3.2 - Giner, Salvador - The Withering Away of Civil Society (en)

7/29/2019 3.2 - Giner, Salvador - The Withering Away of Civil Society (en)

1/22

The following ad supports maintaining our C.E.E.O.L. service

The Withering Away of Civil Society

The Withering Away of Civil Society

by Salvador Giner

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3 / 1985, pages: 247-267, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=c51d4ec3-66bd-4122-9449-de6dade71cc3http://www.ceeol.com/


2/22

Praxis International 5:3 October 1985 0260-8448 $ 2.00

THE WITHERING AWAY OF CIVIL SOCIETY?

Salvador Giner

I. Introduction

The demise of civil society is now a distinct possibility. The ensemble ofrelationships, moral assumptions, rules and private institutions that often goesby that name is undergoing profound changes. Under the new conditionscreated by them, the survival of civil societyas traditionally understood andperceivedwill be highly problematic, if not impossible.

In this article I wish to look at the transformation and disappearance of theinherited world of civil society as well as the course which some of its values andinstitutions are likely to follow. In order to do so, I begin with someconsiderations on the history of the notion of civil society in its several versions.I then move on to a definition and description of civil society itself as it has takenshape and evolved in certain parts of the Western world during recent times.This is followed by a consideration of the trends which, stemming largely fromthe logic of civil society itself, have led to the incipient rise of a new social order.

This social order is, to a large extent, incompatible with a civil society astraditionally understood. It increasingly hinges upon a number of eitherinterlocking or mutually competitive and relatively autonomous organizationalstructures (corporations) and upon organized collective interests. For thatreason, some attention will be devoted to the substitution of the inheritedfeatures of civil society by those of the new, corporate universe. The essaycomes to an end with some reflections on how certain values at the heart of civilsociety may still survive successfullyand not as mere relicswithin themoral constitution of todays emerging corporate world.

Historically, civil society has been understood with notorious imprecision.

The meaning attributed to the expression has shifted within schools of thoughtas well as between them.1 The term has been amply used within two traditions,the liberal and the Marxist. In turn, it is possible to distinguish, within each ofthese two strands, at least another two significant broad interpretations, if notmore. I shall therefore present, albeit briefly, four different views of civilsociety: (a) the classical liberal, (b) the Hegelian, (c) the classical Marxist, and(d) the neo-Marxist. It ought to be remembered that their sequence in time isonly partially relevant since even the earliest version, the classical liberal,continues to enjoy a notable degree of acceptance today. Indeed, neoconserva-tive thought and practice actively support most of its by now venerable

assumptions, although, for quite some time, the expression civil society itselfhas almost ceased to be used by traditional liberals. By contrast, it has retainedthe favour of socialists and Marxists. The latter, however, have never succeededin appropriating it exclusively for themselves. It remains also, and in somefundamental ways, a liberal conception.


3/22

Praxis International248

II. The Liberal Theory

1. According to the earliest liberal philosophers, civil society was acommunity or commonwealth made up of individuals who had entered intopermanent and civilized relationships with each other in the pursuit of theirlegitimate interests. Although for those thinkers the state was one of the resultsof such civilized social intercourse, government was conceived as an institutionwhose sole function was the preservation of the civil societys good order.Government and the state ought not to interfere in the spontaneous life andprosperity of civil society. Three centuries after Lockes publication of his TwoTreatises on Government(1690; the Essay on Civil Governmentwas completed in1679), liberal writers such as Hayek still separate the state from the rest of

society in a similar manner. He considers the former as one of manyorganizations, though one which is confined to the government apparatusand which does not determine the activities of the free individuals. In fact whatfor Hayek really constitutes society is the spontaneously grown network ofrelationships between individuals and the various organizations they create.Among the latter the state is an artificial construct. It is inimical to freedomunless oriented towards letting society (civil society) be.2

Crucial though the distinction between state and civil society was eventuallydestined to become, it was unclear in the work of the earliest liberal theorists.Thus Locke repeatedly speaks of political or civil society, using both terms

interchangeably as synonyms: For him, civil, or political, society is a civilstate, a condition of civility, the opposite of the state of Nature3 in whichmen found themselves before they entered into that nexus of permanent,rational and reasonable freedoms and mutual obligations that alone forms a truebody politic. The further distinction between civil society in general and thatpart of it which must specialize in government only takes shape in Lockeswritings in an implicit, though certainly far from cryptic manner.4 His (andHumes)5 overriding preoccupation was to distinguish between a wild,uncultivated state of mankind and a more advanced state, where prosperity,orderly freedom and a more rational life became possible. It was this

preoccupation that conferred its particular thrust to Fergusons Essay on theHistory of Civil Society. Published nearly a century after Locke wrote his SecondEssay, it was more historically minded and focussed on the stages of thetransition from the state of nature to that of polished nations, that is, nationspossessing a civil society. However, the increasingly important distinctionbetween the political and the purely civil spheres of society still continued to beimplicit. None the less, with Ferguson civil society had begun to be contrastednot only with the barbaric state of nature but also, and very specially, with allsorts of despotism, oriental as well as occidental, and with feudalism. This lattercontrast became important: in Fergusons Essay rude, oriental and feudal

societies were depicted as chafing under arbitrary and overbearing tyrants,while enlightened civil societies were described as havens for free competitionand peaceful social intercourse.6 Liberals, needless to say, were whollyconscious of the limitations of such freedom and security. Thus for Locke, menhad divested themselves of a primeval Natural Liberty and put on the Bonds

aCEEOL NL Germany


4/22

Praxis International 249

of Civil Society for the sake of comfort, safety and peace, as well as for that of amore regulated and evidently less dangerous freedom than that of the state ofnature.7

Early liberal attention to the past and its despotic or feudal legacy began toswitch, however, towards new developments when the state, always conceivedas a circumscribed and protective institution, became more powerful thanenvisaged. Government and its apparatus (as perceived by Tocqueville andeven by Mill) was beginning to transgress its ascribed boundaries. It was this,for the inheritors of the liberal tradition, that made them aware of theimportant, nascent dichotomy between political and civil society. Yet theboundaries of civil society themselves had been left most unclear: demarcationlines were left in the realm of law and the rights of individuals as citizens. No

specific content had been conferred upon civil society, save a recognition that itwas made up of men endowed with individual interests and of different classand unequal life chances (to use the telling expression coined by a much laterliberal writer Max Weber). Civil society in classical liberal thought wasunderstood, therefore, not as a specific structure but rather as a state ofcivilization, a level of moral maturity, entailing tolerance and toleration, asphere established for the realization of individual interests in terms of peacefulpursuit, mutual contract, privacy, and private rights and property.8 Civilsociety for the liberal mind was, and continues to be, a historical achievement inthe moral evolution of mankind. And, for later liberal theorists, it became also

an achievement under threat.2. For the classical liberal tradition the state emerges as a consequence of civilsociety, and it is established with the purpose of preserving its integrity. Hegel,who for the first time theorized the relationship between these two entities andattempted a more clear demarcation between them, inherited this chief tenet ofliberalism.

