Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:54:26.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A further note on civil society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Krishan Kumar
Krishan Kumar
Affiliation:
University of Virginia(Charlottesville).
Get access

Abstract

The discourse of civil society has continued to thrive, despite reservations expressed by thinkers from both East and West. Assuming it is here to stay for the time being, at least, which aspects of the concept still need most scrutiny ? What ate the outstanding problems and themes for further reflection ? How best can we make the concept serviceable ? This essay surveys some of the recent literature with an eye to these questions.

L'appel à la notion de société civile a continué de prospérer en dépit des réserves de certains tant à l'Est qu'à I'Ouest. La recension de quelcjues-uns des textes récents invite a identifier les aspects du concept qui demandent examen approfondi et a poser la question de son bon usage.

Die Diskussion um die zivile Gesellschaft hält an, und dies öbwohl ostliche und westliche Gelehrte ihte Bedenken geäussert haben. Davon abgesehen: welche Aspekte dieses Denkgebäudes sind noch heute von Bedeutung ? Welche Probleme miissen bewältigt werden und welche Themen können die Diskussion weiterbringen ? Wie können wir dieses Konzept am besten anwendbar machen ? Dieser Essay untersucht kurzlich erschienene Arbeiten unter diesem Aspekt.

Type
Note Critique
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , May 2000 , pp. 167 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

(1) Alexander, Jeffrey C., Introduction. Civil Society I, II, III: Constructing an Empirical Concept from Normative Controversies and Historical Transformations, in Alexander, J. (ed.), Real Civil Societies: Dilemmas of Institutionalization (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 1Google Scholar.

(2) For East European misgivings, see, for example, Szacki, Jerzy, Polish Democracy: Dreams and Reality, Social Research 58, no. 4 (1991). 711–722Google Scholar; Geremek, Bronislaw, Civil Society and the Present Age, in Geremek, B. et al. , The Idea of Civil Society (Research Triangle Park, NC: The National Humanities Center, 1992), 11–18Google Scholar; Tamás, G. M., The Legacy of Dissent, Times Literary Supplement, 14 05 1993, 14–19Google Scholar; Tamás, G. M., A Disquisition on Civil Society, Social Research 61, no. 2 (summer 1994), 205–222Google Scholar. And cf. Ferenc Miszlivetz on the need for a ‘multiparty system and parliamentary democracy’ as the necessary basis and pre-condition for the establishment or re-establishment of civil society in East-Central Europe: ‘The Injuries of East Central Europe: Is the Auto-Therapy of Civil Society Possible?, in Gathy, Vera and Jensen, Jody (eds), Citizenship in Europe? (Budapest: Szombathely, 1992), 88Google Scholar. He warns however that this system should not allow itself to be substituted for civil society, as seems to be the danger in the transition period.

(3) A very partial list would include the following useful collections, in addition to that of Alexander's mentioned above: Rau, Zbigniew (ed.), The Reemergence of Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Kukathas, C., Lovell, D. W., and Maley, W. (eds), The Transition from Socialism: State and Civil Society in the USSR (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991)Google Scholar; Lewis, P. G. (ed.), Democracy and Civil Society in Eastern Europe (London: Macmillan, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Robert F. (ed.), The Development of Civil Society in Communist Systems (London: Unwin Hyman, 1992)Google Scholar; Hall, John A. (ed.), Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Bryant, Christopher G. A. and Mokrzycki, Edmund (eds), Democracy, Civil Society and Pluralism (Warsaw: IFIS Publishers, 1995)Google Scholar; Walzer, Michael (ed.), Toward a Global Civil Society (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995)Google Scholar; Hann, Chris and Dunn, Elizabeth (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; Fine, Robert and Rai, Shirin (eds), Civil Society: Democratic Perspectives (London: Frank Cass, 1997)Google Scholar; Khilnani, Sunil (ed.), Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Fullinwider, Robert K. (ed.), Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999)Google Scholar. In addition some important individual contributions have appeared since my article was written. Cohen, Jean and Arato, Andrew have published their long-awaited book, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar; the historical dimensions of the concept, and their implications for attempting to resurrect it today, are incisively explored in Seligman, Adam B., The Idea of Civil Society (New York: The Free Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Gellner, Ernest has drawn upon earlier work for a full-scale treatment, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994)Google Scholar; and Keane, John has returned to the subject he did so much to open up in the two volumes referred to in notes 1 and 2 of my original article, in his new book of reflections, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)Google Scholar. For valuable additional discussions of the history of the concept, see Chandhoke, Neera, State and Civil Society: Explorations in Political Theory (New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 1995)Google Scholar; Castiglione, Dario, History and Theories of Civil Society: Outline of a Contested Paradigm, Australian Journal of Politics and History 40 (1994), 83–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Modes of Civil Society, Public Culture 3, no. 1 (1990), 95–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, C., Civil Society in the Western Tradition, in Groffier, Ethel and Paradis, Michael (eds), The Notion of Tolerance and Human Rights: Essays in Honor of Raymond Klibansky (Toronto: Carleton University Press, 1991), 117–134Google Scholar; Calhoun, Craig, Civil Society and the Public Sphere, Public Culture 5 (1993), 267–280CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richter, Melvin, Montesquieu and the Concept of Civil Society, The European Legacy 3 (1998), 33–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ehrenberg, John, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. Also relevant are two further historical contributions: Becker, Marvin B., The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Jacob, Margaret C., The Enlightenment Redefined: The Formation of Civil Society, Social Research 58, No. 2 (Summer 1991), 475–495Google Scholar. One might also add here some writing that, although it does not always explicitly use the language of civil society, clearly refers to the concept—for instance, Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Putnam, R., Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital, Journal of Democracy 6 (1995), 65–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(4) Keane, Civil Society, 32; and see 12–31, with the literature referred to, for the ‘globalization’ of the civil society idea.

