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Having been dormant as a social science concept for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term civil society emerged in the 1990s as almost as fashionable a buzzword as globalization. Yet there is nothing even resembling a commonly agreed definition of the concept. Scholars at the Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics reflect some of these ambiguities in a cautiously worded “initial working definition. ”They define civil society as

“the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values,” but then go on to make a distinction between its theoretical separation from state, family and market and the blurred and negotiated boundaries between these spheres in practice. (Centre for Civil Society)

A nonexhaustive list of the sort of actors who populate this sphere may be a less contested way to describe the concept than a theoretical definition: Civil society is generally agreed to comprise nongovernmental organizations, community groups, faith-based institutions, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, academics, and activists. Following the genealogy of the concept of civil society and its recent resurgence, a problematic conceptualization of the “civility” of civil society emerged; civil society also relates to democracy and democratization and to capitalism, with modern the debates relating to the existence and nature of a global civil society.

History Of The Civil Society Concept

The term civil society has a direct equivalent in Latin (societas civilis), and a close equivalent in ancient Greek (politike koinona). These terms denoted the polity, with active citizens shaping its institutions and policies. The ter ms also represented unequivocally bounded concepts, implying exclusion of noncitizens. As such, translated as société civil or commonwealth, the terms were attractive to the contractarian thinkers who sought to explain and justify the emergence of modern nation-states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Preoccupations ranged from the bleak requirement of complete subjection of Thomas Hobbes, to the liberal individualism of John Locke, to the equivocation over the benefits of nature versus civilization in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to the emphasis on civic virtue by Adam Ferguson. But for all of them, civil society denoted the social contract between citizens, providing for a nonviolent social space that facilitated the development of commercial, civic, and political activity by the (male, white, propertied) contracting citizens.

Ferguson was widely translated, and Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel were among his readers. Kant holds a special place in the genealogy of civil society since he was the first to posit it as unbounded, and realizable only in a universal (or, today, global) form. Hegel’s conception of civil society is not easily penetrable, and impossible to summarize, but one key aspect was that he saw civil society as something separate from, although symbiotic with, the state. Civil society, for Hegel, concerned men trading and interacting socially, but civil society was separate from government and purely public activity. For Karl Marx, civil society, in its German translation Bηrgerliche Gesellschaft, is narrowed to only economic life, in which everyone pursues individual selfish interests and becomes alienated from one’s own human potential and one’s fellow people.

At the same time as Marx was developing this bleak interpretation of Hegel’s concept, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville became the first theoretical proponent of associationalism. During his extensive visit to the United States (1831–1833), Tocqueville was struck by the American habit of founding associations for all manner of political and public purposes, and came to the conclusion that this was the foundation stone for the successful functioning of democracy in America.

In the early twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, grappled with a theoretical question of vital practical concern: Why, under what Marx had identified as ideal conditions (advanced industrialization, frequent economic and political crises) was the revolution not occurring in Italy? Going back from Marx to Hegel, Gramsci then divorced the notion of civil society, as cultural superstructure, from economic interactions as material base, founding a long line of scholarship on the manufacture of consent for practices of domination. This consent is generated in the institutions of civil society, notably the church, but also in schools, associations, trade unions, media, and other cultural institutions. Gramsci primarily emphasized how it was through this cultural superstructure that the bourgeois class imposed its hegemony, weathering even economic and political crises. However, Gramsci has been widely read as implying that civil society is therefore also the site where a counter hegemony can be built, as a kind of wedge between the state and the class-structured economy, which has the revolutionary potential of dislodging the bourgeoisie.

After Gramsci, the term and indeed the concept of civil society very nearly died out in Western political thought. When the term resurfaced, it was with dissidents against the authoritarian state both in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

In Latin America, the situation of left-wing intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s was very similar to Gramsci’s, fighting fascist dictatorships, where capitalists were by and large colluding with the state, but where the state did not exercise complete control over everyday life. Latin American thinkers, first of all in Brazil, appear to have been attracted to the idea of civil society because it was a term that could unify entrepreneurs, church groups, and labor movements in their opposition to the regime. As a force in society, civil society also could be distinguished from political parties, which many felt had been discredited, as well as from the kind of populist mobilization that had been endemic in various Latin American countries. Most important, civil society appealed to these Latin American groups because it was associated with nonviolence.