Hegels theorization stems from his effort to overcome certain aspects ofliberal individualism without falling prey to anti-individualism. He wanted toreconcile universalism with the particularistic features brought about by theindividualistic and particularistic tendencies of the new liberal civilization,

which were embodied in the civil society. This move towards integrationbetween individualism and universalism9 allows us to understand Hegel, in thisrespect at least, as a liberal (though perhaps a revisionist one) for he did notwishto see individualism trapped and perishing in the clutches of an overridinguniversalism. This interpretation is not far-fetched, since Hegel explicitlyrecognized the claims of privacy, the centrality of individual interests, and theinviolabilityof personal rights.10 His problem was their reconciliation with hisown conception of a harmonious social order: would the vigorous andunattenuated presence of those liberal virtues allow such order to endureunperturbed?

It is in the continued existence of the private universe of civil society thatHegels statements only in the state does man have a rational existence andman owes his entire existence to the state11 must be understood. While civilsociety is the realm of the particular, including the selfish, the egoistic, thefamilistic and even the tribal, the state is the home of the universal, and


5/22


possesses rational properties which cannot be found elsewhere. That is why theessence of the state is ethical life which is expressed in the unity of theuniversal and the subjective will. This unity is realized through the educationof the citizens in their duties towards the public realm and specifically towardsthe authority of the state. It is this authorityunselfish, objective, rational,universalthat makes civilized life possible, including the pursuit of theparticularistic aims of individuals.

Hegels idealization of the state reaches its climax when he affirms that itsdivine principle is the Idea made manifest on earth. This idealization alsoleads him to the identification of the state with the organic community of thenation or fatherland. If the early liberals had failed to distinguish clearlybetween political and civil society (a distinction carefully drawn by Hegel, as

well as by some later liberals) Hegel in turn failed to distinguish between thestate apparatus and the nation. Yet, idealizations and confusions apart, Hegelsaw the key virtue of Western political life as that of having developed statesthat left a free scope to their citizens not only to pursue their interests but also toadminister the law in detail and to engage in their customary practices,unmolested by despotic intervention. Civil society is thus perceived by Hegel asthe arena for the deployment of subjective and private needs and pursuits.Unlike the state, it lacks systemic qualities, and therefore it needs a frameworkand an agent of coordination. This higher coordinator is the state, the onlysocial entity endowed with universalism and objectivity. And Hegel does not

seem to contemplate the danger that the state may engage in wantoninterference with the life of civil society, nor that its administrative apparatusmay ever become endemically interventionist. The states ethical force remainsunquestioned:12 the impersonality of legislation, the impartiality of the courts,the anonymity of the bureaucracy and the altruism of national (state) loyalty areits living proofs.

II I. The Marxist Theory

1. By understanding the state as the embodiment of reason and universality,

Hegel had given the theory of civil society, as it stood before him, a new slantwhose possibilities Marx was quick to grasp, obviously, in so far as Hegelsinterpretation entailed a hardly disguised glorification of the Prussianbureaucracy and of an oppressive state of affairs, Marx found Hegels ideaspernicious. Marx denied any superiority, neutrality and universalism to a statewhich, for him, was a class-bound entity. The split between the politicalrealmclaiming to represent the interests and aspirations of an entire society,but failing in fact to do soand the realm of private life, had been a creation ofbourgeois society. Under this division of spheres the civil society was the arenafor selfish competition, wage-linked capitalist exploitation and class inequality.

The political orderor juridical and governmental superstructurewas theguarantor of that universe of depredation and moral squalor which wascapitalist civil society. The legal mystifications of political society were highlyefficient in maintaining asymmetrical bourgeois freedoms and unequal prop-erty rights. Only the restoration of the political realm to civil society through


6/22


the destruction of the state and their mutual reintegration, would put an end tothis situation. Eventually the result would be the abolition of both contradic-tory structures, and their substitution by a far superior universe.13

Following Hegel, Marx defined civil society as the sum total of socialrelationships outside the strict realm of the state. Contrary to the vision of theearly liberals, though, civil society was not conceived by him as an aggregate ofunrelated individualsor individuals only related to each other by contractsand mutual obligations, freely entered intobut rather as a situation of mutualdependence bred by the bonds of class, necessity and the material conditionsof life. It was the coherence and economic structure of civil society thatprovided the underpinnings of other aspects of the social order, such as law,belief, and the state itself:

It is natural necessity, essential human properties, however alienated they mayseem to be, and interest, that hold the members of civil society together; civil, notpolitical life is their real tie . . . Only political superstition today imagines thatsocial life must be held together by the state whereas in reality the state is heldtogether by civil life.14

These views, expressed in an early manuscript, and which seem to relegatethe state to the status of a by-product of the political economy as it is embodiedin civil society, continued to be firmly held by the mature Marx. Thus inCapitalhe insists:

It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production tothe direct producers . . . which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis ofthe entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation ofsovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of thestate.15

But the state is not superfluous, for it is through its institutions that the rulingclasses, and more specifically the bourgeoisie, implement their labour laws,impose their repressive measures, and reinforce their uneven distribution ofwealth, capital, and rewards. Whether the notion of the state as class tool isreally what Marx believed, or whether he really thought that it possessed a

much greater degree of autonomy and sophistication is a moot point here, moreappropriately discussed by those who wish to build a theory of the state upon hispremises. What is relevant for our discussion is Marxs emphasis on the natureof bourgeois civil society and its inner strengths, which postulates a primacyof the economic over the political, not to mention the ideological. Civil society isthe realm of class, inequality and exploitation, and forms the natural basis ofthe modern state. The latter exists because the contrast between public andprivate life, the contrast between general and particular interests must bemaintained under modern conditions. The state administration is, if anything,helpless before the reciprocal plundering of different civil groups, and

impotence is its natural law:For this tearing apart, this baseness, this slavery of the civil society is the naturalbase on which the modern state rests, as the civil society of slavery was the naturalbasis on which the classical state rested. The existence of the state and theexistence of slavery are inseparable. . . . If the modern state wished to do away


7/22


with the impotence of its administration, it would have to do away with thecontemporary private sphere for it only exists in contrast with the privatesphere.16

The state, we are told, is the active, self-conscious and official expression ofcivil society,17 but the supremacy of the latter is asserted in every possible way.There is an interesting congruence here between Marxs interpretation and theclassical liberal vision. It is the moral judgement passed by each that differed.

