Civil society

Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organisations such as tax-exempt public charities, foundations, development non-governmental organisations, community and grassroots organizations, women's organisations, faith-based organisations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups.

Origin

The term originated with Adam Ferguson, an 18th century Scottish social philosopher usually identified as one of the Scottish moralists, a group which also included Adam Smith. Ferguson saw the development of a commercial state as a way to change the corrupt feudal order and strengthen the liberty of the individual. While Ferguson did not draw a line between the state and the society, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher, made this distinction in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right.. Hegel used the term "bürgerliche Gesellschaft" . The German Zivilgesellschaft emphasizes a more inclusive community than the state. Hegel viewed civil society dialectically along with the state and the family or household (sometimes broadened today as the intimate sphere. This Hegelian trichotomy is echoed in contemporary calls for a Third Way as well as contemporary conceptions of the third sector. Subsequent interpretations of civil society by left- and right-Hegelians differed substantially. Karl Marx's critique of bourgeois society rendered the term a weapon in the Marxist critique of all non-state aspects of society, economy and polity. (See also the discussion on State and Civil Society for more on this issue). On the other side, civil society joined with a neo-Tocquevillian view of voluntary associations became the basis of contemporary conceptions of a third sector between market and state. Geo-political events, including the decline of military dictatorships in Latin America and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Europe are usually credited with a tremendous increase of interest in civil society in the 1990s.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise of Civil Society

Published work on civil society since the 18th century has been characterized by periods of great interest interspersed with periods of relatively little interest. The early years following publication of Ferguson's work (1767) were characterized by great interest but few memorable responses until Hegel (1827). Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1845) is today widely cited in connection with civil society. Tocqueville expanded considerably on numerous themes of civil society with no explicit reference to the concept itself or to Ferguson or Hegel. In Europe, as well, work by a host of scholars including Karl Marx (who largely rejected the idea of civil society independent of the state as part of his departure from Hegel), Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies and a great many others. Nineteenth and early 20th century scholars did much to elaborate the concept of society as an autonomous sphere of activity, albeit with little explicit emphasis on the civil. (A great deal of work in historical sociology as well elaborates on these themes.)

A major new departure arose in the emerging behavioral political science of the 1950s. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963) set forth the concept of civic culture, measurable in terms of a cluster of related political and social attitudes in five democracies. As part of this work, Almond and Verba developed a major statement of the perspective of civic organizations as incubators of democracy and good citizenship.

Using then-new survey research techniques Almond and Verba employed a common modern interpretation of two brief chapters in Tocqueville to argue that the political function of many community organizations is to foster better awareness and more informed citizens who will then make better voting choices and hold government more accountable [8]. They also drew a link between organizational bylaws and political constitutions of democratic governments, suggesting that these organizational micro-constitutions serve to socialize participants to the process of democratic decision making. (Both of these views are now routinely projected back upon Tocqueville by many authors.)

Another line of writing about civil society arose within nascent conservatism in the U.S., as small government conservatives and antigovernment libertarians sought alternatives to the growth of "big government" after World War II. In 1965,Richard Cournelle, a corporate executive and independent scholar, published a call for protection and encouragement of a sector of civic space completely independent of government. The term, if not the underlying theory became the basis of a well known Washington DC organization [INDEPENDENT SECTOR].

The President of INDEPENDENT SECTOR, Brian O'Connell, brought together several emerging threads of the Tocquevillian view of civil society in a reader published in 1983.

Meanwhile, larger geo-political forces both nationally in the U.S. and internationally were destabilizing the consensus view represented by O'Connell and INDEPENDENT SECTOR. In 1976, the American Enterprise Institute had published To Empower People by Peter Berger, a sociologist and Richard John Neuhaus, a noted conservative. Berger and Neuhaus popularized the neo-Tocquevillian notion of nonprofit and civil society organizations as social institutions whose function was to 'mediate' between citizens and government, or the political state.

In the late 1980's there were the multiple beginnings of a new groundswell of interest in the concept of civil society. It was fueled both by the European states rendered newly independent in the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Soviet empire, and the transcendence of democracy over military dictatorships in Latin America.

Two organizational contexts in which issues of civil society still hold a great deal of interest are the [International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR, pronounced eye-star)] and the [Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA)].

More recently, Robert Putnam has argued that even non-political organisations in civil society are vital for democracy. This is because they build social capital, trust and shared values, which are transferred into the political sphere and help to hold society together, facilitating an understanding of the interconnectedness of society and interests within it [9]. Others, however, have questioned how democratic civil society actually is. Some have noted that the civil society actors have now obtained a remarkable amount of political power without anyone directly electing or appointing them [10]. Finally, other scholars have argued that, since the concept of civil society is closely related to democracy and representation, it should in turn be linked with ideas of nationality and nationalism [11].