With the self-styled central Europeans, the concept of civil society was somewhat different. While state terrorism was more spectacular in Latin America, with military regimes behind the “disappearing” of thousands of people in each country in a matter of months, civil society in the Gramscian sense may have been snuffed out more successfully by the longer rule and more totalitarian aspirations of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In a totalitarian state, where the distinction between the interests of the people and the interests of the state is categorically denied (hence people’s republics), central European dissidents began to believe that conceiving a civil society, as an association between people away from the tentacles of the state, was the way to begin resisting the state. Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland during the mid-1980s, such as Adam Michnik, Gyorgi Konrad, and Vaclav Havel revived the term to mean autonomous spaces independent of the state; their understanding may owe as much to Tocqueville’s as to Gramsci’s, although they do not explicitly acknowledge either.

The central European and the Latin American thinkers had several things in common. They emphasized the values of solidarity, public truth telling, ideological plurality, and nonviolence as characteristics of civil society. The way in which they conceived of civil society, also, was not a means to achieve an overthrow of their regimes. They were more interested in reclaiming space that the authoritarian state had encroached upon than in taking over the reigns of power. This space had to be kept open and alive as a necessary complement to a healthy democracy—an antidote to narrow party politics and a bulwark against future threats to democracy. Based on the insight that modern authoritarianism requires ostensible adherence to legal norms, the central European and Latin American intellectuals made much use of appeals to the law, whether it be national law or international human rights standards, as a strategy of legitimate resistance. Finally, while demonstrating a vivid awareness of the world beyond their state, these groups firmly believed that democratization must come from within.

Also in the 1990s, Robert Putnam published his influential work on Italy, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, inspired by the more Tocqueville an tradition of civil society as associationalism, accumulating social capital in communities, and buttressing the functioning of democracy.

From then on, the civil society idea caught on like wildfire. It was apparently considered useful by prodemocracy activists in the Philippines, South Korea, and South Africa. But it also obtained a new lease of life, both in political theory and in policy practice, in entrenched democracies in Western Europe and North America as well as India. This related both to concern over the erosion of democracy through the apathy and disillusionment of the electorate, and to the end of the grand ideologies. The civil society idea was seen as a way of revitalizing democracy when both the socialist great hopes of the all-powerful, all-providing state, and the neoliberal belief that market logic delivers benefits to all, had lost appeal. For the developing world, there is also a rather more cynical explanation for the concept of civil society’s sudden and ubiquitous popularity: Since donors adopted the dogma that strengthening civil society was good for democracy and development, using the language of civil society was good for funding applications.

With these usages, there was a tendency to conflation between Enlightenment, Gramscian, and Tocquevillean meanings of civil society as well conflation of an empirical category, which is often referred to as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or the nonprofit or voluntary sector, with various political projects of liberalization, democratization, or resistance.

The Civility Of Civil Society

As evidenced in the roots of the civil society idea, the Enlightenment concept of civil society is deeply imbued with a sense of the superior civility of European polities. While not very precisely defined, the term civility appears associated with nonviolence, good manners, and at a stretch, tolerance for others within one’s own society. But this internal civilization process had a necessary corollary in war, or at least the threat of war, with others. Moreover, from Napoleonic times onwards, colonial projects were increasingly justified in terms of “civilizing” the natives, even as the methods of subjugation were allowed to be “uncivil” because the population in question was not yet within the “civil” realm of those who can be expected to understand and respect the modern rule of law. This historical baggage makes any reflection on the meaning of the “civil” in civil society, and what might constitute uncivility, politically loaded. Some authors, like John and Jean Comaroff, reject any substantive use of civil as having racist connotations.

Nonetheless, the disillusionment following earlier expectations of civil society’s contribution to a liberal-democratic end of history has spawned recent debates about the term uncivil society. It has come to be used for manifestations of civil society that challenge liberal-democratic values. Violence is most often singled out as its characteristic, but exclusivist or dogmatic ideologies, predatory practices, and general rule breaking are also mentioned. The use of the term uncivil society is also not confined to any particular region. Scholarly articles apply the term to civil society manifestations in Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Arab world, and Latin America, as well as globally. After 9/11, the term has been used increasingly to denote “illiberal” reactions to neoliberal globalization, such as the al-Qaida network.

The main academic argument in relation to uncivil society turns on whether uncivil society should be included in or excluded from a definition of civil society. Some political theorists exclude the uncivil: they insist on acting within the rules, respect for others, or willingness to compromise as elements of civil society. A majority of the literature takes the opposite view, however, insisting on an empirical definition of civil society that includes uncivil society as a tendency within it. Kopecky and Mudde, in their 2003 work, Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe, give the most extensive attention to this issue, adducing no less than five interrelated arguments for eschewing the exclusion of uncivil society from civil society. In summary,

To some extent, all civil society manifestations are exclusivist in that they claim the moral high ground for their own position in opposition to all others.
Civility towards the uncivil has historically been limited and hypocritical.
Adherence to liberal democratic goals does not necessarily equate with internal democracy, or vice versa. Uncivil movements may have civil outcomes and vice versa.
Adherence to legal or even societal norms is far from desirable in nondemocratic societies and proscribes challenges to the status quo even in democratic ones.
Finally, “narrow conceptions of civil society screen off potentially vital ingredients of associational life and democratic politics.” Inclusion is therefore necessary to progress in empirical knowledge.