Marxs concentration upon class and the capitalist mode of production ledhim to neglect the institutional analysis of civil society, not to speak of the stateitself. In a way, his notion of the civil society was still very close to Hegels,though he avoided the lumping together, by the latter, of all the familial andeconomic relationships that fell outside the political realm. Yet his constant

emphasis on the sham and facade nature of many bourgeois organizationstogether with his inclination to see the state as a by-product of class dominationled Marx to concentrate his attention elsewhere. As a consequence, and for avery long time indeed, Marxists felt quite happy with the vague lineaments ofthe civil society as presented by Marx, to the point that most of them came toidentify social structure with class structure by implication, the latter beinglargely the result of a given mode of production. In fact by civil society Marx,Engels and their followers referred to the entire set of class relations and forcesof production, as distinct from their political and ideological manifestations.

2. The founders of liberalism originally developed the state/civil societydichotomy. Hegel gave it greater precision and specificity. Marx took it a stepfurther in the direction of concreteness. At each one of these three stages themeanings and attributes of each component of the analytic pair shifted. Onemore step, and a fourth historical change in interpretation, was to be providedby certain neo-Marxist critics, principally Gramsci.

Most contemporary Marxists believe that Gramsci developed Marxs theoryof civil society and the state without modifying it substantially: he enriched it.He might have done so, but his views on this matter were certainly somewhat atvariance with those of the master. And there were at least two interpretations in

Gramscis work itself. To begin with, Gramsci analytically disentangled civilsociety from the economic infrastructure and then divided the superstructureinto what he termed two general levels: civil society itself (i.e., the ensembleof organisms commonly called private ) and political society (the state).The first level exercises a form of class domination (called by Gramscihegemony) which expresses itself through indirect control: it breedsdomination through indoctrination, education and ideological processes lead-ing towards a consensus about the acceptability of social inequality. Hegemonycreates the common sense on which class society can rest undisturbed. Bycontrast, the second level exercises direct domination, either through institu-

tionalized violence or through the forcible maintenance of public order: it isbased on an apparatus of state coercive power.18 In other passages ofGramscis work, however, the state is described as only oneelement of a widerpolitical society. The constituent elements of the state in the large organicsense are, on the one hand the state properly so called and on the other,


8/22


civil society.19 This new distinction, he explains, is only methodological,since in reality state and civil society overlap and fuse with each other, as theintegral parts of one single, political society.20

Gramscis politicization of the civil society as it appears in this second versionof his conception paradoxically brings him closer to the original liberalinterpretation. It was not a state of mental confusion that made Locke speak ofcivil or political society: civil government (the state) was the naturalpolitical dimension of a civilly constituted commonwealth of free andresponsible men. The difference was that whilst for him (as well as for Fergusonand many other liberals) class, breeding and education would not permit oradvise the incorporation of the many into the society of the few (as they lackedthe intellectual qualities required for the conduct of public business and

responsibility, i.e., they could not form a polished society), for Gramsci classoppression was not only odious, it was also unacceptable. For Gramsci, as forthe liberals, the state was the political constitution of civil society, separableonly by analysis. Unlike them, however, he thought that it was also theconstitution of class bondage and the essence of modern inhumanity. It was nota state of civility by any conceivable means. The concept of hegemony itself,again, brings Gramsci formally close to the liberals. Hegemony is not just theprocess of indirect domination through the institutions of civil societyschools, churches, civic and voluntary associations, and the likebut veryespecially the moral and intellectual leadership produced by the ruling groups

(or those with a calling and a capacity to rule). Gramsci even contemplates thepossibility that hegemony and democracy can be in some definite wayscompatible in so far as the ruling groups may express the needs of the ruledgroups and also incorporate some of them (individually, not collectively) intothe leadership.21 Hegemony therefore entails the wise control of civilsociety, giving it direction and providing it with the adequate leadership. Andalso, save in the case of revolutionary movements, maintaining its classstructure with the least possible amount of direct state violence.

The reception of Gramscian ideas by contemporary Marxist thought hasbrought with it a renewed interest in the texture and composition of civil society

and its place within the entire social universe of advanced capitalism, and evensocialism. It is doubtful whether it would be fruitful here to review the severalinterpretations to which the notion has lent itself in post-Gramscian Marxism.By and large, the tendency has been to lump together, under its name, all thoserelationships in bourgeois society that cannot be reduced to economicactivity,22 and which fall outside the public and administrative realm of thestate. As a consequence, within this contemporary current civil society appearsas a sector which stands between the state and the economy, that is, between theovertly political and the sphere of production. It is thus conceived by some asthe locus of class conflict and reproduction. Although the followers of the

Gramscian approach do in several cases see structural changes taking placewithin civil societycorresponding roughly to changes in capitalism and in theevolution of the welfare statethey do not contemplate its eventual disappear-ance as an identifiable set of private institutions, relationships and laws. Theyhave thus developed a new Marxian orthodoxy, according to which society is


9/22


best understood by its partition into three spheres: the state, civil society andthe economy.

IV. What Is Civil Society?

Does civil society exist? Has it ever been a recognizable historical entity? Isthe concept itself at all useful? The variations upon the theme of civil societywhich have just been examined seem to entirely justify these broad questions:not only does each interpretation disagree with some of the others on matters ofsubstance but they all treat civil society with notable imprecision.

The imprecision of the notions used may perhaps be more symptomatic ofthe object described by them than a reflection of carelessness on the part of its

interpreters. In stark contrast to the clearly defined boundaries of its oppositeentity, the state, those of civil society must always remain unclear. For the state,demarcation is all, whereas for civil society ambiguitythe ambiguity thatstems from a certain kind of freedomis all. And, despite the further problemsthat the identification of civil society with the realm of individualistic andcompetitive freedom raises, civil society as a concept cannot be easily dispensedwith. In the context of the liberal order to which it belongs it cannot be thoughtaway without that order also vanishing from our minds. It is of its essence.

If it is inextricably linked to the rise and consolidation of capitalism,bourgeois civilization and liberal democracy, one wonders in what sense some

critics can even begin to talk about a socialist civil society.23

Could it be thatthey consider the liberal distinction between the public and the private as anattribute of bourgeois society that would be worth maintaining undersocialism? Or, since such a view would be incompatible with the traditionalsocialist conception of the future, are we actually faced with yet another nascentintepretation of the phenomenon? These questions may best be left unansweredfor the moment. Instead, I shall confine myself to a vision of civil society whichis as incompatible with socialism as it is with oriental despotism, feudalism, orany other form of inequality and power similarly inimical to liberal democracy.