(5) Kumar, Krishan, Civil Society. An inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term, British Journal of Sociology, 44, no3 (1993). 375–395CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The article was directly and vigorously combatted by a member of the editorial board of the journal in which it appeared, and, in the same issue, see Bryant, Christopher G. A., Social self-organisation, civility and sociology: a comment on Kumar's ‘Civil Society’, British Journal of Sociology 44, no. 3 (1993), 397–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I in turn replied to Bryant: Civil society again: a reply to Bryant's, Christopher ‘Social self-organisation, civility and sociology’, British Journal of Sociology 45, no. 1 (1994), 127–131Google Scholar; to which Bryant again responded: A Further Comment on Kumar's, ‘Civil Society’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 45, no. 3 (1994), 497–499Google Scholar. For references to the article in the literature, as an instance of dissent from the common approach and approbation, see e.g. John Hall, In Search of Civil Society, in J. Hall (ed.), Civil Society, 27; Keane, Civil Society, 67; Philip Smith. Barbarism and Civility in the Discourses of Fascism, Communism and Democracy, in J. Alexander (ed.), Real Civil Societies, 133.

(6) See especially the contributions in Hann and Dunn (eds), Civil Society; also Chris Hann, Civil society at the grassroots: a reactionary view, in P. G. Lewis (ed.), Democracy and Civil Society in Eastern Europe, 152–65.

(7) Keane, Civil Society, 36. For a good example of the ‘muddle and delirium’ that the term has given rise to, see Tester, Keith, Civil Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar. Tester sees ‘civil society’ as the virtually utopian object of Western political speculation from Hobbes to Rousseau. ‘To talk of civil society has conventionally meant to distinguish the milieu of free humanity from the milieu of reification produced either by nature or the state… Civil society meant to never again take the freedom of society and social relationships for granted’, ibid., 11. Here, as in so much of the literature on civil society, the celebratory and prescriptive purpose overwhelms historical accuracy and conceptual clarity.

It should be said that taking the broad or ‘long view’ of civil society, as more or less coterminous with modern Western liberal society, is not necessarily inimical to productive uses. Ernest Gellner deploys such a conception with considerable force and ingenuity, in his opposition of civil society to various forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, modern and pre-modern: see Conditions of Liberty. But there are evident dangers here as well, both in an overgenerous embrace that does not allow for important distinctions in the meaning of the term, as well as in a certain complacency that regards Western liberal societies as basically unproblematic.

(8) Gallie, W. B., Essentially Contested Concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, volume 56 (1955–1956), 172, 193Google Scholar.

(9) Ibid., 194.

(10) See note 16 in my original article.

(11) Víctor Pérez-Díaz, The Public Sphere and A European Civil Society, in J. Alexander (ed.), Real Civil Societies, 211. See also Pérez-Díaz, V., The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; V. Pérez-Díaz, The Possibility of Civil Society: Traditions, Character and Challenges, in J. Hall (ed.), Civil Society, 80–109. Pérez-Díaz characterizes his ‘generalist’ concept of civil society as follows: ‘[B]y “civil society” I mean an ideal type referring to a set of political and social institutions, characterized by limited, responsible government subject to the rule of law, free and open markets, a plurality of voluntary associations and a sphere of free public debate’, in The Public Sphere and a European Civil Society, 220.

