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Civil Society

Civil society is a concept with varied meanings. Although somewhat simplistic, it is useful to see the concept as having one set of meanings that derive largely from liberal social theory and another set of meanings that derive largely from Marxist social theory.

Liberal Approaches to Civil Society

Liberal social theorists have usually presented civil society as a space of human activity distinct from the activities of the state or government. Although early liberals did not always use the term in ways that are congruent with its later use, one can see the rudiments of this view of civil society in their work. For 17th-century British philosopher John Locke, the social contract that ends the state of nature ideally creates a space where naturally given property rights and economic freedoms are to be protected by the state. In the work of later liberal social theorists, such as 19th-century British political economist John Stuart Mill, this emphasis on society as properly being a space of economic freedom is supplemented by a more developed sense of society as a space of varied human liberties, including rights to free speech and political organization.

Throughout the 20th century, in a wide range of liberal writings, civil society was idealized as a space of both economic and political/ideological freedom. Although many modern liberals have seen these freedoms as two faces of the same coin, others have also noted that the economic freedoms associated with capitalism might not be entirely compatible with the development of other forms of freedom that are central to liberal concepts of civil society. As a consequence, even within a broadly liberal framework, there are sometimes competing emphases in the discussion of civil society. For example, organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have emphasized economic liberalization as a key to the broader development of human freedoms. In this approach, civil society is presented as a space of economic and political opposition to strong and interventionist states. Yet some critics of World Bank and IMF economic liberalization policies have also presented civil society as a space of activity that is potentially at odds with both a strong state and a capitalist economy. In this approach, civil society is construed as one of three distinctive arenas of human activity: the state, the market, and civil society.

Marxist Approaches to Civil Society

Marxist theories start from different assumptions than do liberal theories. For Karl Marx himself, writing during the 19th century, society was fundamentally structured in its patterns of development by conflicts between different social classes. Although these conflicts centered on control of the economic surplus produced by society, they were always carried out simultaneously in various realms, including sites of production (the economic realm), sites of state power (the political realm), and sites of cultural and ideological struggle (the ideological realm). Thus, early-20th-century Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, whose work has had significant influence on contemporary understandings of civil society, contended that the term did not refer to a realm of social activities that could be seen as autonomous from the state or the market. Rather, for Gramsci, the state, the market, and civil society were integrally interconnected with one another and were essentially different faces of the same social structure.

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