>It seems that the attitude toward "civil society" can be used as an
>indicator of the fringe/cultish nature of the group holding it - the
>greater the hostility the more wacky and cultish nature of the group.
Count me a cultist then. I hate that civil society nonsense.
Doug
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from Left Business Observer #77, May 1997
CIVIL $OCIETY
The mail recently brought a birth announcement for The Institute for Civil Society of Newton, Massachusetts. The brochure, festooned with inspirational quotes from Robert Kennedy and Marge Piercy, helpfully explained that "civil society consists of those institutions, relationships, and cultural traditions which promote trust, a sense of community, and mutual obligation for building the common future. Civil society is that part of society which is not government and not business, but without which no peoples or nation can prosper or achieve democracy."
To promote those essential institutions, relationships, and cultural traditions, the ICS will distribute grants. Don't bother to apply, though; the Institute "functions non-traditionally, that is, we do not encourage or accept unsolicited proposals. Rather, we work to develop strategies which relate to the building of civil society and the promotion of human development, and seek partners for the implementation of projects based on these strategies." Don't call us, we'll call you - philanthropist knows best.
Elaborating on its mission, the ICS declares: "Our nation has always been strong because we are like a three-legged stool. All three legs - business, government, and civil society - must be committed and strong to hold up society." Hmm, this stool metaphor sounds awfully familiar. Oh yes, Jeremy Rifkin, in the February 26, 1996, issue of The Nation: "While politicians traditionally divide the United States into a spectrum running from the marketplace on one side to the government on the other, it is more accurate to think of society as a three-legged stool made up of the market sector, the government sector and the civil sector." Though the stool itself is absent, David Korten makes a very similar argument in his awful book, When Corporations Rule the World (LBO #71).
This emphasis on a "third" or "civic" sector is extremely fashionable among philanthropists today. This could be excused as simply a bit of institutional narcissism if it weren't so pervasive among policy makers and pundits (especially pundits like Korten and Rifkin upon whom sensitive philanthropists like to bestow their grants).
"Civil society" is big on the right, too, where it fits comfortably into a pro-market, anti-statist agenda. A quick web search reveals the existence of yet another youthful Institute for Civil Society, this one in the Cato corporate libertarian orbit. Blowhard moralists like William Bennett are also fond of the concept; in 1995, the cretinous Indiana Sen. Dan Coats introduced a package of bills, scripted in part by Bennett, to "energize mainly private efforts to meet human needs" - Victorian charity, rather than public programs. As is often the case, the right understands the concept better than do the "pwogwessives" (Alexander Cockburn's epithet) who appropriate their ideas.
Solo act
The (Kennedy-quoting) ICS is led by Pam Solo, a MacArthur-certified genius. She was most recently the director of the Social Venture Network, a group of soulful businesspersons whose credo can be summed up in Solo's assertion: "I think a lot of money could be made calling forth our best values." Apparently she doesn't worry that the desire to make a lot of money undermines "our best values." On the contrary - Solo says one of her missions is "looking at the way business and the economy contribute to inner civility."
The biggest recipient of the ICS's first round of awards, announced in April, was (in the Boston Globe's words) "a [Boston] group composed mostly of black leaders who are dedicated to prying youngsters from gangs and drugs." Other grants went to an economic development program for Dorchester; to a group that's been putting up antigun billboards on Massachusetts highways; and to a primary school so that it can put a museum in its first floor enabling children to "become familiar with art at an early age." These may all be worthy projects, but they seem like weak tea next to mass incarceration and the end of welfare. But in the words of Solo's comrade, Anna Faith Jones, president of the Boston Foundation, "We're trying to reinvigorate public participation in society. People are pulling back into isolation and are not taking part in society."
Telling origins
Why might that be, aside from simple exhaustion? An answer might lie in the origins of the term "civil society" itself.
Locke and Rousseau used "civil society" to signify civil government, as opposed to life in a raw state of nature. But its popular usage in the U.S. today seems an import from the dissidents of Eastern Europe, who knew its theoretical roots in Marx and Hegel. "Civil society" was a way of introducing market relations by the backdoor. That position is a lot more coherent than the one being hawked by Solo and Rifkin.
Feudal society was deeply and explicitly political. Individuals were situated a distinct social hierarchy culminating in the sovereign; economic life was bound up with the state. Capitalism split the economic and the political, market and state. In the emergent bourgeois doctrine, the state was grounded in civil society, but civil society itself was constituted, in Marx's words, by "self-sufficient monads" acting egoistically. Or as Hegel said, "civil society is the battlefield where everyone's individual private interest meets everyone else's" - a war each of against all. For Hegel, civil society comprised all those social institutions between the family and the state - though curiously, the cops and the courts were part of civil society and not the state. Hegel's civil society isn't pretty: 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."
To Marx, the member of civil society was "an individual withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private desires and separated from the community." All that binds these monads into a society are "natural necessity, need and private interest, the conservation of their property and their egoistic persons." To Gramsci, civil society was the place of "the 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group [that is, the ruling class - Gramsci used the euphemisms to evade the jailhouse censors after Mussolini had him arrested]; this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." Of course, should spontaneous consent become rebellion, spontaneous or organized, the state will intervene.
Some South African writers, inspired in part by Gramsci, have been talking up the development of a working-class civil society - a real, democratic culture, independent of the monied, and a thoroughly wonderful idea. But it has nothing in common with actually existing U.S. civil society, nor does it have much in common with the softer version dreamt by Solo.
Rich people and their foundations dearly love hospitals, universities, and museums -all of which have their virtues, but which are all deeply embedded in market relations, and are also deeply involved in the propagation of Gramsci's "hegemony," or the seemingly "natural" dominance of a ruling class. These institutions are among those by which regional and national elites constitute themselves: board memberships convey prestige and lubricate social and business connections. In other words, these institutions are among the means by which economic power is transformed into broader social prestige and power, crucial to the development of the instincts of "spontaneous consent."
The civil society lobby professes its concern for more grassroots matters. Yet even here, the hierarchies of money and prestige prevail. Rather than developing a democratic civil society, the philanthropy-driven brand still gives precedence to the whims of the monied and the foundation program officers who handle the details for them. Grant-driven civil society is almost always reactive, or meliorative, or adaptive - but never interested in social transformation, or even understanding. And it's almost always oriented towards very local and specific concerns; it's not given to systemic reflection or agitation.
So we see grants to help separate children from guns and drugs, but never an inquiry into why American society produces so much poverty, violence, and a passion for serious intoxication; grants to community organizations to counsel the poor or offer job training, but never to organize for a jobs program, or to resist welfare reform. In those examples, doing the right thing would require serious self-organization, not strategies conceived and funded from on high. Appearances aside, the civil society of philanthropists and their grantees is as atomized and hierarchical as the market whose injuries they profess to heal. The roots of the social incivility they mourn can be found in the original "civil society" described by Hegel, Marx, and Gramsci.
These days, everyone knows that the state is dominated by money, but it takes a little effort to show how civil society is as well, and how ill-suited it is as a check on the mighty market. Ironically, one of the obsessions of the civil society crowd is tempering the harsh tone of public speech. (Solo herself blames the bull market in incivility on the likes of Rikki Lake.) They've forgotten that, as the man said, money doesn't talk, it swears.