No paradigmatic civil society exists in the real world, though somecountries come closer to the ideal than others. There are only several, concretecivil societies, all different from each other. Some are more mature, some less.Some lead a precarious life, others flourish. Thus it is often said that Englandand the United States possess strong civil societies. By contrast modernGreece, for instance, is often described as a nation with a weak civil society.And many non-Western nations are seen as entirely lacking it. Any definitionmust, accordingly, be ideal-typical. The following one, and the five dimensionsthat are presented afterwards, must therefore be understood in that sense.Likewise, and this is crucial for the argument, the definition must be seen to

apply fully only to a historical period during which liberal bourgeois civilizationwas at its height, while the welfare state and the other public and privatebureaucracies had not yet substantially affected its essential contours.

Civil society may be defined as an historically evolved sphere of individualrights, freedoms and voluntary associations whose politically undisturbed


10/22


competition with each other in the pursuit of their respective private concerns,interests and intentions is guaranteed by a public institution, called the state.

Any mature civil society exhibits at least five prominent dimensions:individualism, privacy, the market, pluralism and class.24 Each one of themposes an existential problem for civil society, that is, each dimension in turnbreeds currents that undermine it and that therefore weaken the civil societyitself. Reference to these countertrends in the following discussion is intendedto curtail any idealistic excesses that may be committed in drawing up the civilsociety model.

(a) Individualism. The main ontological assumption of liberalism is that theonly and ultimate unit of social life is the individual, and that all socialinstitutions are no more than associations of discrete individuals. A civil society

is grounded on this belief. (As such, it is an assumption that does not confineitself to mere methodological individualism: it also entails realistic indi-vidualism.) The individual is the seat of sovereign will. Human reason andintentions are the supreme judges of the world. Churches, parties, tradingcompanies, governments, are only collective aggregations of individual wills.They can be modified, transformed or cancelled by the individual men who setthem up or use them. In so far as the universe of an individualistic civil societyhas been successful (and there are no collectivistic civil societies), it haspermitted ontological (and ideological) individualism to thrive. As a seriouslyheld belief or as an important legal fiction, the assumption of individualism is

then the cornerstone of a civil society.Initially the chief problem for the advancement of individualism was the

existence of a number of institutions inherited from the past which had to beabolished, as they were perceived as essentially supraindividualistic orantiindividualistic. Since individualism first developed in Western Europe,whose past was for the most part feudal, its targets were the guilds, the estates,the feudal privileges, and the ecclesiastical authority over the secular world. Asthese powers fell, or as their force was substantially attenuated, the powers ofindividualistically built coalitions (governments, parties, industrial andcommercial enterprises) began to assert themselves in an utterly non-individu-alistic manner. The specific problem that ontological individualism breeds byadvocating the free formation of voluntary associations is that of their collecti-vistic autonomy and power vis visthe individuals that make them up.

(b) Privacy. Civil society is the abode of privacy in a world which has beendivided into two realms: the public and the private. When individual freedom isdefined as the supreme good and non-interference with the life of others isconsidered to be a core virtue of civil society, privacy becomes its achievement.

On a more mundane level, privacy is a utopia of the liberal mind which can beapproximated (if not fully realized) by being bought, or by being acquired

through status, privilege, power or social skill. Apart from the not inconsider-able fact that there are many who are not interested in its systematic practice,privacy, by being in permanent tension with its opposite, the public life, givesrise to its own specific problem, the withdrawal from public life. Masswithdrawal into privacy breeds oligarchy. It facilitates tyranny. Citizenshipa


11/22


virtue of political, rather than civil, societydemands active popular participa-tion in public life. An excess of privacy depoliticizes the state.25

(c) The Market. If individualism and privacy are the moral justification ofcivil society, the market is its most salient structural feature. As the civilsocietys organizing principle, the relatively unhampered market allocatesresources, honour, authority, goods and services through a spontaneous andultimately anonymous process of countless transactions (contracts) among freeindividuals and their associations. In a sense, the market is institutionless. Atthe economic level, from which it gets its name and at which it is most clearlyseen, the market produces equilibrium through aggregate forces of supply anddemand. A similar process operates in the intellectual, the ideological and thepolitical market places. The wider, generalized market, however, is not an

extension of the economy: it is a competitive but essentially peaceful locus forthe production of social life. Any public institution interfering with the severalmarket places by imposing an extraneously determined allocation of goods andresources is bound to weaken and even destroy the social arrangements whichemerge from them and which are precisely those of civil society.

Competitive and peaceful are contradictory terms. Permanent efforts atthe restoration of market freedom (in some cases stemming from the state itselfin its role as protector of the civil society) are therefore necessary and are oftennot enough. More seriously, monopolistic and oligopolistic tendencies in theeconomy, and oligarchic tendencies in the polity, are generated by the very

logic of a mature or maturing market society, thus leading to serious problemsin its hypothetically unhampered functioning. Nevertheless, the usual remin-ders about the limitations of markets and the impossibility of perfectcompetition conditions ought to be accompanied by parallel reminders aboutthe key role played by real markets (no matter how imperfect) in thespontaneous regulation, without outside intervention, of the economic,political and cultural markets. The real scope of markets may be limited, buttheir continued existence has had massive effects in the creation of viable liberalcivil societies.

(d) Pluralismhas been one of them. It has two dimensions. On the one hand it

entails the diffusion of power throughout society which is then vesteddifferently upon individuals, communities, associations and institutions. Theythen become relatively autonomous from each other, they have their ownspheres of competence where other entitieseven the statedare notpenetrate with impunity. On the other hand, pluralism is also a culture,whereby a wide range of beliefs, conceptions and attitudes coexist freely and areequally freely fostered by their proponents. From a more sociologicalstandpoint, it is the legitimation and recognition of the actual fragmentation ofcertain societies into varying patterns of class, race, belief, ideology andreligion, as well as of the groups to which their combination and overlap give

rise.As in the case of the market, with which it is intimately related, pluralism

always appears as a far cry from its own ideal type. The asymmetric distributionof power and influence amongst all the units that form a pluralistic order is thusthe norm. This is not only true of those units which directly compete with each


12/22


other for the same goods (firms within the economy, or parties struggling overthe same sections of the electorate) but especially of those associations whichconfront each other for the distribution of income and labour, as employers andtrade unions do. But these features must only be seen as curtailments of civilsociety in its pure form, not as its obliteration. It is the effective measure ofpluralism that matters in each case, not its manifest limitations.

(d) Class. Civil society is a class society. Class is to a large extent theunintended consequence of citizenship. If citizenship is the political institu-tionalization of the individual within liberalism, and liberalism is based in turnon the competitive allocation of goods, resources and power, then it follows thatsociety must be made up of unequal people, though perhaps not of peopleunequal before the law, at least not in principle. From this alone, of course, it

does not follow that class reproduction through time must necessarily occur.

