Civil Society. Michael Edwards

Civil Society - Michael  Edwards


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thinkers that stretches back two thousand years. Though the profile of these ideas has certainly waxed and waned, arguing about civil society has always been a part of political and philosophical debate.

      Today, this “neo-Tocquevillian” tradition is particularly strong in the United States, where it dovetails naturally with preexisting traditions of self-governance, suspicions about the state, and concerns about public disengagement from politics and civic life, and is closely linked to other schools of thought such as communitarianism, localism, and the “liberal egalitarianism” of Michael Walzer, William Galston, and others.5 In contrast to classical liberals, liberal egalitarians recognize the debilitating effects of unequal access to resources and opportunities on the health and functioning of civil society. This is an important insight, and scholars have built on these ideas to construct a comprehensive critique of the neo-Tocquevillian tradition that focuses on the structural obstacles that prevent some groups from articulating their interests; the ethnocentrism or simple unreliability of assumptions about associations and their effects; and a failure to account for the impact of globalization, economic restructuring, political corruption, and power relations of different kinds.6 Even this critique, however, reaches back through history to connect with much earlier debates about the ideas that developed during the Enlightenment.

      This whistle-stop tour through history shows that ideas about civil society have passed through many phases without ever securing a consensus, even leaving aside all the other variants of civil society thinking that I have omitted in order to focus on the basics – such as non-western theories or theories about non-western societies, scholarship about African-American civil society in the United States, feminist contributions to the debate and others. I will get to these contributions a little later, though most of my analysis will be skewed toward North America and Western Europe and the literatures that they have spawned. Although work on civil society outside these contexts is growing, it has not yet reached a level at which systematic comparisons can be made. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the civil society debate will continue to divide scholars in fundamental ways and, although such divisions are never watertight, I want to focus in the rest of the book on three contrasting schools of thought that emerge from this brief discussion: civil society as a part of society (the neo-Tocquevillian school that focuses on associational life); civil society as a kind of society (characterized by positive norms and values as well as success in meeting particular social goals); and civil society as the public sphere. After each of these schools is explored in greater detail, the latter part of the book shows how they are related to each other and where a more integrated approach can take us in terms of policy and practice.


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