Understanding Civil Society Study Notes IGNOU MGPE 13
Understanding Civil
Society
Study Notes
INTRODUCTION
Understanding Civil Society Between 1750 and 1850 the term
civil society emerged because the key concept in Western political thought.
Till then, civil society (koinônia, politikç, civilis, sociçtç, civile,
bürgerliche, Gesellschaft, Civill Society, societâ civile) was used
synonymously thereupon of the state (polis, civitas, état, Staat, state,
stato). A member of the civil society was also expected to be a citizen of the
state and under obligation to act in accordance with its laws and without
harming other citizens.
This perception remained dominant till the center of the
eighteenth century in Britain, France and Germany1 . the priority at this point
is with the character of civil society and therefore the limits of state
action.
Understanding Civil Society as an idea originated within
liberalism with an effort to undermine absolutism. The concept was introduced
into modern European political philosophy through the Latin translations of the
Aristotelian Greek term, politike koinonia, which for Aristotle, is that the
ethical-political community of free and equal citizens in ruling and being
ruled under a legally defined system of public procedures and shared values.
consistent with Riedel (1975), the term has since come to ask very different
organisations 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.
Understanding Civil Society However, the Aristotelian
identification of the political and therefore the civil was maintained until
the eighteenth century. Civil society, as an idea , is a component of the
democratic revolution of the eighteenth century as a bulwark against the
absolutism of the state. It reflects the new spirit of the Enlightenment
espousing the explanation for liberal individualism.
Aristotle And Classical Notion Of Civil Society
Understanding Civil Society The Greek view, as exemplified in
Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) writings, used the term koinonia that has the notions
of association, community and society, and there was no evidence of separate
terms for every of those words. Aristotle’s main concern, consistent with
Runciman, isn't ‘between society and therefore the refore the State but between
the private or familial and the political-cum-social’. However, within the
context of developing a philosophy of what constitutes the political, Aristotle
provides a series of distinctions that indicates the difference between
political society and therefore the society of citizens.
Aristotle points out that variety of natural associations are
formed for a few good purpose and therefore the highest of all of them , is
that the state that has got to be distinguished from the household which arises
naturally out of a union of male and feminine for the satisfaction of daily
needs. Within the household, there's a natural hierarchy of the husband over
the wife and master over the slave.
A cluster of households form a village and a number of other
villages together constitute the city-state that ensures economic and political
independence. The state comes into being for the sake of life but continues for
the sake of excellent life. it's established as an ideological end of other
associations.
Understanding Civil Society The state exists naturally since
‘man naturally may be a political animal’, for citizenry alone have perceptions
of excellent and evil, just and unjust. ‘A one that doesn't feel the necessity
for a state is either an angel or a beast’. it's this commonality that creates
possible for a household and a state. However, this unity between a household
and therefore the state doesn't imply that the 2 associations are equal, for
the ‘state has priority over the household and over a person among us, because
the ‘whole must be before the part’. Understanding Civil Society The household
satisfies the essential needs and necessities while the state tries to secure
good life. the standard of life within a state depends on those that constitute
it and therefore the ends they want to pursue.
Aristotle answers this question by defining a constitution
not even as a sort of government or a group of norms but as how of life, as
that determines the moral character of a state. He criticises Plato (428/7-347
BC) for conflating the household into a state and points out that household
differs from a state during a fundamental sense. within the former,
relationships are between the superior (husband and master) over the inferior
(wife, children and slaves), Understanding Civil Society whereas within the
state, the connection between the ruled and ruler is one among equality, some
extent that Locke (1632-1704), the founding father of liberalism, subsequently
reiterates in his critique of political absolutism and patriarchal authority
within the late seventeenth century.
The state may be a space for free of charge men because
women’s domestic responsibilities don't give them time for politics . Thus, for
Aristotle, a polis is an association of free and equal men bound together by
friendship and a standard look for justice secured in law.
POST-ARISTOTLE EVOLUTION
Aristotle also believes that it's only by balancing the
oligarchic (principle of quality concerning exclusive category of birth,
wealth, property, social position and education) with democratic (quantity or
numbers, the claims of the mass of people) elements that the state might be
stable and fewer vulnerable to revolutions. By this logic he seeks to avoid the
rule by the rich or the poor and sees the center class as means within the
societal balance. This bourgeoisie state, for Aristotle, is that the polity and
is that the most stable state, reiterating Euripides’ (480-06 BC) description
of those states because the ‘save states’.
