Idea Of Civil Society

The Idea of Civil Society

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1992 by Adam B. Seligman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seligman, A.

The idea of civil society/Adam B. Seligman.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-02-928315-9

ISBN 13: 978-0-0292-8315-8

eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-0611-2

1. Civil society.  I. Title.

JC336.S38   1992

306.2—dc20   92-19591

CIP

—Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus showes an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Modern Idea of Civil Society

2. The Sources of Civil Society: Reason and the Individual

3. Civil Society, Citizenship, and the Representation of Society

4. Jerusalem, Budapest, Los Angeles: In Search of Civil Society

Concluding Remarks on Civil Society

Notes

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

The idea of civil society has had a long history in the traditions of Western political thought. Its roots go back to Christian natural law speculation, while its early modern articulation in the Scottish Enlightenment has provided the inspiration to more contemporary arguments for its recovery. Resurrected in the 1970s, in the struggles between the Polish Workers’ Movement and the State appartus, the concept has, in recent years, been central to political debates in both Eastern and Western Europe as well as in the United States.

In this contemporary revival of the idea of civil society, the concept has come to mean different things to different people. Different thinkers have stressed different aspects of the concept as well as different historical sources and traditions as relevant to its contemporary usage. The resulting picture is one of great ambiguity and not a little confusion as the idea of civil society has come to mean one set of principles and practices to thinkers working in the liberal tradition of politics and another to their more conservative critics. Similarly, and perhaps even more importantly, the idea of civil society resonates very differently in the streets of Bucharest, Budapest, Vilna, or Prague than in Oxford, Princeton, Chicago, or Toronto.

Despite these differing theoretical perspectives and political agendas, what nevertheless makes the idea of civil society so attractive to so many social thinkers is its assumed synthesis of private and public good and of individual and social desiderata. The idea of civil society thus embodies for many an ethical ideal of the social order, one that, if not overcomes, at least harmonizes, the conflicting demands of individual interest and social good.

As it is this vision that, I believe, stands at the core of most contemporary attempts to resurrect the idea of civil society, it is this that will form the focus of the following analysis. By properly identifying both the historical and what may be termed philosophical conditions that made this vision possible in the past we may, I hope, arrive at a more coherent understanding of its relevance to contemporary political life, in both the West and the East.

In organizing this inquiry along these lines, the work of many thinkers—however important to the idea of civil society in general—has not been dealt with. Notable perhaps in their absence are Bernard Constant, Lorenz Von Stein, and Antonio Gramsci—all of whom made significant contributions to the idea of civil society in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Constant’s comparison of liberty and civic virtue in ancient and modern societies, Von Stein’s attempt to unite legal science with state administration in a philosophical theory of Verwaltungslehre, and Gramsci’s analysis of the primacy of civil society in opposition to the State as locus for revolutionary praxis, all had direct bearing on the civil society debate. The absence of these and other thinkers from the present work is thus to be understood not in terms of their insignificance for the historical development of any idea of civil society but in terms of the volume’s defining and rather circumscribed problematique focused on the ethical component of the idea of civil society.

In some cases, the concerns of these and other thinkers were deemed tangential to or repetitive of our main line of argument while others led us too far afield of the ethical component of civil society per se and more toward a theory of the State. This is true of the work of Lorenz Von Stein. Indeed, this last aspect of the civil society debate, centering more fully on the State/Civil Society dichotomy is much more salient among continental thinkers than Anglo-American ones. Though our own inquiry is oriented more to the tradition emanating from the Scottish Enlightenment than later continental thought (with a few important exceptions) the very reasons for this distinction are, it is hoped, made clear. Ultimately, the various traditions dealing with the idea of civil society are of different relative emphases, to be explained, in part, by the historical conditions pertaining in different countries and periods during the eighteenth, nineteenth and indeed twentieth centuries. My own belief is that the constitutive core of the civil society debate is however strikingly similar and adequately examined through the approach adopted here—the ultimate wisdom of which must be left with the reader to decide.

This book was written in Budapest. It was conceived in Los Angeles (at the gentle prodding of Peter Dougherty of The Free Press) and owes much (perhaps too much) to many years spent in Jerusalem—in practical and theoretical engagement with the constitutive issues of citizenship and so of civil society. In developing my own ideas on the theme of civil society I have incurred immense debts to people in all three cities. To list all those whose thoughts, insights, and actions have contributed to my own ideas would be daunting. However, I would like to thank Marie Heller, Dénes Némedi, and György Csepeli at the Institute of Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, for reading and commenting on various chapters and, together with members of the Sociology of Law Department, for sharing their thoughts and feelings during this period of transition with me.