Civil Society And Democracy

Much of the civil society literature of the last decade is devoted to critiques of the idea, so dominant in policy making in the 1990s, that strengthening civil society contributes to democratization. This idea, partly considered to have come out of the “1989 experience” in Eastern Europe, and partly attributed to Robert Putnam’s influential work on Italy, requires civil society to be imbued with both democratic and liberal values, and for it to be easily distinguishable from “uncivil society” which lacks these values. The critiques of the mutual strengthening theory, based on numerous empirical studies from a variety of regions, make four counterpoints.

First, having a vibrant civil society is not to be conflated with having a “civil” civil society. This argument is most persuasively pursued in a historical article by Berman, which shows that Germans in the Weimar Republic, having lost confidence in the state, were “addicted to associating” in much the same way as Tocqueville observed of early Americans, but that these dense associational networks were rapidly and successfully infiltrated and captured by Nazi organizers, accelerating and buttressing the Nazi seizure of power “from below.”

Second, religious or nationalist movements often have a democratic base, and sometimes seek the overthrow of a nondemocratic government, but their values are not necessarily democratic and certainly not liberal. Segments of civil society imbued with liberal, Western values on the other hand do not necessarily have democratic legitimacy in the form of a grassroots base.

Third, democracy in Western nations developed in the context of a global system that exploited and repressed other parts of the world. It is not surprising therefore that populations and civil society actors in these other parts sometimes have a more cynical, even hostile conception of the liberal democracy; they see the liberal democracy as being offered or even forced upon them by Western institutions in a continuing context of inequality.

Finally, the quality of civil society and the quality of the state and market are interdependent. Hence, civil society can only be as civil as the circumstances allow. Leonardo Avritzer (53–60), for instance, develops “uncivil society,” as the prototype of civil society most likely to emerge when the state is too weak to guarantee either physical or material security: the market economy exists only in clienteles form, and political society is nonexistent or fragmented to the point of destruction. He cites Peru and Colombia as Latin American prototypes of this situation, whilst acknowledging that elements of it can be found in all Latin American countries. The challenge in these situations is “whether civil society can produce civility in spite of the state and the market.”

Civil Society And Capitalism

The classical theorists made no distinction between civil society and the market. For Locke, the civility of civil society consisted precisely in providing sufficient physical security for the individual so that one could, through one’s industry and ingenuity, amass property. Hegel, on the other hand, has described particularly vividly the dynamic nature of what he called Buergerliche Gesellschaft—what we would nowadays call the capitalist system—but he did not at all believe it to be civil. Without checks and balances provided by the state, the system neglects or exploits the poor who cannot help themselves. Similarly, Marx thought of civil society as bourgeois society, a necessary stage in history, but inherently exploitative.

Since then, through the detour of Gramsci’s insistence on dividing material base from cultural superstructure, civil society has come to mean the nonstate, nonmarket realm of society. However, capitalism is now generally accepted as the global background setting in which civil society operates. Recent work has begun to take into account the problematic relationship between civil society and capitalism both at the national level and globally, but this relation is as yet much less theorized than that between civil society and democracy.

Transnational Or Global Civil Society

While until recently, civil society was primarily thought of as a national concept, the reality of cross-border networking of nonprofit associations and social movements is much older, especially if we include forms of organization associated with the Catholic Church and organized Islam. The nineteenth century saw peace movements, antislavery campaigns, women’s suffrage, and labor movements having continuous correspondence and international meetings, spawning intellectual and strategic cross-fertilization.

The last two decades, building on these earlier links, are qualitatively different, however. The intensity with which people network and link up across borders has exploded. But this is not just an empirical shift. In stark contrast to the Enlightenment concept, the discourses and identities of civil society actors have become more transnational and even global. Human rights defenders used a legal universalist frame to combat national injustices, peace groups challenged national security policies with concepts of solidarity across conflict divides, and environmentalists initiated talk of one world and global solutions. More recently, normative cosmopolitan concepts of global civil society have been opposed to ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism, as well as a counterforce against predatory globalization. At the same time, some of the most common forms of uncivil society in the twenty-first century may be based on what Manuel Castells has called a “resistance identity,” based solely on being against various (perceived) aspects of globalization rather than on a positive project for society.

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