Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals.

• Author: Minogue, Kenneth

THERE SEEMS TO be no theory of why communism collapsed that does not send us scurrying back to take our own temperatures. Contemplating the post-communist world, we find ourselves falling into medical metaphors. After so long a political illness, what can it be that constitutes "health"? We cannot merely take our bearings from Europe and America. They are certainly vital and healthy in a number of striking respects when compared to the corruption and pollution of the communist world, yet every time we consider what would be communist regeneration, we seem to be driven to think of what would be ideal for us. Because others have been ill, our spiritual hypochondria seems to be getting worse. Certain ideals have been given a new lease of life by the collapse of communism and they threaten to give a whole new life to utopia.

Recovery from communism is currently understood in terms of three overlapping ideas. Democracy must have pride of place because a rot that began in politics must be corrected by a better way of governing. Democracy here includes the rule of law and the implementation of human rights, and it was these slogans that challenged the corrupt Party oligarchies of communism's last days. The second idea was that the market, with all that it involves, must replace the so-called "command economies" which have impoverished the East: capitalist abundance was what the peoples themselves thought they most needed. But both "market forces" and "capitalism" are unfortunate expressions. "Capitalism" is a recycled item of communist criticism of modern Western life. It retains the sense of something raw and selfish, badly in need of some political softening. "Market forces" has become a kind of demonic metaphysics, detached from its source in the things individuals choose to produce and consume, and feared as an alien power causing greed and the erosion of community. The Marxist theory of alienation has made a remarkable comeback by infiltrating our current vocabulary.

Both of these formulations have their supporters, but it is the idea of civil society which has swept the board. It stands for a plausible doctrine of social regeneration, to the effect that communism atomized society by politicization. Nothing moved in the Soviet Union unless the Party controlled it--nothing, that is, except for the criminality in which alone individual enterprise might flourish. The cure for this moral and political degradation must involve a comprehensive resurgence of the human spirit. No doubt democratic institutions must be established or restored, but the disease was more than merely political. No doubt a modern economy, with its plural centers of initiative, must be created. Neither of these things would be possible without the rule of law. But everyone knew that some additional element was needed to bind this new order together. The name for it has, very rapidly, come to be "civil society."

Ernest Gellner's Conditions of Liberty(1) is much the best treatment of civil society to emerge from this new situation. Gellner himself these days is in Prague much of the time, studying the process of regeneration from the inside. It is perhaps an advantage that the Czech Republic is the most vigorous patient in the ex-communist ward. Some Czechs can still remember what it was once like to be healthy. As a philosopher and anthropologist, however, Gellner has the notable advantage of being able to frame his study of civil society in terms of a comprehensive account of the modern world which he has been developing for many decades.(2)

He wants to persuade us above all that civil society is a most remarkable human achievement. The term refers to the modern Western state under the aspect of its social and economic vitality. It is less an idea than a complex institutional structure combining a very strong sovereign power on the one hand and a great amount of social freedom and independence on the other. But it is above all a moral fact, a complex set of attitudes including mutual trust between the members of society as a whole, which allows Europeans and Americans to be fluent creators of social institutions, including economic enterprises. This moral fact has developed over many generations and depends upon social and political conditions: a strong but limited government and a widespread aversion to overarching monopolies.(3)

The problem is that...