My own ideas on civil society were further developed during long discussions with Jeffrey Alexander, Ivan Szelényi, Shaul Friedlander, and Amos Funkenstein during the time I spent in Los Angeles. Perhaps, however, they owe most to the hard course in civic education that any resident of Israel must pass, almost every day with each morning’s headlines. Here I would especially like to thank Sholomo Fischer, Avishai Ehrlich, Menucha Orushkies, Ornar Elhaija, and Uri Ram as only a few among many who contributed to any sense I eventually made of these headlines. Years of professional association with Erik Cohen, Nachman Ben Yehuda, and most especially with S.N. Eisenstadt, whose provocative criticism, lucid insights, and standards of intellectual rigor pursued me to both Los Angeles and Budapest, formed, in no small measure, any understanding I may have of the constitutive issues of modern politics and society. The intellectual debt I owe to the latter—notwithstanding our deep disagreements on the idea of civil society—is beyond recompense.

I would also like to thank the Rothchild Foundation for enabling me to participate in the stimulating intellectual environment of UCLA during the 1988-89 academic year and the Fulbright Foundation for enabling me to spend the past two years in Budapest during this critical period of political and social change and transformation.

Finally, and most important, without the love, trust, and hope of my family, of Rahel Wasserfall, and of Sarah Ana Seligman the ideas set forth here would never have been put to paper. Responsibility for all errors and misinterpretations must, nevertheless, remain mine alone.

Introduction

However modern (or even postmodern) we take ourselves to be, our sustaining beliefs—in the Rights of Man, the equality of citizens, the integrity of the person, and freedom of belief—are as old as the revolutions of the eighteenth century. They are rooted in a world that identified the workings of Reason with those of the good life and saw (at least since Immanuel Kant) in the troika of Reason, Equality, and the Public Realm the ultimate touchstone of moral beliefs.

We, however, live amid the debris of Reason. The rights of Reason, as final arbitrators of ethical and moral dilemmas, have in this century increasingly been questioned, most recently by a plethora of postmodern philosophies. This very questioning of first principles brings in its wake a host of additional questions, and those questions define the classical and recently resurrected debates about what constitutes civil society. Thus, the perduring question of how individual interests can be pursued in the social arena and, similarly, the social good in individual or private life is once again a subject of public debate across the political spectrum, not only in the United States but, significantly, in Eastern and East-Central Europe as well. What is ultimately at stake in this question is, of course, the proper mode of constituting society itself, whether in terms of private individuals or of a shared public sphere.

The debate about the direction of civil society has its roots in the historical traditions of Western political theory and social philosophy but ironically now finds itself at center stage in the writings of contemporary observers. Intellectuals of stature such as Charles Taylor, Edward Shils, Michael Waltzer, and Daniel Bell have all been among the contributors to this renaissance.¹ For Daniel Bell the concept of civil society is crucial in understanding the issue of American exceptionalism. In a recent issue of The Public Interest he noted that the demand for a return to civil society is the demand for a return to a manageable scale of social life, one which emphasizes voluntary association, churches and communities, arguing that decisions should be made locally and should not be controlled by the state and its bureaucracies.² Similarly, Charles Taylor posits the idea of civil society as part of any continuing struggle for freedom in the modern world. For Michael Waltzer it points to an achieved synthesis of different values in the search for the good life.

Broadly stated, the continuing debate over the changing institutional politics of Western democracies (including the very existence of a public sphere), as well as the reorganization of the European Economic Community, the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, and the rising tide of national consciousness there, have all led to a renewed interest in civil society.

Thus, for example, Vladimir Tismaneanu has argued that the emergence of civil society through such organizations as Solidarity in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and the Hungarian National Forum have undermined the authority of the State in Eastern Europe.³ John Keane has called for a reexamination of Thatcherite policies of privatizing long-established British public service institutions such as broadcasting in the name of a free press which is held accountable to [its] citizens who work and consume, live and love within an independent, self-organizing civil society.⁴ New Republic journalist Mickey Kaus has called for an expansion of civil society in America through policies that induce rich and poor actually to rub shoulders as equals in improved public schools, communal day care centers, mandatory national service, and other institutions of citizenship. Finally, Anna Quindlen has put the best label on these and other issues by giving her New York Times column the name and theme of Public and Private. In short, this notion of civil society would seem to be one whose time has come again.

This treatise on the idea of civil society will explain this concept, whose importance as a means for understanding contemporary political and social life is increasingly being embraced by thinkers across the political spectrum. As mentioned above, recent writings of both a popular and theoretical nature on the contemporary politics of Europe (East and West) as well as the United States have been returning to this classical concept in an attempt to explain phenomena as diverse as the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and the nature of postmodern society in the industrialized countries of Europe and the United States at the close of the twentieth century.