26

Hypothetically, the entrenchment of social class through family privilege,patronage and the transmission of property does not necessarily arise from anestablished civil society. The least that can be said, however, is that civilsociety, relying as it does on spontaneous contractual processes, lacks anyinstitutional apparatus to redress class bias. Nor is any such task contemplatedby its moral constitution. For that, people must rely on egalitarian movementsand on government policies and intervention. Yet in classical liberal times thestate did little or nothing against class bias, and was not expected to do anythingin particular against it. This is precisely the reason why, as was shown earlier,

some observers were able to describe the state as a mere excrescence of civilsociety, embodying little more than the will and the interests of its rulingclasses. Later, when state intervention for the attenuation of the injuries of classinequality began to appear, it did not leave intact the fabric of civil society.From the standpoint of liberal orthodoxy, state intervention in favour of civilsociety can only exist in the form of deregulation, denationalization, and thedismantling of state agencies. Strictly speaking, state intervention ought toexist only as withdrawal and abstention, though government interventionagainst crime or in order to uphold the law and keep the peace was never ruledout by the liberal conception. Interestingly, in this context, liberal (i.e., con-

servative) parties and movements cyclically attempt to return to this venerableorthodoxy even when in power. Most efforts, under the changed conditions ofour age, have so far yielded only limited results.

Individualism, privacy, the market, pluralism and class are the dimensionsthat provide some substance and realism to the abstract definition of civilsociety provided earlier. The picture that has arisen differs in various ways fromthe main traditional images and theories of civil society, though it owes much toevery one of them. Any attempt to draw up a new model must inevitably rejector play down certain aspects of the several classical interpretations whileaccepting or stressing others. Thus liberal ignorance of the close relationship

between civil society and class inequality, or its blindness to its unpalatablefacets, cannot be sustained. Nor can the neo-Marxist tripartite division betweenthe economy, civil society and the state be upheld. Things are not that neat inthe contemporary world, if they ever were.

Our perspective takes the risk of an apparent confusion of realms. It sees civil


13/22


society as a sphere of activity encompassing economic, political and culturalkinds of human behaviour falling outside the field of the official, thoughsometimes sanctioned by the official. The private and the public, the economyand the polity, public opinion and government doctrine, are thereby neitherconfused nor jumbled together. Civil society is not understood as aninstitutional network, though it does contain one. It is rather conceived as asocial space. In it specialization, the spontaneous division of labour and theanalytical mind, can develop relatively unhampered. At the time of its earlyhistorical development civil society already exhibited an inner affinity to theanalytical mind. It was essential to the civilization that gave rise to civil societythat separations in the various realms of action and thought could be effectedsuccessfully. The separation and insulation of one aspect of social life from

another has a very long history in the West: its roots can be found in thedistinction betweenfas(religious law) and ius(human, profane law) of the earlyRomans. It developed in a hazardous and difficult manner through thecenturies. The distinction between the state and civil society is an achievementof this process.

The nature of these demarcations is essentially cultural. They serve certainimportant purposes in the economic and political spheres, however, which arebuttressed by powerful legal fictions and arrangements. Everyone knows thatabsolute social cleavages and specializations are well-nigh impossible. Class,power, privilege, belief, and the economy have always penetrated both the state

and civil society with few problems caused by barriers or demarcations. But thefiction has held. The question is whether it still does today.

V. Civil Society In Peril?

There never was a golden age of civil society, but there was a time when,buttressed by a state zealous of its autonomy and underpinned by classinequality, it thrived practically unmolested in a few significant countries whileits features slowly spread to others. Historically, this situation was relativelybrief.

Signs that all was not well with civil society and that its life was moreprecarious than it looked to some were already easy to perceive well before theSecond World War, and not only in countries where Fascism had put a swiftand violent end to it, or in those, like Russia, where it had perished ingloriouslyat the first onslaught of revolution because it had always been extremely weak.There were a number of trends at work in several advanced industrial countrieswhich were secretly eroding some of the foundations on which traditional civilsociety rested. They became more apparent after the war, paradoxically at atime when civil society, helped by a powerful new cycle of capitalist prosperityand protected by the victorious constitutional and liberal states, enjoyed

exceptional material and ideological reinforcements. But by then the subterra-nean currents against it had already surfaced. These forces, essentially inimicalto civil society in its classical form, are well known. Some of them are notentirely extraneous to the logic of civil society itself; on the contrary, they areoften the expression of trends fostered by liberal civilization in its early stages


14/22


which have now outgrown, as it were, and even rejected, the world that madethem possible in the first instance. They can be grouped under four mutuallyrelated processes: corporatization, state expansion, congestion and technocul-ture:

(a) Corporatization points to the rise of what may cautiously be called acorporate society. Corporatization appears as the continuation of seculartrends in bureaucratization, occupational specialization, and the proliferationof formal organizations in every field of endeavour. Such organizations (orcorporations in the more generic sense of the word) often mediate betweentraditional forms of class conflict, and possess a restraining effect upon thecapacities of individuals to compete freely with each other or to form coalitionswhich might threaten the competence and power of the existing ones. 27

Bargaining and negotiation were patterns of collective behaviour perfectlyacceptable to traditional civil society, but were not understood as necessarilyoccurring between groups possessing an official status despite their privatenature. The corporatist management of the economy clearly challenges thisconception; besides, the institutionalization of the three-cornered relationshipbetween employers, government, and the unions has entailed a majorencroachment upon the market, and has called forth further state intermedia-tion, while strengthening the respective monopolistic or oligopolistic powers oflabour and management organizations.

The consolidation and proliferation of corporations and associations has led

to the progressive displacement of other units of social life to a position wherethe latterclasses, communities, publicsmust either express themselvesthrough such associations or take the more hazardous path of an alternativesocial movement, challenging the new order. Although corporatization has notexhausted all the available social space, the scope of corporations is muchgreater than it ever was earlier. Corporate saturation might not have arrivedand perhaps never will, as long as the strained pluralist universe survivesbutadvanced corporate density is a fact in many countries. It now effectivelychallenges the basic tenet of civil society whereby any group of individuals canform an association of its own accord and free will in order to pursue their

interests jointly. Thus stated, this might have only been part of the liberalutopia. Yet, empirically observed, there appears to have been a steady declinein the possibilities opened everywhere in advanced industrial societies for thesuccessful establishment of new associations in areas where others have alreadyestablished themselves. The crystallization of groups into firms, associationsand corporations, and subsequent mergers, takeovers and syndications pointstowards the development of a network of mutual dependencies and recogni-tions which makes the fluidity of the civil society as it was originally conceivedquite problematic. The rules that generally characterize oligopolisticcompetitiondiffidence, caution, and agreed costs and prices, rather than

market-determined onesbecome those of the new order.(b) State expansionhas involved its metamorphosis into a welfare state. The

penetration of the state into every sphere of social lifeas educator, manager ofpublic services, producer and consumer of armaments, entrepreneur, investor,and so onhas transformed the relationship which traditionally obtained