In the post-Aristotelian phase, the Stoics developed a
conception of world citizenship and therefore the Roman Empire , unlike the
Greeks, tried to unite all citizenry thereunder . the event of Christianity
snapped the unity that Aristotle emphasizes by separating the polis or civitas
and therefore the church of Ecclesia, creating in St. Augustine’s (354-430)
doctrine a dual citizenship of civitas Dei and civitas terrna. Understanding
Civil Society Christianity infuses social unity by appealing to a divinely
inspired and commonly shared spiritual fellowship. Augustine, like Cicero,
defines the civitas as a gaggle of men joined in their agreement about the
meaning of ius or right.
However, for Cicero the Roman Republic is that the expression
of ius, for Augustine a community unified by the love of God or civitas de
expresses ius. By this definition, only a Christian political community might
be a real commonwealth, one that fully implements the indispensable requirement
of justice.
The later Christian tradition, exemplified in Aquinas’
writings, revives Aristotle’s notion of political life within the polis, by
viewing the state as not only natural and because the highest sort of
organisation, but also as existing within and subordinate to the overall frame
of divine direction of the planet .
The community and society is synonymous even in Aquinas even
as it's in Aristotle.
Alighieri Dante (1265-1321) makes an opportunity
with the old ideal of a unified Christian Commonwealth and substitutes a
carefully balanced and complete dualism during which the State and therefore
the Church are independent of every other, but necessarily complementary. the
last word unit is not any longer Christendom but a world State. In feudal
society, there existed, during a narrow sense, a division of society into
estates, communities and guilds but the normal notions of community and society
still ask both the political society of the state also on the units within it.
CIVIL
SOCIETY AND STATE IN OPPOSITION: PAINE
Understanding Civil Society Writing within the background of
the American Revolution with its innovative principles, that of natural rights
of man, popular sovereignty, right to resist unlawful government, and
republican and federal political structure, Paine points bent the utmost got to
restrict the facility of the state in favour of civil society, because the
state may be a necessary evil while the civil society is unqualified good.
The more perfect civil society is, the more it might regulate
its own affairs leaving little or no for state . With the exception of us ,
consistent with Paine, states everywhere crush and barbarise their people.
Despotic governments stifle individual initiative, support
patriarchal sorts of power within households and institute class divisions
within society through excessive rates of taxation. Paine thinks that reduction
of state power to a minimum would encourage the formation of a world
confederation of nationally independent and peacefully interacting civil
societies . this is often the start of a replacement idea of ‘a government
being the simplest which governs the least’. The nationally sovereign state
would be a mere elected manager and guarantor of ‘universal peace, civilization
and commerce’ (1977, p.183). he's convinced that limited states guided by civil
societies cemented by ties of reciprocal interests and mutual understanding
make it possible for global order and harmony.
Civil society thrives on common interest which is more
powerful than the positive law enacted and administered by governments. Understanding
Civil Society Individuals interact with others spontaneously enabling them to
make interlocking self-sufficient social whole free from conflict and if states
everywhere were built upon this natural social bases then the prevailing
inequality, aggression and bondage among individuals and groups would disappear
Paine, pointing to the positive aspects of the American
Revolution , repeatedly emphasizes the necessity for deliberately resisting
excesses of state power, underlined by two related but quite different sets of
arguments, leading to conclusions different from that of Ferguson. within the
first place, the principle of natural right and active consent of the governed
guides a legitimate state.
Individuals delegate power to the state held as trust, one
that would be legitimately withdrawn at any time. No particular political group
or institution has the proper to bind and control how, and by whom, the planet
is to be governed, as all individuals are born equal and with equal natural
rights.
These rights are God-given and incline individuals to act
freely and fairly for his or her own comfort and happiness without injuring the
natural rights of others. Natural rights measure the legitimacy of states and
can't be annihilated, transferred or divided and no generation can deny them to
their heirs.
Government without a constitution is like power without
right: “A constitution … is to a government, what the laws made afterwards by
that government are to a court of judicature. The court of judicature doesn't
make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only asks in conformity to the
laws made: and therefore the government is in like manner governed by the
constitution”.
CIVIL
SOCIETY AS LIFE BRAETH OF STATE: TOCQUEVILLE
- According to Alexis de
Tocqueville
(1805-59) Understanding Civil Society the problem of state despotism is the new
problem that confronts modern nations and this could be checkmated only by the
growth and development of civil associations that lie beyond the control of
state institutions.
- The plurality of civil associations is necessary for consolidating the democratic revolution.
- Civil associations, according to Tocqueville, are permanent open schools of public spirit within which citizens learn their rights and obligations, and press their claims and become familiar with others.
- He considers civil associations as arenas in which individuals can direct their attention to more than their selfish, narrow private and conflicting goals and also realise that they are dependent on one another and hence must work for cooperation.
- He acknowledges that central state institutions ensure the survival and coordination among civil associations but he also insists, like Hegel, that freedom and equality among individuals and groups depend upon preserving types of associations that nurture local freedoms and provide for the active expression of particular interests.
- He is categorical that right of association within civil society is inalienable.
STATE AS UNIVERSAL AND CIVIL SOCIETY AS PARTICULAR BY HEGEL
In Understanding Civil Society There is a popular belief that
it is the German thinkers in general and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831) in particular who had written extensively on the distinction
between the civil society and state as the crucial organising principle of the
modern world. Manfred Reidel observes that Hegel’s notion of civil society
(bürgerliche Gesellschaft) is innovative in political philosophy and is
comparable to Bodin’s concept of sovereignty and Rousseau’s notion of the
General Will: “Hegel drew together ‘bürgerlich’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ into one of
the basic concepts of political philosophy. When viewed externally, this
concept corresponds to the tradition of Aristotle’s koinónia politiké. Bodin’s
Melanchthon’s or Wolff’s societas civilis, and Kant’s ‘bürgerliche
Gesellschaft’.
Hegel stresses that the state proper and the civil society
are two different things. Civil society embodies a ‘system of needs’ and totality
of private individuals. With gradual freeing of the Third Estate, the civil
society came to be regarded as bourgeois society; a society of private, free
and equal individuals with property but without the domination of one group by
another. Civil society, for Hegel, represents conflict of interests that can be
resolved only by the state representing all interests of society.
Hegel sees the civil society as crippling and in constant
need of state supervision and control.
Unlike Paine, Hegel does not consider the civil society
(bürgerliche Gesellschaft) as a natural condition of freedom but as a
‘historically produced sphere of ethical life’ that lies in between the simple
patriarchal household and the universal state.
It includes the market economy, social classes, corporations
and institutions concerned with the administration of welfare and civil law.
The creation of civil society is the achievement of the
modern world (1976, p.339) and is made possible because it develops the ‘system
of needs’. Hegel, reiterating Ferguson, points out that the bourgeois economy
generates commodities that make a level of specialisation and mechanisation of
human labour necessary, thus transforming the nature of human needs, which no
longer remain natural and become social. Understanding Civil Society There is
no possibility of harmony within the civil society.
Harmony derived from unadulterated love is possible only
within a family. Relationships within civil society are tenuous and, at times,
bordering on serious conflict due to class division leading to restlessness.
Hegel recognises a variety of classes or class fragments- civil servants,
landowners, peasantry, intellectuals, lawyers, doctors and clergymen but the
moving principle of the civil society, is primarily in the Bürgerstand. Understanding
Civil Society Much of Hegel’s analysis is similar to that of Ferguson.
The class of burghers, in which Hegel includes the
workers, also is defined by its selfish individualism. The burgher class
depends on the corporationsmunicipal, trade, educational, religious,
professional and other state-authorised forms of collective associations; is
less public spirited than a self-serving bourgeois.
Hegel agrees with Ferguson and Paine that the modern civil
society is a complex system of transacting individuals, whose livelihoods,
legal status and happiness are interwoven but it is this universal selfishness,
and on this point, rejects Ferguson’s trust in citizenship and Paine’s belief
in natural sociability, that turns the civil society into a ‘blind and unstable
field of economic competition among private non citizens’. Hence the civil
society is unable to resolve its inherent conflicts and overcome particularity
and can remain civil only, if ordered politically, by the state. Understanding
Civil Society The state may intervene in the society to remedy its injustices
and inequalities- for instance, the domination of one or more classes by
another, the pauperisation of whole groups or the establishment of oligarchies.
Keane (1988) points out that Hegel’s analysis represents the
third phase in the evolution of the concept of civil society. The Young
Hegelians and Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-83) criticise this relationship between
the state and civil society. In writings such as On the Jewish Question,
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction and
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx uses the term civil society to
make a critique of Hegel and German Idealism.
The term disappears in the later writings. For Marx, the
civil society is the site of crass materialism, of modern property relations,
the struggle of each against all, and egotism. Civil society, he stresses,
arises from the destruction of medieval society.
In the medieval society, the individual was part of different
societies, such as guilds or estates, each of which had a political role and
hence there was no need for a civil realm.
With the breakdown of these partial societies, individual
becomes all important thus giving an impetus to the rise of civil society. The
old bonds were replaced by selfish needs of atomistic individuals, distinct and
separate from one another and from the community. Law provides the links
between individuals but it arises not from human will and dominates them by the
threat of punishment. The fragmented and conflictual nature of civil society
determines the nature of the modern state.
Antonio Gramsci (1871-1937) writes extensively on civil
society and uses the term in a manner different from that of Marx. It is not
simply a sphere of individual needs but of organisations that has the potential
for rational self-regulation and freedom. Understanding Civil Society While
Marx stresses the separation between the state and civil society, for Gramsci,
the two are interrelated.
Civil society consists of private institutions like
schools, churches, clubs, journals and parties which are instrumental in
crystallising social and political consciousness and political society consists
of public institutions like the government, courts, police and the army, the
instruments of direct domination. It is in the civil society that the
intellectuals play an important role by creating hegemony. Understanding Civil
Society If hegemony is successfully created by intellectuals then the ruling
class rules by controlling the apparatus of civil society and if they fail then
the rule is through coercion. Unlike Marx who places total emphasis on economic
relations for Gramsci it is the superstructure that is important.
CONCLUSION
Totalitarianism conflates nation in the state and makes the
state the sole and complete expression of the nation. It subordinates the state
to a party and a paternalistic leader. Philosophically, some ideologies like
Marxism and Anarchism feel strongly that the state will ultimately wither away.
Radical versions of liberalism, as in Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992),
contend that society represents spontaneity while the state stands for coercion
and hence its ambit ought to be reduced to the minimum.
There is popular but mistaken notion that hard economic facts
of modernity, that of commodity production and exchange under capitalism, a
view traceable to the writings of Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820-95), were
influential in the development of the concept of civil society.
A Understanding Civil Society of the writings of thinkers,
other than Marx and Engels reveal of their awareness of the importance of
market competition, commodity production and exchange and the growth of the
bourgeoisie, hostility to aristocracy and its inherited wealth, corrupt manner
and political privileges, to the modernisation of the concept of civil society.
These thinkers are profoundly aware of the heterogeneity and
complexity of civil society and “rarely reduced the complex patterns of
stratification, organization, conflicts and movements of civil society to the
logic and contradictions of a mode of productionthe emerging capitalist
economy.… they usually noted the patterns of harmony or (potential) conflict
between civil society’s privately controlled commerce and manufacturing and its
other organizations, including patriarchal households, churches, municipal
governments, publishers, scientific and literary associations and such policing
authorities as charitable relief organizations, schools and hospitals” (Keane
1988, p.64).
The early thinkers on civil society were aware of the
inequalities within capitalism and the possible losses of freedom that
commodity production and exchange would bring out. Above all, they were
profoundly sensitive to the dangers of concentration of political power.
It was the fear of despotism, attenuated by the experiences
of the French Revolution that made them think of ways and means of limiting
state power and in strengthening civil society. This view started when liberal
individualism was consolidating itself and becoming an integral component of
the modern political discourse.
Understanding Civil Society The modern democratic age comes
of age first in the post fascist period and then in the post communist era with
the roll back of the state leviathan and the triumph of civil society.
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