On Civil Society

"In recent decades, the notion of civil society has flourished in two very distinct political environments nd continues to be pertinent in both. In eastern Europe and other once dictatorial societies in Latin America and Asia, it became a way of talking about samizdat politics and dissent, of alluding as much to what was absent in autocracy as to anything present in the critics’ and dissenters’ paltry institutions. In this kind of context it has had a radical utopian cast: the imagined civil society we would ideally like to have, used as a critique of the despotic regimes we actually do have. It has also been a map for democrats discovering, as many recently have, that to democratize a state and liberalize an economy is not necessarily to establish a domain of real democratic freedom, unless, at the same time, society is civilized and pluralized through the cultivation of educational, philanthropic, religious, and other forms of civic association.

THE LIBERTARIAN PERSPECTIVE: CIVIL SOCIETY AS A SYNONYM FOR THE PRIVATE SECTOR

It is easy enough to imagine that our lives and our institutions have only two possible venues, one public, the other private. The public one in this popular view is the domain of politics and universality, where we vote, pay taxes, fight wars, do jury service, discharge civic obligations, and claim services based on an idea of justice. The private one becomes the place where just about everything else occurs: where we vork and play and pray and sleep and learn and produce and consume and reproduce.

This way of conceiving our political and our private lives as radical opposites suggests these two sectors of our living wo are rival and largely incompatible. The first is the domain of the state and its formal governing institutions that we consider cynically as “it”; the second a more sympathetic domain we think of as 'us' that encompasses almost everything else we can imagine: from individuals to social organizations, from economic corporations to civil associations. The public sector is defined here by its power: the state is coercion. defined when it is a democratic state by its legitimate monopoly over force. The private sector is defined by liberty: the market is freedom, defined by voluntary contract and free association, and as such is the condition of privacy and individuality. This insistence on a bipolar interpretation is rooted in the illusory conviction that to be truly free we have to make a radical choice between government and markets.

In this most commonplace of all understandings, civil society is a synonym for the private market sector, a domain of free individuals who associate voluntarily in various economic and social groupings that are contractual in nature, including the family (which becomes a mini-corporation, a product of implicit contracts). With the state and the individual thus polarized, any growth in the one must come at the cost of attrition in the other. The two realms confront each other in a zero-sum game where any change in one entails an equal and opposite change in the other. More power, less liberty; more private, less public: and vice versa. When Senator Robert Dole offered Americans the choice of "trusting government or trusting the people," he polarized the public and private realms in just this way, leaving us only with the demonized "it" of public-sector government and the glorified multitudinous “me’s” of the private-sector "we" he calkd "the people".

This classical libertarian model — setting be people and their government at odds and making power the nemesis of liberty and the state the enemy of the individuals it is supposed to serve — leaves no other venue for civil society but the private sector. No large distinctions can he made between individuals and the private civil associations they may form, between economic corporations and civil organizations, or between the realm of markets and the realm of culture, ethics, or religion (to take some emblematic instances). Dualism here creates an implacable (and improbable) opposition, which leaves those who are frustrated with government thinking that privatization is their only option...

In the libertarian model, social relations both within the private sector and between it and the state sector feel like contract relations: a series of deals that free individuals or associations make in the name of their interests and goods and in defense of their liberties. The libertarian model hence is a version of the social-contract model: it has the “thin” feel of liberal social relations where the human nexus is severely attenuated; where, in the language of the philosopher Robert Nozick, people "live separate existences" among which "no moral balancing is possible" and where their "voluntary consent" is required every time one forges a relationship with another—whether in a business, a church, or a marriage.

When the individual looks at government from the privileged sanctuary of the private sector, as she would n the libertarian model, she sees only a fearsome leviathan sometimes capable of serving her interests as a client of government bureaucracies or as a consumer of government services, but just as likely to swallow up her liberties whole... such fear is harder to comprehend in the United States, where the governing majority has forever been a "puppy dog tethered to a lion’s leash", in Louis Hartz’s poignant phrase in his The Liberal Tradition in America. We can understand why, at the time of the Founding, Americans as distrustful of democratic as of monarchical power secured a constitution that did as much to limit as to enable government. Yet today many Americans persist in their distrust, as if they were still English Whigs suspicious of George III's ambitions or refugees from Napoleonic étatisme. "A government powerful enough to give us all we want," President Ford was still proclaiming at the 1996 Republican Convention, “is powerful enough to take from us all we have.” The prudent libertarian concludes that liberties must therefore be surrounded by a thick wall of rights.

Philosophers looking at the fretful citizen pursuing his economic interests and deploying defensive parapets of rights to defend himself against an encroaching state may come to regard him as little more than an economic animal: homo economicus, the citizen defined as a consumer of government services, not as a participant but only as a watchdog to the political representatives accountable to him. From the point of view of the citizen who sees himself an economic animal, civil associations feel, at best, rather like consumer cooperatives or rights alliances. They permit people to protect themselves more efficiently and serve themselves more securely but have little to do with participation, cooperation, or sociability per se, let alone solidarity, community, or the pursuit of a commonwealth such a community makes possible.

For people in our day who fear politics and trust only private power, markets are the ticket to freedom—and they come to consider them as an appropriate surrogate for civil society...