15/22


between itself and civil society. The transformation has entailed the gradualapproximation of the state to the citizenry29 through welfare services,militarization, universal taxation, education, and increased surveillance bypolice, justice, health, and fiscal agencies. At best, all this represents an erosionof what was once considered an inviolable sphere; at worst, it blurs the essentialdistinction between the public and the private, and between the state and civilsociety.30 A process which began only with some unavoidable curbs upon theold patrimonial conception of property as ius usum adque abusum now curbsindividual autonomy in a systematic manner. Arguably, it often does soprecisely in order to protect certain freedoms and spheres of autonomy forindividuals and associations and its rationale continues to be the same as thatbehind earlier official interference with privacy or private concerns. However,

the scope and intensity of protective surveillance and interference is now muchgreater.(c) Congestion is to a large extent the cause of this particular contradictory

situation. There is institutional congestion due to corporate and bureaucraticdensity, legal congestion in the form of overregulation, and physical congestiondue to population increase, mass participation in formerly restricted areas ofendeavourthe democratization of social lifeand the rapid exhaustion ofno-mans land. Civil society assumed the possibility of infinite resources,endless expansion, and permanent growth. The intimate affinity betweenexpansive progress and the civilization of civil society hardly needs to be

explained. Interestingly Marx, along with other critics of the bourgeoisconception of civil society, not only did not question the assumption of theinfinitude of resources but even made it a cornerstone of his own conception ofprogress.

Congestion has changed our perception of the limits of social space. While weare trying to make out the kind of world into which we are entering, equipped aswe are with preconceptions of progress which do not quite fit it, inflationarytendencies in laws, regulations and by-laws seriously begin to interfere with thespontaneous development of life in the traditional arena of civil society. Eachnew wave of eventsincreased unemployment, deindustrialization, fiscal

crisis, new generations in weaponry, rising crime, pollutionforces anothernew wave of legislation upon a sphere which by definition was considered asinherently free of regulation from external bodies. Externalities have alwaysexisted: but sometimes man could free himself from their noxious effects bymoving elsewhere. Thus the ruthless Ricardian search for and opening up ofvirgin lands reflected an escape from the pernicious externalities of capitalistexpansion, and not just a desire for the increase in profits. The problem todayseems to be that of the rapid diminution and exhaustion of the available virginspacesi.e., spaces out of the reach of constraining or negative externalitiesupon which a thriving, ever expanding civil society once depended.31

(d) Technoculture is the phenomenon that is perhaps least rooted in thehistorical logic of civil society. The transformation in the meaning of knowledgeand information, the rise of information technology, robotization and, aboveall, artificial intelligence appear to be the really new phenomena of the age. It isan open question whether they will eventually show themselves to be


16/22


compatible with the inheritedalbeit reformedliberal society. For themoment it looks as though technological manipulation and control, combinedwith information technology, computerization and artifical intelligence are farmore compatible with advanced corporate management and with the environ-ment of a corporate society than with the moral universe and personal freedomsfostered by certain aspects of traditional civil society.32

Despite these developments, the demise of civil society has not yet occurred.Not only that, but a close analysis of the situation reveals important facts thatseem to run counter to any such demise. The subtlety of the situation is rich inparadox. The state itself, in some senses civil societys worst enemy, hasbecome in the capitalist parliamentarian countries one of its safeguards. Notonly can it not free itself from civil society, but rather, it depends on its

relatively healthy existence in order to continue functioning in its present form.The contemporary state attempts to keep civil society under its active tutelageand tight control. However, the existence of this, and other similar contradic-tions, must not make us blind to deeper, more far-reaching, and slower currentsin the historical process.

VI. Some Concluding Remarks

In the societies where civil society was once born it has now undergoneseveral modifications. The chances are that further changes will take place in

the future until it eventually acquires a purely vestigial character. The greatestinroads of tatismeand corporatization into its fabric have taken place at thestructural level, as distinct from the cultural one. Thus, though the spread ofcorporations (economic or otherwise) has put an end to the fluidity of pastarrangements, the very needs of the modern polity and economy have upheldthe ethos of individualism in some of its dimensions, especially those which areuseful for fostering occupational competitiveness within organizations. Theshift from entrepreneurial competitiveness to the newer, occupational kind hasmeant that personal qualifications and entitlements to privacy and autonomyhave been respected in significant ways by the powers that be. The corporate

economy is the first to benefit from the existence of a private pool of skills,talent and expertise. A defence against the class injuries of this market-likearrangement (human capital has a counterpart, the human market, assubscribers of the human capital theory in economics are well aware) is theunionization of the labour force. In the circumstances, however, it may becomealso a form of working-class corporatization, especially under closed-shopconditions.

Social structure evolves faster than culture. The new, reformed, civil societypromotes a new culture, but the contemporary social structures must live in themidst of a receding one, that of inherited bourgeois conceptions. Interestingly

enough, a great part of the culture of the old civil society, now convenientlyredefined, is still very useful for the maintenance of modern forms of classinequality and political power. There has occurred a transition from thepossessive individualism of the pastbased on private propertyto thepositional individualism of the present, based on occupation and power within


17/22


the organization. We must come to understand how certain components of theculture of bourgeois society are still necessary for the functioning of thecorporate order of today if we wish to explain the puzzle posed by itsantinomies.

The old liberal framework, now recast, is not only necessary for themaintenance of inequality and for the adequate recruitment of qualifiedpersonnel into the positions of each corporation, but also for the neutralizationof dissent. In this latter respect, the old culture of tolerance has reached newheights in the form of so-called permissiveness, while the more institutionalaspects of society go unperturbed on their own, divergent, ways. Corporationsdo not feel threatened by that culture: people may now advocate theimplementation of genuine socialism, unilateral disarmament, the abolition of

racial and sexual discrimination, distributive justice, or any other goals, nomatter how outrageous. They will be met with tolerance, indifference, orefforts at accomodation with existing arrangements. No wonder that, con-fronted with this, some critics have produced a theory of repressive tolerancein order to explain this seemingly intractable question. Unfortunately, thetheory is flawed by a rejection of those elements of the liberal creed which stemfrom the more universal aspects of human freedom and that have beenappropriated by it. The theorists of repressive tolerance seem to forget thatonly the relative tolerance they themselves enjoy may make possible theeventual development of a non-repressive kind of tolerance. It is, to say the

least, problematic that totalitarian regimes unwittingly prepare the way forliberty. If this be the cunning of history, it is a very low cunning indeed.These comments express the necessity to achieve a balanced view in these

matters. If we are to acknowledge the crisis of civil society we must begin byestablishing its limits. Thus far I have shown that, rather than a breakdown, ithas undergone some far-reaching modifications, and that these are closelyrelated to the new class structure of the corporate society as well as to thecontinued development of the state apparatus. The reformed civil society hasbecome entrenched in the political realm as the official ideology of pluralistic,parliamentary democracies. This ideology buttresses the now embattled realm

of citizenship. It precariously protects the life of voluntary associations andautonomous social movements, and the survival of minimal market conditionsthrough such means as anti-trust laws and regulations against unfair competi-tion. It is therefore an essential part of the culture of our troubled times. On thewhole, however, it tends to appear on the defensive, though occasionaltransitions of dictatorial regimes into parliamentary democraciesas haveoccured in Southern Europe in 1974 and 1977may be deemed exceptions tothis broad trend. They represent important advances of the liberal formula forcivil society in countries hitherto largely deprived of its benefits.

