Civil Society

Conceptual Overview

The notion of civil society constitutes one of the most debated concepts in social science. Its importance is based on the direct involvement it has in defining what makes up the public sphere and its analysis of how, [Page 158]according to this definition, citizens becomes entangled with the state. Further, it plays an important role in democratic societies in both recognizing and implementing rights and public initiatives.

Civil society has been a companion of the modern state since the recognition of rights and private autonomy created a space in which interactions between individuals and their organizations were ruled by mechanisms that were not defined or monitored by the state. Indeed, its beginning can be traced back to property owners associations that, in some disciplines and policy-making normative frameworks, are still dominant. However, the principles of citizenship were also causing civil society, as a concept, to evolve from being exclusively related to property owners. Instead, civil society was increasingly becoming an inclusive account in which citizenship was acknowledged, according to the rules defined by the state, to any individual belonging to a society where he or she lives.

The definition of civil society provided by G. W. Hegel allowed the integration of a universal definition of the individual as the bearer of rights and moral conscience. In this fashion, a distinction was made between state and civil society that allowed room for individual interpenetration. Ultimately, this distinction allowed civil society to be stressed as the space where material civilization was embodied.

The history of the concept of civil society is inevitably tied to the evolution of two other concepts: state and democracy. In this regard, civil society's meaning has become centralized for a large part of the Western literature that considers civil society an analytical concept used to understand the dynamics of society. This coalescence is usually centered on the recognition of individual rights associated with political and economic spheres. In this sense, civil society became entangled with the concept of public sphere and democracy.

The evolution of the public sphere and democracy, as developed by Jürgen Habermas, among others, has been historically associated with the bourgeois revolution and the clear association between modern democracy and representative democracy. Indeed, civil society is historically grounded on the recognition of freedom of speech and association. Consequently, it is rooted in a liberal framework. However, current trends suggest an expansion of the concept of civil society to include sectors that are usually voiceless and disorganized. Such an expansion is achieved through the substitution of the state with nongovernmental organizations and private initiatives, both members of the civil society. A substitution of this nature generates a social and heterogeneous corpus that can achieve two fundamental goals. First of all, this corpus is capable of practicing the rights already identified at the core of civil society. Second, and probably most important, it also considers the right to have rights as the hallmark of a new space for the development of civil society.

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