These folks who promote "civil society" should be forced to read what Hegel said on the matter: "civil society is the battlefield where everyone's individual private interest meets everyone else's" - a war each of against all. It "affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both." It's the domain of "capital and class-divisions," a world of "compulsion" and social polarization. Civil society's "resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble." Oh, but that's where the program officers come to the rescue.
The beginning of DDK's article:
<quote> Last month, President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at New York University to talk about the politics of a "third way." Few journalists covered this unusual occasion and those who did mostly feigned incomprehension. Was there anything here other than muddy centrism?
As a matter of fact, yes. But asking Clinton and Blair to define the new politics is like asking surfers to explain why the ocean swells. They're not the major thinkers behind the movement-they're just along for the ride.
The "third way" is a political philosophy that poses an alternative to capitalism and communism. In recent years, it also has come to mean a politics beyond the narrow confines of liberalism and conservatism. Clinton and Blair are right to say we need to abandon the tired dichotomy of the two-dimensional political spectrum. But they're wrong when they imply the third way is just "post-ideological" problem-solving, or a bland triangulation to the middle. Americans should not confuse Clinton and Blair's compromising centrism with a real third way.
A genuine third way draws from far wider traditions than the current liberal-vs.-conservative context. While liberals stress the role of government (weakly echoing communism's vision of a state-dominated society) and conservatives stress the role of "free" markets (loudly trumpeting capitalism's vision of a market-dominated society), the third way seeks a balance between the public sector, the private sector and a strongly developed civil society. Instead of posing an alternative between "the state" and "the individual," the third way values both of these realms, but adds the in-between realm of community.
As we approach the end of the century, a third way seems more politically viable than ever. During the Cold War, capitalism and communism were hotly defended systems of belief, and proposing an alternative was seen as heresy or pie-in-the-sky posturing. Today, however, the American public is just waiting for the right suitor to come along-party loyalty is at an all-time low, and the public seems tired of the narrowing political options it is offered. It has been 30 years since the last time a serious alternative to liberalism commanded the attention of the Democratic Party. Ideas have evolved. It's time for a new attempt to dislodge liberalism and replace it with a third way. </quote>