> Snitch uses a phrase in his piece that always jumps out at me when reading
> commentaries about conflicts between two sides in some foreign land.
>
> "I am on the side of the Iraqi and Kurdish opponents of this filthy
menace.
> And they are on the side of civil society in a wider conflict, which is the
> civil war now burning across the Muslim world from Indonesia to Nigeria."
>
> The ugly phrase is "civil society". In my mind, it always conjures up a
> noble Englishman in khaki gear travelling into the heart of darkness down
the
> Nile to find some other Englishman carrying on the white man's burden of
> enlightening the natives.
I think the phrase first shows up in Hegel, in _The Philosophy of Right_ perhaps? (I could look it up but am too lazy at the moment). It acquired a right-wing flavor in the 70s and 80s because it was often used in right-wing analyses of "actually existing socialism" in the eastern bloc. By "civil society," they basically meant "mediating institutions," organized non-state bodies such as churches, voluntary associations of the sort that Tocqueville wrote about, and institutions such as independent universities. One of the things wrong with Soviet-style socialism, in this view, was that it brought "civil society" under tight state control, indeed subsumed it into the state.
This is what made the Soviet version of socialism "totalitarian." In Poland, however, (so the story went), an independent "civil society" had survived under the sheltering wing of the Catholic church, providing the basis for resistance to "totalitarianism"--thus the rise of Solidarnosc and everything that followed.
In my opinion, this analysis wasn't wholly wrong, at least ca. 1979, although there's much that it leaves out. The phrase continues in use, however, and has become infected with the bad faith that so characterizes the intellectual right today. What Snitch had in mind using it in this context, I have no idea. Probably just slinging left-over phrases from the Cold War.
I agree with you about Snitch, BTW. I always found his literary manner more arrogant than elegant.
Jacob Conrad