Putting Civil Society in Its Place. Jessop, Bob
In terms of a research agenda on (meta)governance, the preceding remarks invite the following questions. First, given the inherent complexity of the real world, what role does semiosis (that is, sense-and meaning-making) play in reducing complexity and, a fortiori, defining collective problems? This is a field where critical discourse analysis has much to offer not only in understanding the discursive framing or construction of social problems but also in the critique of ideology. Second, given the inherent complexity of the real world, what role does structuration play in limiting compossible social relations? This set of issues is one where an SRA to structurally inscribed strategic selectivities and, a fortiori, to patterns of domination, has much to offer. Third, given the importance of disciplinary, normalizing and regulatory practices in both regards, what specific modes of calculation and technologies of power or knowledge are involved in governance? There are some interesting and productive links here to Foucauldian analyses of governmentality and questions of power or knowledge relations. And fourth, because of the lack of social closure in a hypercomplex, discursively contested, structurally underdetermined and technically malleable world, what scope is there for social agency to make a difference? This is where questions of conjunctural analysis, strategic calculation and social mobilization belong.
If we accept the incompleteness of one-sided attempts at coordination (whether through the market, the state, networks or solidarity) as inevitable, then we need to adopt a satisficing approach to these attempts. This, in turn, has three key dimensions: a self-reflexive orientation to what will prove satisfactory in the case of failure, a self-reflexive cultivation of a repertoire (requisite variety) of responses so that strategies and tactics can be combined to reduce the likelihood of failure and to alter their balance in the face of failure, and a self-reflexive ‘irony’ in the sense that participants must recognize the likelihood of failure but proceed as if success were possible.
Finally, in terms of practical recommendations on governance and metagovernance and their recurrent forms of failure, I advocate a principled and pragmatic reliance on romantic public irony combined with participatory governance. I juxtapose ‘romantic public irony’ to fatalism, stoicism, cynicism or opportunism. The fatalist concludes that, since everything fails, there is no point in trying to achieve anything, and therefore lapses into passive resignation. The stoic agrees but carries on regardless, out of a ritualistic sense of duty or obligation. The cynic shares the fatalists’ ‘pessimism of the intellect’ but seeks, sometimes in a self-deluding manner, to deny evident failures or to redefine them as successes or else manipulates appearances so that success seems to have occurred. The opportunist recognizes the possibilities (indeed, probability of failure) but hopes to bail out in time as a winner, leaving others to carry the costs of failure. In contrast to the cynics and opportunists, ironists are sceptical and romantic. They act in ‘good faith’ and are prepared to admit to failure and bear its costs. One cannot choose to succeed completely and permanently in a complex world, but one can choose how to fail. This makes it imperative to choose wisely!
Given the main alternatives (markets, imperative coordination, self-organization and solidarity) and what we know about how and why they fail, the best chance of reducing the likelihood of failure is to draw on the collective intelligence of stakeholders and other relevant partners in a form of participatory democracy. This does not exclude resort to other forms of coordination, but it does require that the scope granted to the market mechanism, the exercise of formal authority, the contribution of networks or the resort to solidarity is subject as far as possible to decision through forms of participatory governance or commoning that aim to balance efficiency, effectiveness and democratic accountability. This provides the public dimension to romantic irony. Key substantive outcomes to be added here include sustainable development, the prioritization of social justice and respect for difference. In this sense, public romantic irony is the best mechanism for working out which modes of governance to resort to in particular situations and when collibration is required. It is not the only method to be adopted in each and every situation.
This book explores the roles of markets, organizations, networks and solidarity as modes of governance, their respective strengths and weaknesses, and how they are combined and operate in hybrid ways in the real world. Civil society is not the main object of this book, which seeks instead to locate this field of social relations within a governance approach. Civil society can be said to exist at the intersection of networks and solidarity as opposed to markets or command, and its agents have the potential to guide markets and state action. In these terms, civil society may serve as a means of self-responsibilization as well as self-emancipation, and this can be seen in dialogues around the ‘Big Society’, social enterprise, social innovation, the formation of the commons, and so forth, as well as in practices of societal organization in response to disasters and crises. In this regard the governance approach rejects the tripartite classification of market, state and civil society inherited from the Enlightenment in favour of an analysis of hybrid relations of governance.
First comments on civil society
Let me confess that I find ‘civil society’ problematic on conceptual as well as empirical grounds. It is hard to separate ‘civil society’ fully from the economy (which is always socially embedded, although the forms of embeddedness vary) and from the state (defined by Gramsci, for example, as ‘political society + civil society’, 1971: 242; 1975, Q15, §10: 1765). Gramsci added that the state can be understood as ‘[t]he entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the consent of those over whom it rules’ (Gramsci, 1971: 244; 1975, Q15, §10). Nicos Poulantzas (1978) developed this idea further when he defined the state as a social relation. This is an elliptical statement that draws on Marx’s own statement that capital is not a thing but a social relation between people, established through the instrumentality of things (Marx, 1996 [1883]: 753). For Poulantzas, this meant that state power is a social relation between politically relevant forces mediated through the institutional structure of political society (Poulantzas, 1978: 128–9). Both Gramsci and Poulantzas adopted a class-theoretical approach to state power. This is not required in a governance-theoretical strategic-relational approach (SRA), but can be useful for some purposes.
I do not support a concept of ‘civil society’ as denoting a specific institutional site with its own structured coherence. This is problematic, especially as there is no definition of civil society that corresponds to the modern territorial state. ‘Civil society’ comprises a heterogeneous set of institutional orders and pluralistic set of agents, many of which are operationally autonomous and resistant to control from outside – whether through market forces, top-down command or horizontal networking. It is also the site of identities and interests that are not grounded in any specific institutional order but crosscut them by virtue of their relationship to the experience and ‘lifeworld’ of whole persons. This is reflected in David Lockwood’s questioning of sociologists’ focus on class formation over citizenship and his recognition of the politics of intersectionality (cf Lockwood, 1999: 531, 537, 547). Indeed, people with multiple roles and complex personal identities and in addition, complex multifunctional organizations, often attempt to integrate their personal and organizational lives by retaining autonomy and resisting state intervention. This is where demands for empowerment and capacity-building become relevant. But identity politics and empowerment could become just another opportunity for capital to appropriate more flexible labour power, to commodify other institutional orders, to restructure consumption even as its tendencies towards economic polarization continue on a global scale, to seek legitimacy through the domestication of calls for corporate social responsibility, and so forth. This would limit attempts to ensure the inclusion of all citizens within each order.
This raises the question of whether ‘civil society’ is an autonomous domain of social life with its own logic, or comprises no more than a heterogeneous set of social relations that are not (yet) dominated by other institutional orders. The former approach can be illustrated through Habermas’s analysis