Societies controlled by technobureaucratic, single parties and their states, by

contrast, confront entirely different problems. The aim of their democrats andcivil rights campaigners cannot be to fight the erosion of an already existing civilsociety: their aim is rather its re-instatement or its reconstruction, for in thosecountries the civil society has been most successfully and brutally abolished bypolitical means. The problem in them is that, in fact, there is no civil society at


18/22


all. As a Soviet civil rights activist puts it: One of the peculiarities of the Sovietsystem is an impotent society which faces an omnipotent state or, to be moreprecise, the absence of civil society.33 Thus, efforts by dissidents in Russiaand the Ukraine, by democrats in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, moresuccessfully perhaps, in Poland since 1980 have been towards the creation,sometimes ex nihilo, of a civil society. Their chances of success, when they exist,still remain highly uncertain. Therefore the fate of civil society under statesocialism is very different from its fate elsewhere. It is only in the very lastinstance that the issues at stake resemble each other in East and West.

The relative relegation of the sphere of civil society to the cultural andideological realms and to that of a privatized and fragmented citizenry wouldspell in the long run its final demise. Deprived of the protection afforded by

both the traditional circumscribed state and by its own institutional underpin-nings in free and competitive association, it could not last, and a long andperhaps painful agony would await it. Any such shift would embody amovement towards a world devoid of the features of civil society, although notentirely devoid of private institutions; these will, however, have lost their roleas protagonists of social life. Whatever autonomy they possess will be under thetutelage and regulation of large public or pseudo-private corporations.

The state itself will come to an end if civil society finally expires. This followslogically from the very nature of the old division between the two com-plementary spheres. They were a function of each other, mutually endorsing

their respective concerns. This does not mean that the apparatus of the publicadministration will itself wither away. What is bound to die is the sovereignstate of today. Contemporary interdependence, dependence, and world-systemic relationships are already gnawing at the supreme powers of thisresilient public institution. Some states, of course, continue to be moresovereign than others, and even manage to curtail the autonomy of subordinatepowers: Russia, for instance, within its Soviet empire, is one of them, though itsrule there is not untroubled; the United States is another, within the latecapitalist world, others, especially Western European ones, have alreadyembarked on the hazardous voyage towards the recognition of limited

sovereignty. They are reluctantly transferring it to higher federal bodies, slowlyyielding to the pressures of the internationalization of the economy and thepolity. World-state visionaries notwithstanding, the end of this uneven roadwill not exactly be a larger statestates can only exist in relation to otherstatesbut a complex, stateless network of trans-national managing bodies:agencies of large-scale imperative coordination in the fields of demography,ecology, energy, goods distribution, research and development, and regulatorylaw generally. There will be a withering away, but certainly not the oneenvisaged in the noble hopes of our forefathers. Or at least this is what is boundto happen if developments continue along their present course.

No doubt events may take a different turn. It would be naive to supposeotherwise. What is clear is that for them to follow a different path, some drasticchanges in tatisation and corporatization would have first to take place.Moreover, we do not have enough evidence that such qualitative transforma-tions are at hand. (Unless, that is, moves towards an extraparliamentary


19/22


opposition, towards workers self-management or autogestion are given aweight and a scope they do not yet possess. In the case of the extraparliamen-tary oppositions especially as it briefly developed in Germany in the early1970s, it revealed more about the weakness of civil society rather than about itsreconstruction.) For the moment, social movements of a truly transformationalkind have failed. When they have turned sour, they have frequently degener-ated into militant lunacy or terrorism, that is, precisely into phenomena thatfurther strengthen the repressive and law and order powers of the state.There is no contradiction here, for it is not only the state that is reinforced, butalso very much the international agencies for the control and repression ofterrorism, thus reinforcing the supranational trends just mentioned.

All this does not imply that extraparliamentary citizens movements, nuclear

disarmament campaigns, demands for industrial self-management or sexualand racial equality, have found no response when expressed outside thecorporatist order of the contemporary polity. The highly systemic or evencybernetic quality of this polity is not insensitive to such pressures: hence itsrelative capacity for its own re-equilibration and for ecological preservation,pollution control, further social reform, and charitable aid to the poor at homeand to those suffering spectacular penury and starvation abroad. Though neverneglecting the imperious exigencies of the war machine and of foreignintervention, these measures have served the purpose of assuaging extremedemands and of keeping dissent within manageable bounds. They have thus

ensured the untroubled progress of the social order of the future under thedismal terms set by the conditions of today.In the foregoing discussion I have tried to show that civil society may now be

beginning to disintegrate and that, although at a much slower pace, so may thestate. I have argued that civil society has now been redefined mostly as a legal,cultural and ideological sphere, though an increasingly small range of relativelyautonomous institutions is still allowed to thrive. I have also shown how, for thetime being, the traditional distinction between state and civil society continuesto be crucial, albeit in a different manner, for the maintenance of the politicalorder of the West. In the longer term, however, the thorough corporatization of

civil society can only mean its own quiet demise.That demise ought to have consequences for social theory. Traditional

Marxianincluding Gramsciannotions of civil society are bound to becomeincreasingly outdated. They may soon be as outdated as those cherished by thenostalgic neoliberal thinkers of today already are. (Gramscis concept ofhegemony, however, may fare better, for it is a sophisticated view ofdomination and of the legitimation of inequality.) Accordingly, those who stillsubscribe to these views would do well to use them only to understand bygonesituations. Confined to the past, they will no doubt continue to prove mostenlightening.

