The Idea of Civil Society
Walzer, Michael
A Path to Social Reconstruction y aim in this essay is to defend a complex, imprecise, and, at crucial points, uncertain account of society and politics. I have no hope of theoretical...
...To live well is not to make political decisions or beautiful objects...
...Labor unions need legal recognition and guarantees against "unfair labor practices...
...Ideally, civil society is a setting of settings: all are included, none is preferred...
...The civil society project can only be described in terms of all the other projects, against their singularity...
...And a member, secure in membership, literally part of an organic whole—this is much the best thing to be...
...Some kind of administrative agency would still be necessary for economic coordination, and it is only a Marxist conceit to refuse to call this agency a state...
...A Nationalist Response The fourth answer to the question about the good life can be read as a response to market amorality and disloyalty, though it has, historically, other sources as well...
...The capitalist answer assumes that the good life of entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice is a life led most importantly by individuals...
...Still, there is a fifth answer, the newest one (it draws upon less central themes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social thought), which holds that the good life can only be lived in civil society, the realm of fragmentation and struggle but also of concrete and authentic solidarities, where we fulfill E. M. Forster's injunction, "only connect," and become sociable or communal men and women...
...There was a kind of heroism in those projects—a concentration of energy, a clear sense of direction, an unblinking recognition of friends and enemies...
...The network of associations incorporates, but it cannot dispense with, the agencies of state power...
...All these are necessarily fragmented and localized as they are incorporated...
...In the nature of things, then, my argument won't be elegant, and though I believe that arguments should march, the sentences following one another like soldiers on parade, the route of my march today will be twisting and roundabout...
...Civil society appears in his book as an alternative to the state, which he assumes to be unchangeable and irredeemably hostile...
...We can only choose when we have many choices...
...What sorts of institutions should we work for...
...It challenges their singularity but it has no singularity of its own...
...What can a hospital attendant or a school teacher or a marriage counselor or a social worker or a television repairperson or a government official be said to make...
...it is lost, literally, without its firepower...
...Here, then, is the paradox of the civil society argument...
...All social forms are relativized by the civil society argument—and on the actual ground too...
...and the best constraint probably lies in collective security, that is, in alliances with other states that give economic regulation some international effect...
...In time of trouble, it can readily be turned against other nations, particularly against the internal others: minorities, aliens, strangers...
...It is also true, unhappily, that we can only make effective (rather than merely speculative or wistful) choices when we have resources to dispose of...
...Or, its protagonists conceive of citizenship in economic terms, so that citizens are transformed into autonomous consumers, looking for the party or program that most persuasively promises to strengthen their market positions...
...It is indeed true that the new social movements in the East and the West— concerned with ecology, feminism, the rights of immigrants and national minorities, workplace and product safety, and so on—do not aim, as the democratic and labor movements once aimed, at taking power...
...And civil society is tested by its capacity to produce citizens whose interests, at least sometimes, reach farther than themselves and their comrades, who look after the political community that fosters and protects the associational networks...
...And the larger it gets, the more it takes over those smaller associations still subject to hands-on control...
...This same argument also serves to legitimate a kind of state that is liberal and pluralist more than republican (not so radically dependent upon the virtue of its citizens...
...I mean to argue against choosing, but I shall also claim that it is from within civil society that this argument is best understood...
...That's not to say that we must be citizens all the time, finding in politics, as Rousseau urged, the greater part of our happiness...
...neither can socialist cooperation or capitalist competition dispense with the state...
...Against a background of growing disorganization— violence, homelessness, divorce, abandonment, alienation, and addiction—a society of this sort looks more like a necessary achievement than a comfortable reality...
...they should be served by machines, if not by slaves, so that they can flock to the assemblies and argue with their fellows about affairs of state...
...There is something to be said for the neoconservative argument that in the modem world we need to recapture the density of associational life and relearn the activities and understandings that go with it...
...its protagonists are more likely to meet sullen indifference, fear, despair, apathy, and withdrawal...
...It's not that some individuals live in fancier apartments than others, or drive better-made cars, or take vacations in more exotic places...
...I would rather say that the civil society argument is a corrective to the four ideological accounts of the good life—part denial, part incorporation—rather than a fifth to stand alongside them...
...But it is most characteristically an ideology of the right, for its understanding of membership is ascriptive...
...But in the associational networks of civil society—in unions, parties, movements, interest groups, and so on—these same people make many smaller decisions and shape to some degree the more distant determinations of state and economy...
...In Central and Eastern Europe, civil society is still a battle cry, for it requires a dismantling of the totalitarian state and it brings with it the exhilarating experience of associational independence...
...Looking back, after the collapse of the Communist regimes in Hungary and elsewhere, I can easily see how much it was a product of its time—and how short that time was...
...Between elections they are served, well or badly, by the civil service...
...The civility that makes democratic politics possible can only be learned in the associational networks...
...This is so, on the nationalist view, without reference to the specific content of the heritage, so long as it is one's own, a matter of birth, not choice...
...I suspect that they both respond to such deep human needs that they will outlast their current organizational forms...
...The Hobbesian account of society is more persuasive than it once was...
