which found its most coherent expression in 19th-century German thought, separated civil society from state in both ethical and analytical terms and regarded the two as separable and perhaps as opposites.

Standing between and partially overlapping with these perspectives, there developed a different, long-lasting conception in the thinking of some of the major theorists of the Scottish political economy tradition of the 18th century, including Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson. In their view, civil society should be conceived as emerging from the intertwined development of an independent commercial order, within which complex chains of interdependence between predominantly self-seeking individuals proliferated, and the development of an independent public sphere, where the common interests of society as a whole could be pursued. The development of the notion of a public that is in possession of its own “opinion” in relation to matters of common concern became an increasingly prevalent way of thinking about civil society, particularly in connection with the emergence of forums and spaces where the free exchange of opinions was observable—newspapers, coffeehouses, political assemblies.