Some observers have noted that, under the pressures of economic and othercrises, the capitalist societies of today are being forced to give up their owncrucial distinction between state and civil society.34 This may be so, but thedistinction is not surrendered easily, for civil society, even under the pressureswhich beset it in its present, receding stage, is a resilient, complex, creation. It


20/22


finds unexpected and equivocal friends even in conservative quarters. Right-wing populist revivalist movements, often strengthened by successes at thepolls, attempt to stem the tide of corporatization in their own way, as if thereimposition of a more naked, old-fashioned, form of class domination andentrepreneurial rule were still feasible. Such efforts represent only temporaryand ultimately futile swings of the reactionary pendulum, but they aresignificant. More importantly, the civil society finds firmer friends amongdemocrats for whom the defence of its autonomous institutions is an essentialtask in their conception of freedom. Yet the men of power throughout corporatesociety and its political apparatus no longer believe in it, though they are forced,constitutionally as it were, to pay their public respects to some of its tenets. Inthe contemporary world many of those who still proclaim the need for a civil

society actively help the advent of a universe in which, were they to succeed,there would be no need whatsoever for it.

NOTES

1 This essay does not attempt a detailed account of all the vicissitudes and ramificationsundergone by the notion of civil society throughout its history. I shall confine myself toconveying some of the most important meanings attributed to it.

2 F.A. Hayek (1979), pp. 139-141.3 J. Locke (1970), Book II, Ch. VII Of Political or Civil Society, pp. 154-178, andpassim.4 For instance in Ch. XI (Of the Extent of the Legislative Power) where the legislative is

seen as charged with the preservation of the society. . . and every person in it (p. 183).Cf. pp. 183-192, ibid.

5 D. Hume (1969) Book III, Of Morals, Part II (Of Justice and Injustice), Ch. VII (Ofthe Origin of Government), and ff., pp. 585-619.

6 A. Ferguson (1980),passim.7 J. Locke op. cit., Ch. II (pp. 118-124).8 For later liberal thinkers such as John Dewey and Ernest Barker the state appears as the

juridical organization of civil society. The latter, together with the family, provide theinstitutional framework within which individuals, socially aggregated by the necessities ofcompetition and collaboration, pursue their particular, i.e., private, ends. S.I. Benn andG.F. Gaus (1983), p. 51.

9 A.S. Walton (1983), p. 251.10 Ibid., p. 25511 These and the following references to Hegel are in G.W.F. Hegel (1975), pp. 94-97.12 A.S. Walton op. cit., pp. 256-258.13 For a discussion of Hegels and Marxs notions of civil society and the conceptual problems

to which they give rise, cf. L. Kolakowski and S. Hampshire eds. (1974), pp. 18-44.14 This often quoted passage is here taken from Z. Jordan (1967), p. 39. My interpretation

owes much to his. Cf. also K. Vergopoulos (1983), pp. 35-36.15 K. Marx (1971), p. Vol. III, p. 791.16 K. Marx (1971), Early Texts, pp. 189-190.17 Ibid., p. 19018 A. Gramsci (1973), p. 1219 A. Gramsci (1949), p. 122, and M.A. Macciocchi, p. 163.20 A. Gramsci (1949), pp. 29-30, and M.A. Macciocchi, p. 163.21 A. Gramsci (1949) (1966 edition), p. 160 (Egemonia e democrazia), and p. 161 (Societ

civile e societ politica)


21/22


22 Cf. A. Gouldner (1980), especially the chapter Civil Society in Capitalism and Socialism.23 Cf. C. Offe (1984), Introd. by J. Keane, pp. 31-32.24 Each one of these traits of a liberal order gives rise to sets of issues about which there is a

considerable literature. For obvious reasons they are left unexplored here.25 This is sopacethose latter-day apologists of political apathy who claim that it has salutary

effects for democracy, since it makes it more stable. Political theorists who embrace thisview seem to assume that a very active popular participation within the framework of liberaldemocracy and relative pluralism must inevitably lead to mass frenzy, Stimmungsdemokratieand other evils of mass politics. Cf. S. Giner (1976).

26 There may therefore be greater affinity between citizenship, on the one hand, and socialclass, on the other, than T.H. Marshall seems to assume. They are not in every sense,mutually antagonistic trends of advanced societies. Cf. T.H. Marshall (1950).

27 For an account of these trends of cf. P.C. Schmitter and G. Lehmbruch (1979), and S. Ginerand M. Prez Yruela (1979).

28 W. Fellner (1949).29 R.M. Unger (1976).30 R. Sennett (1977).31 F. Hirsch (1977).32 S. Giner (1984).33 B. Weil (1981), p. 101.34 C. Offe (1978), p. 37.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BENN, S.I. and GAUS, G.F. (1983) The liberal conception of the Public and the Private. InS.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus, eds. Private and Public in Social Life. London: Croom Helm,pp. 31-66.

FRANKEL, B. (1983) Beyond the State? Dominant Theories and Socialist Strategies. London:Macmillan.

FERGUSON, A. (1980) An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. with an Introduction byL. Schneider. New Brunswick and London. Transaction Books (First Edition 1767).

GINER, S. (1976)Mass Society. London: Martin Robertson.GINER, S. (1985) El rapto de la moral: mudanza de la virtud civica en la sociedad corporativa.

In Revista de Occidente., no. 45, February 1985, pp. 47-70.GINER, S. and PEREZ YRUELA, M. (1979) La sociedad corporativa. Madrid: C.I.S.GOULDNER, A. (1980) The Two Marxisms. New York: Seabury Press.GRAMSCI, A. (1973) Selections from the Prison Notebooks,edited and translated by Q. Hoare and

G.N. Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.GRAMSCI, A. (1949)Note sul Machiavelli. Turin: Einaudi.HEGEL, G.W.F. (1975) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Cambridge University

Press.HIRSCH, F. (1977) Social Limits to Growth. London.HUME, D. (1969) A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. with an Introduction by E.G. Mosser.

Harmondsworth: Penguin. (First Edition 1739 and 1740.)JORDAN, Z. (1967) The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism. London: Macmillan.LOCKE, J. (1970) Two Treatises of Civil Government, with an Introduction by W.S. Carpenter.

London: Dent, 1970 (First published 1690).MACCIOCCHI, M.A. (1974) Pour Gramsci. Paris: Seuil.MARSHALL, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge University Press.


22/22


MARX, K. (1972) Capital, Vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart.Praxis International 267MARX, K. (1971) Selections, in D. McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx. London: Macmillan.

OFFE, C. (1984) Contradictions of the Welfare State. London: Hutchinson.SENNETT, R. (1977) The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf.VERGOPOULOS, K. (1983) Ltat dans le capitalisme periphrique. In Revue du Tiers

Monde, 24, no. 93: 37-52.WALTON, A.S. (1983) Public and Private Interests: Hegel on Civil Society and the State. In

S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus, eds. Private and Public in Social Life. London: Groom Helm,pp. 249-266.

WEIL, B. (1981) Current Opposition in the Soviet Union. In Praxis International, 1, no. 1:101-104.

Date post:	14-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	juanma-vessant-roig
View:	218 times
Download:	0 times

3.2 - Giner, Salvador - The Withering Away of Civil Society (en)

Documents