(12) For a clear account of Habermas' conception, see Outhwaite, William, Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

(13) See Jeffrey Alexander, Introduction, in J. Alexander (ed.), Real Civil Societies, 6–8; see also Alexander, Jeffrey C., The Paradoxes of Civil Society, International Sociology 12, no. 2 (1997), 115–133CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this latter piece Alexander mentions both Gramsci and Habermas as influences on his conception. He also stresses the extent to which civil society must not be understood as restricted to a separate societal sphere, but operates rather as a universalizing discourse of solidarity and human rights crossing all spheres and potentially encompassing the whole of humanity: see 122–3, 128–9. Presumably the link is that the sphere of civil society has as its specific function the production and cultivation of this universalizing discourse that is available for mobilization in other spheres. See further on this Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Smith, Philip, The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies, Theory and Society 22 (1993), 151–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This position has some similarities with Michael Walzer's view of civil society as ‘a setting of settings’, that is, as a kind of liberal ‘anti-ideology’ that has no singularity of its own but is a praxis wherein different versions of the good life compete and are tested. See : The Civil Society Argument, in Mouffe, Chantal (ed), Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 97–98Google Scholar.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the ‘minimalists’ are not all of one mind, any more than the ‘generalists’. Alexander for instance criticizes Cohen and Arato for having an insufficiently differentiated concept. They distinguish civil society from the state and economy but not, in addition, religion, the family and other spheres that operate on principles different from civil society, in Alexander, ‘Paradoxes’, 127–8; see also his review of Cohen and Arato's Civil Society and Political Theory: The Return to Civil Society, Contemporary Sociology 22, no. 6 (1994), 797–803Google Scholar. It is possible that the highly differentiated view of civil society derives, in part, from an American experience in which not only was religion made a voluntary activity but the State too was radically demoted, conceptually and practically. The distinguishing feature of the United States hitherto, says Daniel Bell, is that ‘it has been the complete civil society,… perhaps the only one in history.’ ‘American exceptionalism’ revisited: the role of civil society’, The Public Interest 95 (1989), 48.

(14) Keane, Civil Society, 17–19; see also Pérez-Díaz, The Public Sphere and a European Civil Society, 213–15. And cf. Michael Walzer: ‘The market, when it is entangled in the networks of associations, when the forms of ownership are pluralized, is without doubt the economic formation most consistent with the civil society argument’, in ‘The Civil Society Argument’, 98. A similar view is expressed by Shils, Edward, The Virtue of Civil Society, Government and Society 26, no. 1 (1991), 9Google Scholar.

Marin Malia has made the absence of market institutions the cardinal reason why civil society will be difficult to achieve in Eastern Europe in the near future. ‘The creation of a mature, diversified civil society in the East still lies many years in the future. What until now has been called ‘civil society’ has in fact been a moral civil society of dissidents, democrats, and ecclesiastics; it was not a material civil society, because there was almost no private property. Indeed the destruction of society was perhaps the greatst crime that the total Party-state committed against the populations it ruled’, in Endgame, Leninist, Daedalus 121, no. 2 (Spring 1992), 71–72Google Scholar.

(15) Alexander, Introduction, 8–9.