The very idea of civil society touches on and embraces the major themes of the Western political tradition. Originally posited in the eighteenth century as referring to a realm of social mutuality, in the nineteenth century it was used to characterize that aspect of social existence which existed beyond the realm of the State. It points, in its different articulations, to those elements of both community and individualism that have served to define political thought for the past two hundred years. For civil society is, at the same time, that realm of natural affections and sociability recognized by Adam Smith as well as that arena where man acts as a private individual, regards other men as means, degrades himself into a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers, in Marx’s famous characterization of market relations.⁵ It is the realm of rights but also of property, of civility but also of economic exploitation. It rests on the legally free individual, but also on the community of free individuals. Apart from the State, it is nevertheless regulated by law. A public realm, yet one constituted by private individuals.

Given these very different resonances, it is no wonder that contemporary uses of the term tend to be broad and often lack analytic rigor. The works of writers as diverse as Ferguson and Marx, Hegel and Adam Smith, Tocqueville and Gramsci are all invoked in the contemporary rediscovery of civil society.⁶ Adding to this confusion is the strange and somewhat asymptotic development of the term itself in the twentieth century. For though ignored for decades by mainstream West European and North American writing on social philosophy and political theory, the idea of civil society continued (and continues) to be hotly debated among intellectuals on the left and critics of both the former state-socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and of postindustrial Western societies. Indeed, it is to a large extent only in the wake of the recent transformations of East European politics and society that the idea of civil society has once again gained currency among wider sectors of the academic, professional, and reading public.

Given this state of affairs, and especially the current renaissance of a 250-year-old concept long relegated to disuse, it would seem imperative to clarify and to present a clear exposition of the developing idea of civil society, its historical antecedents, the social context of its emergence and transformation (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and its continuing relevance to the problems and crises of modern existence (in both the West and the formerly communist East European societies). It is precisely this set of themes that the present volume on the idea of civil society will address. Moreover, I wish to stress here at the outset that the focus of this essay will be on the concept of civil society as a concept and not as an existing social or historical reality. For before we can fruitfully make use of this notion as either a descriptive or (as Clifford Geertz would remind us) a prescriptive model of (or for) social reality, we must clarify just what intellectual baggage we carry with us on the portmanteau of civil society. Consequently, this short inquiry will be devoted in the main to an exploration of those ideational positions which were central to the original articulation of the idea of civil society and without which any attempt to resurrect this concept must remain meaningless. This intervention in the current debates around civil society thus aims at clearing the necessary ground upon which any contemporary usage of the idea of civil society must be based. As an essay in the sociology of knowledge it hopes to clarify certain intellectual positions, to bring others, less immediately manifest, to light, and, in so doing, perhaps to make the current idols of the marketplace somewhat less attractive.

The concept of civil society as a collective entity existing independently from the State has, as noted, been critical to the history of Western political thought. In its different interpretations it has been central to the development of both the liberal-parliamentary tradition and the socialist, Marxian one. And although the concept of civil society was defined differently by the different theorists of the French, Scottish, and German Enlightenments, what was common to all attempts to articulate a notion of civil society was the problematic relation between the private and the public, the individual and the social, public ethics and individual interests, individual passions and public concerns.

It was this problem, or set of problems, that stood at the heart of the classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempt to expound a theory of society, and it is this set of problems which continues to define the most salient issues of political and social life today. For if the sense of a shared public is constitutive of civil society, so is the very existence of the private. It is after all the very existence of a free and equal citizenry—of that autonomous, agentic individual—of the private subject that makes civil society possible at all. For civil society is, most essentially, that realm where the concrete person—that particular individual, subject to his or her own wants, caprices, and physical necessities—seeks the attainment of these selfish aims. It is that arena where the burgher as private person seeks to fulfill his or her own interests. Civil society is thus that arena where—in Hegelian terms—free, self-determining individuality sets forth its claims for satisfaction of its wants and personal autonomy.

The public space of interaction in civil society is thus a public space only insofar as it is distinguished from those social actors who enter it as private individuals. Where there is no private sphere, there is, concomitantly, no public one: both must exist in dialectic unity for sense to be made of either one.

It is precisely this dialectic and tension between public and private, as constitutive of civil society, that I will develop in the following essay. This work will focus on precisely that definition of the individual—as moral agent and as subject without whom no cogent theory of civil society is possible. This inquiry into the constitutive individual or private aspect of civil society must, of necessity, be historical in nature. For the differentiation of civic selfhood from communal or collective attributes was a process that, in Western Europe, took place over hundreds of years. It owed much to the religious doctrines of sectarian or ascetic Puritanism, from which the notions of the individual as possessing metaphysical and moral value emerged. That selfhood, which, as both Marcell Mauss and Max Weber realized, was validated in the Déclaration des Droits de l’homme et du citoyen—stemmed, ultimately, from a religious paradigm whose roots were firmly tied to Reformation religion.⁷ Civil society, as originally articulated in the Scottish Enlightenment, thus owed—as we shall come to see—as much to Revelation as to Reason. And it is to relevation as well as to reason that we must turn to understand not only the original coherence and clarity of the idea of civil society but also the severe problems inherent to any contemporary attempt to rescue the notion of civil society and to use it as a model for social organization. As I hope to show, it was precisely these two sources—reason and revelation—and a unique, fragile and historically contingent balance between them that infused the original notion of civil society with its overwhelming saliency, but which today can no longer provide the ground for contemporary arguments for civil society.

In this context, contemporary Eastern Europe presents an interesting example of the problems incumbent on any contemporary usage of the term civil society. For while in Western Europe and in America many scholars are lamenting The Fall of Public Man and the dissolution of the ties of civil society (a fear already present in Tocqueville), in Eastern Europe an attempt appears to be under way to reconstitute civil society, and with it an autonomous public domain.⁸ Given the current interest in and concern over the crises of postindustrial (or ‘postmodern’) societies, the events in Eastern Europe are thus of great significance. On the one hand, Eastern Europe would seem to be almost a latter-day laboratory of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the passions, interests, and concerns that defined political thought at the onset of the modern era. Significantly, the current social and political changes in Eastern Europe would seem to present a unique historical reenactment of the development of an autonomous, self-regulating domain independent of the State. At present, in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other East-Central European countries, the nature of the relationship between civil society and the State is being rethought and is undergoing the most radical transformations.

Whereas the Western tradition of parliamentary, liberal democracy has always maintained the primacy and autonomy of civil society in its relation with the State, East (and East-Central) European countries have been characterized by a subsuming of the interests of civil society to those of the State. This tradition is currently being transformed in the most fundamental manner. The drafting of new Constitutions, the growth of free political parties, and the development of market economies have all led East European politicians, intellectuals, and indeed citizens to rethink the very constitutive premises of social and political organization. What is being forged in contemporary Eastern Europe, according to some observers, is nothing less than an experiment in civil society as a collective entity free of State regulation.

Yet, on closer scrutiny, there are serious problems with this vision of Eastern Europe as the Scottish Enlightenment revividus. One has only to look at contemporary Hungary to see the markedly Realpolitik character of the use of civil society in today’s Eastern Europe. A banner for the opposition between 1987 and 1989, the term became, with the fall of the communist regime, a legitimizing device for the new government. The quest for the realization of civil society was, it was argued, fulfilled with an elected Parliament and the Antal government of the Hungarian Democratic Forum. Civil society was realized in—the new State apparatus.

This what may seem at first sight a cynical use of the idea of civil society has deep roots in the concept’s very emergence in Eastern Europe. For it was after all in Poland in the late 1970s that the idea of civil society reemerged and became an important part of political discourse. But to understand the saliency of this idea in Poland we must also recall the tragic history of that country. Divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1772, 1793, and 1795, its revolutions of the nineteenth century crushed by Czarist Russia, enjoying a brief period of independence (as an authoritarian and militant State under Pilsudski) in the interwar years and then under the domination of Germany from 1939 and of the Soviet Union from 1945, Poland never had an autonomous State in modern times. The idea of civil society thus provided the only ideological alternative to foreign domination. Here too we see—as will be dealt with at greater length in the following chapters—the Realpolitik nature of civil society in Eastern Europe and its lack of that transcendental (what I earlier referred to somewhat metaphorically as revelatory) dimension, which was critical to the eighteenth-century idea of civil society. Thus, for all its popularity as a theme of international conferences, journal articles, and television debates in Eastern Europe, the concept is, metaphorically speaking, truncated, lacking that one important aspect of its earlier incarnation and hence, in today’s East European political debates of logistical and tactical and not of substantive value.

A similar dynamic, as well as lacunae in the necessary preconditions for civil society, can be found in the West European and North American contexts, where the idea of civil society is also being rediscovered. Indeed the current transformations in Eastern Europe are themselves matched by a concomitant restructuring of political action and thought in the West European and North Atlantic countries, particularly the United States. The United States, which, in contrast to both Eastern and Western Europe, always lacked a coherent concept of the State, has traditionally been presented as a model of civil society. Yet in the closing decades of the twentieth century the adequacy of this model is increasingly being questioned.

Any reading, however cursory, of the newspapers brings one face to face with those issues of individual rights and entitlements, public regulation and private liberties which stand at the core of civil society. Whether in the ethical dilemmas arising from biotechnology (IVF-GIFT of donated ova, surrogate motherhood, or artificial insemination), religious beliefs that stand in conflict with modern medical practice (as the tragic case of the Christian Science couple in Boston), the debates over corporate ownership and worker participation, or the legislation of antidrug laws—all are contemporary issues that question the existing synthesis of boundaries between the public and the private, the limits placed on individual liberties, and essentially the proper conceptualization of the social good and its relation to individual rights, responsibilities, and freedoms.

In fact, the increasingly problematized relation of