On the nature of civil society.

• Author: Rowley, Charles K.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire and the efforts made in Central and Eastern European countries to construct or reconstruct civil society as the salvation of their nations have inspired Western intellectuals to reconsider the concept of civil society and to ask whether it may also help us to understand the condition of Western societies. In both cases, the crisis of socialism, as an ideology and as a practical experience, has proved to be the fulcrum of this search for alternative concepts. For the most part, the concept of civil society is viewed by those active in its renaissance as an attractive combination of domestic pluralism and a continuing role for extensive state regulation and guidance. As such, it offers a broad tent capable of sheltering a multitude of diverse political systems. So broad indeed is this tent that it may be defined more appropriately as an empty shell (Rowley 1996, 6).

In this article, I shall review briefly the history of the concept of civil society and evaluate its relevance for classical liberal political economy. I shall suggest that the concept of civil society advanced by John Locke, the young John Stuart Mill, and other like-minded classical liberal scholars best encapsulates the classical ideal and provides an intellectually rigorous basis for defining the appropriate role of government, for protecting individual liberties, and for stimulating those private associations of individual citizens, all of which, in combination, constitute the fundamental basis for human flourishing and the wealth of nations.

The Concept of Civil Society in Historical Perspective

Until the end of the eighteenth century, the term "civil society" was synonymous with the state or political society. In this respect, the term reflected precisely its classical origins as a translation of Aristotle's Koinonia politike or of Cicero's societas civilis. In this conception, civil society expresses the growth of civilization to the point Where society is civilized as classically expressed in the Athenian polis or the Roman republic. It represents a social order of citizenship in which men (more rarely women) regulated their relationships and settled their disputes according to a system of laws, where civility reigned, and where citizens took an active part in public life (Kumar 1993, 377; Ferguson 1991; Roepke 1996).

Following directly in this tradition, John Locke (1690) employed civil government as a synonym for civil or political society, Kant defined burgerliche Gesellschaft as that constitutional state toward which political evolution tends, and Rousseau defined the etat civil simply as the state. In all these usages, civil society is contrasted with the uncivilized condition of humanity in a hypothetical state of nature or under an unnatural system of government that rules by despotic decree rather than by laws.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville narrowed the concept of civil society along sociological lines by delineating three realms of society. First, there is the state, which comprises the system of formal political representation, With its parliamentary assemblies, courts, bureaucracies, police, and army. Second, there is civil society, which essentially comprises the system of private and economic interests. Third, there is political society with its political associations such as local government, juries, and political parties and its civil associations such as churches, schools, scientific societies, and commercial organizations.

The life of all these associations, the "super-abundant force and energy" they contribute to the body politic, constitutes political society. Political society supplies "the independent eye of society" that exercises surveillance over the state. It educates us for politics, tempers our passions, and curbs the unmitigated pursuit of private self-interest.

In the postcommunist order, Tocqueville's third category, political society, has become the principal fulcrum for the reconstructed concept of civil society. The tendency has been for ex-Marxists and non-Marxists alike to stress the specifically non-economic and nonstate dimensions of civil society and to focus attention on civic, cultural, educational, religious, and other organizations operating at the periphery of the capitalist system, yet essentially autonomous from the state itself.

In a sense, this preoccupation is entirely understandable, though misguided, among the intellectuals of Central and Eastern Europe, where prior to 1989 the elevation of civil society was perceived not as constituting a new relationship between state and society but rather as an uncoupling of that relationship. Because the state could not be effectively challenged, it was to be ignored. The supporters of civil society aspired to make it an alternative society, a parallel society coexisting for the time being With a delegitimized and weakened official state (Kumar 1993, 386). Nothing better illustrated this parallel than Solidarity in Poland, which remained cohesive from the late 1970s until the collapse of communism but thereafter fragmented into sectorial squabbles and personal rivalries and became incapable of evolving the institutions necessary for a safe transition to constitutional democracy.

In no small part because intellectuals had evaluated civil society above the state, viewing it as the solution to all problems accumulated by socialism, they evinced a serious lack of concern after 1989 with regard to the reconstitution of the state and the private economy from the broader perspective of civil society in its classical conception. This lack of concern was especially serious (Klaus 1996) because communism was not defeated but simply collapsed, leaving weak and inefficient markets and weak and inefficient democracies, conditions that continue to plague the entire postcommunist order, the Czech Republic included. As Tocqueville noted, politics spreads "the general habit and taste for association," not Nice versa. In the absence of an appropriately formulated polity, civil society in both its broad classical sense and its narrow late-twentieth-century conception simply will not exist.

Much less excusable, and at least equally misguided, has been the post-1989 reaction of too many Western intellectuals. By claiming "the end of history" (Fukuyama 1992) and assuming too easily that the collapse of communism implied the success of U.S.-style capitalism, the large majority of Western intellectuals forgot the maxim that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" and focused attention excessively on the resurrection of civil society in the narrow "political association" sense of Tocqueville.

By inferring the final victory of democracy and capitalism over autocracy and socialism, these Western intellectuals proclaimed, at least implicitly, that any preoccupation with classical political economy was unnecessary and suggested instead that the results of majoritarian democracy represented the highest level of politicoeconomic achievement (Nozick 1989; Gray 1989, 1993). These judgments were (and are) misguided.

Certainly the free society rests upon and is intended to nurture a solid foundation of competent, self-governing citizens, fully capable of and personally responsible for making the major political, economic, and moral decisions that shape their own lives and those of their children. Certainly, such personal qualities are nurtured and passed on to future generations by healthy families, churches, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and schools, all of which provide training in, and room for, the exercise of genuine citizenship. Certainly, this expansive understanding of citizenship is challenged in the late-twentieth-century United States, as it was not when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, by contemporary forces and ideas that regard individuals as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces.

It is a fundamental error, however, to assume that these contemporary forces and ideas are exogenous elements of the state of nature to be counteracted by some narrow retreat into civil society or by some program that seeks directly to reinvigorate and to reempower the traditional local institutions that provide the environment for the exercise of genuine citizenship. In truth, the forces and ideas that now erode good citizenship emanate from the consequences of an ill-directed twentieth-century political economy, not from any neglect of civil society in its narrow late-twentieth-century form.

Before Resorting to Politics

"Why does anyone want to resort to politics, and why does anyone put one kind of political order above another?" Anthony de Jasay (1996) suggests that those who are both very earthy and very frank approve the political order that they believe is doing the most good for them. Such a "grand criterion" of political hedonism has no prospect of generating basic agreement about the respective merits and consequences of political systems except for the lowest common denominator of democracy, namely, the shared redistributive advantage of a winning over a losing coalition.

What is true in this crude and obvious way about the system of political hedonism in which the state caters to some interests and neglects others is also true, if less conspicuously, about any other political order that fosters one value and neglects others. Not all values are compatible; most compete with one another. A political order reveals a hierarchy of values by what it promotes and demotes, by the marginal rates of substitution between them that it establishes through policy interventions.

Predictably, the value-orientated political order will be an imperfect match for those who live within it if the citizens are heterogeneous with respect to the values they uphold. No discernible mechanism would make global choice coincide with the best available choice of each individual consistent with the best available...