(16) Warning against East European ‘antipolitics’, with its rejection of the state, Walzer rightly says that the state ‘both frames civil society and occupies space within it. It fixes the boundary conditions and the basic rules of all associational activity… Civil society requires political agency’, The Civil Society Argument, 103–4. See also Shils, The Virtue of Civil Society, 15. And cf. also Chris Hann on the positive role of the state in enhancing the life of civil society: Introduction: political society and civil anthropology, in C. Hann (ed.), Civil Society, 7–9, 21–22. In a powerful piece, David Rieff warns against the ‘neo-medievalism’ of uncontrolled private interests that may be the consequence of a victory of the civil society advocates. In undermining the state, [these advocates] undermine the only remaining power that has at least the potential to stand in opposition to the privatization of the world, commonly known as globalization, in The False Dawn of Civil Society, The Nation, February 22, 1999, 12. A similar view, of thedangers of the anti-statist concept of civil society now popular in both East and West, informs John Ehrenberg's study, Civil Society (see note 3). Two recent episodes are melancholy reminders of the dangers of advocating the strongly anti-state, anti-political version of civil society, as if civil society were some self-sufficient, self-sustaining entity. There is Rwanda, which before its descent into genocide was regarded by developmental experts as having one of the most developed civil societies in Africa; and there is Kosovo, where there was much support in the West for the strategy of the Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova in taking a Solidarity-style, non-confrontational stance against the Serbian state in the early 1990s. With their organization of their own schools, hospitals sumand even universities, ‘Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo was the closest thing to civil society that the southern Balkans had seen since the outbreak of [the Bosnian] war.’ Alas, it did little to save them against the Serbian troops. See King, Charles, Where the West went wrong, Times Literary Supplement, 05 7, 1999, 3Google Scholar; see also, for a similar view, Zimmermann, Warren, Milosevic's Final Solution, New York Review of Books, 06 10, 1999, 41Google Scholar. On Rwanda, see Rieff, The False Dawn of Civil Society, 15.

(17) A point underlined by Keane's summary statement that ‘where there are no markets, civil societies find it impossible to survive, But the converse rule also applies: where there is no civil society, there can be no markets’, Civil Society, 19.

(18) It is clear in the case of Gellner, Conditions of Liberty, that civil society is so equated with modern liberal society; and somewhat less clearly so in the writings of Pérez-Díaz. Neither of them fully explains why they need the concept of civil society. Shils too equates civil society with ‘liberal democratic society’, in his case adding the need for ‘civility’ on the part of leaders and citizens, in The Virtue of Civil Society, 16–18. Elsewhere he goes even further in arguing for the need of the idea of the nation as a precondition for the existence of civil society. See Shils, , Nation, nationality, nationalism and civil society, Nations and Nationalism 1, no. 1 (1995): 93–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(19) One of the problems with Cohen and Arato's otherwise impressive Civil Society and Political Theory is their unwillingness to ack-nowledge that or to make use of the intellectual and historical material it offers. As Istvan Hont wrote in a review, they ‘choose to remain restricted within a modern German perspective’, which means that they discuss civil society almost exclusively within the Hegelian and post-Hegelian tradition. The result is a considerable loss of scope and efficacy. ‘…Arato and Cohen are so keen to get themselves and their friends out of the difficulties of Kulturkritik that they forget how much wider and historically deeper the debates between ancient and modern liberty, virtue and rights, direct democracy and constitutionalism, resistance and undivided sovereignty, mixed government and elective democracy, state and market, have all been. They refuse to learn from the theoretical traditions which predate the early 19th century and spurn their languages of polities’, in Liberty, Equality, Prudence, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, October 9, 1992, 25. And cf. the similar point made by Alexander, Paradoxes, 129 n3. The importance of the earlier tradition of use, specifically that associated with early English liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment, is also urged by John Gray, who thinks it might help contemporary East Europeans to forget their obsession with ‘democracy’ and concentrate more on the rule of law, the importance of contracts, and market institutions, in Post-Totalitarianism, Civil Society, and the Limits of the Western Model, Rau (ed.), The Reemergence of Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 145–160.

(20) Hann, Introduction, in Hann (ed.), Civil Society, 1.

(21) Ibid., 9–10, 17–21.

(22) Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society, especially chapter 2.

(23) A good start can be made with Margaret Somers's historical exploration of the concepts of ‘public culture’ and the ‘public sphere’, which she sees as linked to the Western—though mainly Anglo-Saxon— ‘metanarrative’ of civil society, starting with John Locke. See: What's Political or Cultural About Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept formation, Sociological Theory 13, no. 2 (1995), 113–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Narrating and Naturalizing Civil Society and Citizenship Theory: The Place of Political Culture and the Public Sphere, Sociological Theory 13, no. 3 (1995), 229–274CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And cf. also Kamenka, Eugene: ‘The term civil society, like any other important social concept, needs not to be defined but to be understood in a multiplicity of often competing contexts’, Civil Society and Freedom in the Post-Communist World, in Nugent, Margaret L. (ed.), From Leninism to Freedom: The Challenges of Democratization (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1992), 117Google Scholar. A valuable aspect of John Ehrenberg's recent study, Civil Society (see note 3), is its historical span, moving from classical conceptions through medieval and early-modern to its recent usages in Eastern Europe and its current usages in the West.