By focusing on the consumer who is burrowed into a shell of rights and thus - autonomous, solitary, and egoistic - likely to venture into the social sector only to get something from a service-station state whose compass of activities must be kept minimal, the libertarian model of civil society can envision only a rudimentary form of social relations that remains shallowly instrumental: the citizen as client, the voter as customer, the democratic participant as consumer. Rights are the only political weapon that such private citizens can imagine: claims on government, which, however, impose no corresponding obligations on them as citizens...

Liberty is reduced to the private choices that consumers make among goods from a menu they do not write. The libertarian model of civil society cannot soften relations between individual and state or mediate between them, as many of sociology’s traditional systems have tried to do. Nineteenth-century sociologists like Ferdinand Toennies wrote of both society (Gesellschaft) and community (Gemeinschaft) as mediators of individuality in the setting of coercive states. The thinness of the libertarian version of civil society means that it is unresponsive to the yearning for community and solidarity which modern peoples living in mobile, post-industrial societies feel so deeply. (This is what Rokert Bellah and his colleagues wrote about so movingly in their Habits of the Mind.) And it accounts for much of the communitarian frustration that attends thin liberal conceptions of civil society, a form of frustration that can be dangerous to democracy. For it is a basic law of modern politics that where democratic communities cannot be found to do the work of solidarity and identity which human existence seems to require, undemocratic communities that do so will appear...

THE COMMUNITARIAN PERSPECTIVE: CIVIL SOCIETY AS A SYNONYM FOR COMMUNITY

... Yet even if our highest hopes are but "contingent products" of a self-invented identity (as the skepticist liberal philosopher Richard Rorty has written), the distinction between the ancient communities that we call “natural” and the new associations that seem so obviously ‘artificial’ is palpable and politically consequential. Rorty does not seem to notice that just because today’s natural communities were once artificially constructed does not diminish their conservative political potency as "ancient" and "natural" associations impregnable to today’s fashions and popular whims...

The political danger of unvarnished communitarianism is that it tends to absorb, assimilate, and finally monopolize all public space. When America’s "cultural conservatives" make war on consumer capitalism (Hollywood, for example) and on the thin, relativistic liberal state (Patrick Buchanan’s culture wars), they are reviving deadly old notions of Kulturkampf and are using a colonialist cultural paradigm that assimilates both the state and the private sector...

The implicit political aspirations of communitarianism were evident in the German ideal of Volksgemeinschaft... Communitarians are not always alive enough to this darker side of the yearning for communal identity. The heart whose habits they would serve is not always rational, and its need for love sometimes seems to depend on its need to hate.

... Ironically, while both communitarian and libertarian versions of civil association polarize state and individual (or state and community) in the name of the wall between public and private, they tend in both cases to colonize the “other side.” People who think of themselves primarily or exclusively as economic beings — consumers and producers—start thinking about government exclusively as a servicer of client needs; people who think of themselves primarily or exclusively in terms of their ethnic or tribal identity start thinking about government as a repository for their identity. In effect, they colonize public space with their private identities. When market liberals do this, they downsize the state until it near]y vanishes ("the best government is no government at all"), making the private sphere quite nearly sovereign — a totalizing presence the face of which every identity other than that of the producer and consumer vanish; when cominunitarians do it, they subordinate the state to a larger community which the state must faithfully serve — whether that comrnunity is the fatherland, a Volksgemeinschaft or some blood clan writ large (the "Austrian People," the "Scottish nation," the “Bosnian Serb state,” or "Christian America"). Islam’s aspirations to theocracy are a logical extension of cornmunitarianism’s totalizing tendencies.

Communitarians in the throes of a totalitarian temptation must also confront the paradox that the natural communities which they aspire to fortify are often in practice realized only artificially. Under modern conditions, where the environment for natural community has been undermined by secularism, by utilitarianism, and by the erosion of “natural” social ties, many communities claiming traditional or natural identities must make strenuously artificial efforts to reconstitute themselves as the organic natural communities they no longer are or can be. Their labors result in contrived “voluntary” associations pretending to be “natural communities." The Ku Klux Klan is no more a "clan" in the sense of an extended kinship association or a blood band than self-consciously hyphenated American identity groups such as Polish-American or African-Americans are really Polish or African...

Neither Bill Clinton nor Bob Dole spent much time during their adult lives in the village communities they celebrated as definitive of their hopes for America. The creative friction between cosmopolitan cities and small towns is marked by this tension between self-creation and ascriptive (given) identity. The identity that a deracinated city dweller—long since uprooted from some faintly remembered village childhood — seeks as a home for his yearnings may, for those still enmeshed in village life, appear as nothing so much as a prison. Village life portrayed in literature enjoys this twin reputation: depicted through the gentle memories of nostalgia writers like Dylan Thomas and Thorton Wilder, it is a remembered sanctuary from the world’s dismal urbanity, a child’s Christman in Wales long ago, the town that was “our town” as we wish it might have been; depicted by unsentimental realists such as Toni Morrison or Thomas Hardy, it is little more than a death trap — not our town but their town, the town without pity and the town without tolerance...

Such adventurers [rural-urban migration] strode out across the threshold of modernity into a yearling urban world that had little room for the clan fealty of the Middle Ages. But in leaping from a stolid world of community into the frenzy of deracinated urban life, they prepared the ground for a later communitarian nostalgia. The small towns they abandoned for urban liberation were reconstructed by their great-grandchildren as imagined sanctuaries from urbanity’s plagues and used as political ammunition in the war against modernity."

--- Benjamin R. Barber (1998) A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong.