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Civil society, municipal government and the state: enshrinement, empowerment and legitimacy. Scotland, 1800–1929

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Graeme Morton
Graeme Morton
Affiliation:
Dept of Economic and Social History, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, EH8 9JY
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Abstract

Civil society remains the most challenging and all-pervading of concepts, yet too rarely is it examined empirically. The potential of civil society is that it better allows understanding of local political structures as well as cross-class associational activity. Its alternatives, while many, are principally ‘public life’ and ‘influence’, both of which have their own highly respected traditions. It is argued here that civil society offers a powerful analysis of structure and action in the urban world, and that it is one mediated by municipal government. To operationalize this definition, this article will introduce three further concepts: ‘enshrinement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘legitimacy’. Each of these is linked to the relationship of the municipal state with that at Westminster, the formal mechanism through which the stability of civil society in nineteenth-century Britain was negotiated.

Type
Dyos Prize
Information
Urban History , Volume 25 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Civil Society in Britain , December 1998 , pp. 348 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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