(24) The introduction of the idea of ‘social capital’, and its possible depletion, is clearly related to a similar concern. See the works by Putnam in note 3, above. ‘Political culture’, popular in the 1960s, is also making something of a comeback—again, presumably, for the same reasons.

(25) In what seems a rather desperate effort to save the concept of civil society in the midst of the proliferation of uses and meanings, and in the face of criticism from anthropologists and others, Keane proposes a ‘post-foundationalist’ understanding that ‘itself recognizes, and actively reinforces respect for, the multiplicity of and often incommensurable normative codes and forms of contemporary life.’ This new, post-modern, concept is meant to meet the objections that the idea of civil society is ethnocentric (that is, that it is too heavily reliant on liberal individualist Western thought), that it is unviable as a current project because it can no longer rely on its original moral and religious foundations (the Seligman argument), and, above all, that it is vacuous because of the multiple and contradictory meaning attached to it. (Keane, Civil Society, 53–56). No doubt a ‘post-foundationalist’ concept is capable of meeting these and any other objections, but it seems to do so simply by becoming sponge-like, taking in all and everything that comes its way. This hardly seems a solution, more a counsel of despair. For some stimulating remarks on the problem of universalism and relativism in conceptualizing civil society, see Hann, Introduction, in Hann (ed.), Civil Society, 17–21.

(26) For the exuberance and exhilaration that still surrounded the concept in the early 1990s see Tismaneanu's, Vladimir encomium in Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: The Free Press, 1992), chapters 4 and 5Google Scholar. For the increasing doubts about the relevance of the concept, see the references in note 2, above. G. M. Tamás, a former Hungarian dissident, in particular, has expressed increasing disillusionment (though now from a North American base). For him ‘the central myth of 1989 is civil society’, and its legacy is an outburst of antinomian and anarchic sentiment—similar to 1968—that is making it almost impossible to construct stable and orderly democratic regimes in the region. Paradoxically, ‘like communism, the myth of civil society is a tale of a non-coercive political order.’ Tamás, A Disquisition on Civil Society, 215–16.

(27) For an often hilarious account of the attempt to ‘export’ civil society to Eastern Europe, in the form of Western foundations and international agencies trying to set up or support ‘non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) in the region, see Steven Sampson, The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Albania, in C. Hann (ed.), Civil Society, 121–142. Sampson shows this to be a two-way affair, with East Europeans often exploiting these efforts for their own private, and occasionally public, agendas. For the view that these efforts are a substitute for the promised and more relevant material aid to the region, see Rieff, The False Dawn of Civil Society, 12.

(28) Cf. Bronislaw Geremek's melancholy observation, partly with the Church in mind: ‘In the light of the dangers that have appeared on the horizon for Poland in particular and for Central and Eastern Europe in general, we must ask whether the idea of civil society—however effective it was in helping to bring down communism—will turn out to be useless in the building of democracy’, Civil Society and the Present Age, 18. At the same conference at which Geremek spoke, Connor Cruise O'Brien also expressed the view that ‘the threat to civil society comes not from the State alone, but from some of the components of civil society itself. Not least among these are the churches, almost all of which in the former Soviet Empire have strong authoritarian traditions and will now be working together with and not against other authoritarian traditions in the society’, Religion, Nationalism, and Civil Society, in B. Geremek et al., The Idea of Civil Society, 28. For a more optimistic account of the Polish scene, while recognizing that ‘civil society’ might mean something very different now from the ebullient Solidarity era, see Michael Buchowski, The Shifting Meanings of Civil and Civic Society in Poland, in C. Hann (ed.), Civil Society, 79–98; and for a similar perception of the switch of forms and meanings in the post-Solidarity period, with a guarded optimism about future developments, see Wlodzimierz Wesolowski, The Nature of Social Ties and the Future of Postcommunist Society: Poland after Solidarity, in J. Hall (ed.), Civil Society, 110–135. Piotr Sztompka has moved from a fundamentally pessimistic position to one where he sees more hope, particularly in the increase of the peculiarly important resource of trust: see Mistrusting Civility: Predicament of a Post-Communist Society, in J. Alexander (ed.), Real Civil Societies, 191–210; see especially the note on p. 206.

(29) See the general survey of post-communist societies in Ray, Larry, Social Theory and the Crisis of State Socialism (Cheltenham, Eng: Edward Elgar, 1996), 200–228.Google Scholar

(30) The conference, convened by the Czech President Vaclav Havel, was entitled Forum 2000. It was held in Prague, October 12–15, 1998.