Civil Society. Michael Edwards

1 Introduction – What’s the Big Idea?

Set into the wall of the Church of the Ascension on London’s Blackheath is a small metal plaque. “Fellowship is life,” it reads, “and lack of fellowship is death, but in hell there is no brotherhood but every man for himself.” John Ball, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt who spoke these words nearby in 1381, would not have thought of himself as part of “civil society,” but his sentiments have been echoed down the centuries by anyone who has ever joined a group, formed an association, or volunteered to defend or advance the causes they believed in. Collective action in search of the good society is a universal part of human experience, though manifested in a million different ways across time, space, and culture. In Sullivan County, New York, where I live, I am surrounded by contemporary examples of the same phenomenon – the volunteer fire service, the free giveaway of hay to those who can’t afford to buy it for their pets, the music sale by Radio W-JEFF (“America’s only hydro-powered public radio station”), the community activists at Swan Lake Renaissance who are my neighbors, and a myriad of other groups that cater to every affinity and interest. Yet Sullivan County remains economically depressed and politically divided, one more set of communities on the margins of a nation that is increasingly violent, unequal, and apparently incapable of resolving its own pressing social problems. A strong civil society, it seems, is no guarantee that society will be strong and civil, especially when citizens themselves become so polarized.

The question of how to connect these two sides of the civil society equation – collective action and the good society – has exercised the imaginations of thinkers and doers for hundreds of years, generating a vast literature and a universe of diverse experiences in the process. As we shall see, a third dimension of civil society – the public sphere – can play a major role in answering this question, but there’s no doubt that this debate is full of confusions and contradictions. Depending on whose version one follows, civil society is either a specific product of the nation-state and capitalism that arose spontaneously to mediate conflicts between social life and the market economy when the industrial revolution fractured traditional bonds of kin and community; or a universal expression of the collective life of individuals, at work in all societies but expressed in different ways according to their history, politics, and culture. Some see civil society as one of three sectors (along with the state and the market), separate from and independent of each other though sometimes overlapping in the middle. Others emphasize the “fuzzy” borders and interrelationships that exist between these sectors, increasingly characterized by hybrids of various kinds. Some claim that only certain associations are part of civil society – voluntary, democratic, modern, and “civil” according to some predefined set of normative criteria – while others insist that all associations qualify for membership, including “uncivil” societies and traditional associations that are based on inherited characteristics like ethnicity. Are families “in” or “out,” and what about the business sector? Is civil society a bulwark against the state, an indispensable support for government reformers, or dependent on state intervention for its continued existence? Is it the key to individual freedom through the guaranteed experience of pluralism or a threat to democracy through special-interest politics? Is it a noun (a part of society), an adjective (a kind of society), an arena for societal deliberation, or a mixture of all three?

      It is not difficult to find support for all of these positions since civil society is popular across the political spectrum and among radically different intellectual traditions. “One man’s dirty trick is another man’s civic participation,” as the US Republican Party operative Roger Stone told the Guardian newspaper in 2017.¹ Admittedly, that’s an extreme position, but what is to be done with a concept that seems so unsure of itself that definitions are akin to nailing jelly to the wall? One response would be to ditch the concept completely, but that would be a serious mistake. It would leave us short of the analytical tools we need to understand what happens in politics and social change, which cannot be explained or addressed through state-centric thinking or market-centric models by themselves. A second response would be to choose one interpretation of civil society and forget about the rest, but that would deprive the debate of all the richness and diversity that makes it so interesting and engaging. So the best way forward is to struggle through all the different theories and experiences with a critical and focused mind in order to see where that leads us. Ideas about the civil sphere can prosper in a rigorous critique so long as we abandon false universals, magic bullets, and painless panaceas. The goal is not consensus (something that would be impossible to achieve in the civil society debate) but greater clarity. And greater clarity, I hope, can be the basis for a better conversation about these ideas in the future.

Civil society: a very brief history of an idea

The first step in achieving greater clarity is to identify the origins of different contemporary understandings of civil society in the history of political thought. This is not a theoretical book, nor a book about civil society theory, but, in order to appreciate the ways in which theory has been muddled and misapplied in practice, a quick tour through theory is essential. As Keynes’s famous dictum reminds us, “practical men in authority who think themselves immune from theoretical influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” just as present-day “civil society builders” are motivated, consciously or not, by ideas that are deeply rooted in the past.

      Fortunately, we are blessed with a number of books that provide excellent and detailed accounts of the history of this idea.² They show how civil society has been a point of reference for philosophers since antiquity in their struggle to understand the great issues of the day: the nature of the good society, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the practice of politics and government, and, most especially, how to live together peacefully by reconciling our individual autonomy with our collective aspirations, balancing freedom and its boundaries, and marrying pluralism with conformity so that complex societies can function with both efficiency and justice. Such questions were difficult enough to resolve in small, homogeneous communities where face-to-face social interaction could build reciprocity and trust, but in an increasingly integrated world where none of these conditions apply they become hugely more demanding. Yet the discussions that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or in the ferment of the Arab Spring during 2011 and 2012, or around the contentious mid-term congressional elections in the United States in 2018, would surely