Civil society

« Civil society In modern social and political philosophy civil society has come to refer to a sphere of human activity and a set of institutions outside state or government.

It embraces families, churches, voluntary associations and social movements.

The contrast between civil society and state was first drawn by eighteenth-century liberals for the purpose of attacking absolutism.

Originally the term civil society (in Aristotelian Greek, politike koinonia ) referred to a political community of equal citizens who participate in ruling and being ruled In the twentieth century the separation of philosophy from social sciences, and the greatly expanded role of the state in economic and social life, have seemed to deprive the concept of both its intellectual home and its critical force.

Yet, approaching the end of the century, the discourse of civil society is now enormously influential.

What explains the concept's revival? Does it have any application in societies that are not constitutional democracies? From a normative point of view, what distinguishes civil society from both the state and the formal economy? 1 Conceptual history The concept of civil society was introduced into modern European political philosophy through Latin translations of the Aristotelian Greek term, politike koinonia .

In Aristotle's work, politike koinonia was defined as an ethical-political community of free and equal citizens who participate in ruling and being ruled under a legally defined system of public procedures and shared values.

The term has since come to refer to very different organizations of the sphere regulated by public law - city republics, estate polities, dualistic structures of prince and country, the society of orders within the absolutist state (Riedel 1975).

However, the Aristotelian identification of the political and the civil was maintained until the eighteenth century. The early liberal polemical juxtaposition of society and state, originating in pre- revolutionary intellectual discourses critical of absolutism, decisively affected the meaning of civil society.

Ever since, civil society has referred to a sphere of activity and set of institutions outside the state or government, representing an order of legitimacy that properly constructed political organizations ought to serve.

The normative ideal of free and equal citizens comprising the body politic (civil society) was retained, but the body politic itself became differentiated in various ways from the state. Nineteenth-century liberalism in all its versions maintained the society/state dualism.

Yet the category of civil society developed primarily at the conservative, revolutionary and republican margins of liberal thought.

Although he insisted upon the ethical dignity of the modern state, Hegel (§8) nevertheless conceived civil society as a complex framework of economic activities, legal institutions, intermediary associations and publics upon which modern political culture and identity were to rest ( Hegel 1821 ).

Drawing on Hegel's concept of the ‘system of needs' , Marx (§4) identified the civil with the bourgeois, and reconceptualized civil society from two points of view: as class society and as economic society.

Marx also worked with a differentiated model of state and civil. »