...In their hands, republicanism is still a simplifying creed...
...a growing number of people seem to be radically disengaged—passive clients of the state, market dropouts, resentful and posturing nationalists...
...I shall give only a few obvious examples, drawn from American experience...
...Their work is technically important but not substantively interesting...
...the roughly equal and widely dispersed capabilities that sustain the networks have to be fostered by the democratic state...
...Second, despite the singlemindedness of republican ideology, politics rarely engages the full attention of the citizens who are supposed to be its chief protagonists...
...In every actual experience of socialist politics, the state has moved rapidly into the foreground, and most socialists, in the West at least, have been driven to make their own amalgam of the first and second answers...
...The ease with which citizens, workers, and consumers become fervent nationalists is a sign of the inadequacy of the first three answers to the question about the good life...
...Civil society as we know it has its origin in the struggle for religious freedom...
...The nature of nationalist fervor signals the inadequacy of the fourth...
...In truth, however, it was never a comfortable reality, except for the few...
...it requires at most a minimal state— not "social regulation," only the police...
...Familial solidarity, mutual assistance, political likemindedness — all these are less certain and less substantial than they once were...
...Even the failed totalitarianism of, say, the Polish communist state had this much impact upon the Solidarity union: it determined that Solidarity was a Polish union, focused on economic arrangements and labor policy within the borders of Poland...
...and (3) to pluralize and domesticate nationalism, on the religious model, so that there are different ways to realize and sustain historical identities...
...Economic activity belongs to the realm of necessity, they argue, politics to the realm of freedom...
...Nor need we be involved all the time in our associations...
...Partly for this reason, capitalism, like socialism, is highly dependent on state action— not only to prevent theft and enforce 296 • DISSENT Civil Society contracts but also to regulate the economy and guarantee the minimal welfare of its participants...
...they need political correction...
...It would appear to be an elementary requirement of social democracy that there exist a society of lively, engaged, and effective men and women—where the honor of "action" belongs to the many and not to the few...
...And this time it's possible that they are not, as they usually are, foolishly alarmist...
...Citizenship is one of many roles that SPRING • 1991 • 301 Chrill Soddy members play, but the state itself is unlike all the other associations...
...He urged his fellow dissidents to reject the very idea of seizing or sharing power and to devote their energies to religious, cultural, economic, and professional associations...
...The totalitarian project has left behind an abiding sense of bureaucratic brutality...
...q 304 • DISSENT...
...Perhaps, to some extent, it does: certainly the welfare state has had its greatest successes in ethnically homogeneous countries...
...The establishment of this one thing," John Locke wrote about toleration, "would take away all ground of complaints and tumults upon account of conscience...
...Central and East European dissidence flourished within a highly restricted version of civil society, and the first task of the new democracies created by the dissidents, so we are told, is to rebuild the networks: unions, churches, political parties and movements, cooperatives, neighborhoods, schools of thought, societies for promoting or preventing this and that...
...It is, obviously, a price we already pay: in all capitalist societies, the market makes for inequality...
...The defense of civil society doesn't seem quite comparable...
...And in a more densely organized, more egalitarian civil society, they might do both these things to greater effect...
...But the verb "translates" here describes a socially mediated process, which is fostered or inhibited by the SPRING • 1991 • 299 ChM Society structure of its mediations...
...And the market within which choices are made, like the socialist economy, largely dispenses with politics...
...We have been thinking too much about social formations different from, in competition with, civil society...
...The two cases suggest, again, that civil society requires political agency...
...Most men and women have been trapped in one or another subordinate relationship, where the "civility" they learned was deferential rather than independent and active...
...The words "civil society" name the space of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of This essay was given as the Gunnar Myrdal lecture at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, October 1990...
...But these participants, insofar as they are market activists, are not active in the state: capitalism in its ideal form, like socialism again, does not make for citizenship...
...Their own lives, I suppose, are emotionally intense, but in relation to society and economy this is a dangerously free-floating intensity...
...Worker-owned companies and consumer cooperatives need state loans or loan guarantees...
...The more successful its imperialism, the greater the inequality...
...The first of the two holds that the preferred setting for the good life is the political community, the democratic state, within which we can be citizens: freely engaged, fully committed, decision-making members...
...It requires a new sensitivity for what is local, specific, contingent—and, above all, a new recognition (to paraphrase a famous sentence) that the good life is in the details...
...More generally, selfgovernment on the job called into question the legitimacy of "social regulation" or state planning, which alone, Marx thought, could enable individual workers to devote themselves, without distraction, to their work...
...It is also the instrument of the struggle, used to give a particular shape to the common life...
...The contemporary economy does not offer many people a chance for creativity in the Marxist sense...
...Here was the ultimate form of political singlemindedness, and though the "democratic" (and, for that matter, the "communist") ideology that they appropriated was false, the intrusions even of a more genuine democracy are rendered suspect by the memory...
...nor does it lend itself to a singular description (but this is what lies ahead in the East too...
...The same mechanism may turn out to be useful to the new environmental groups...
...The seriousness of Marxist antipolitics is nicely illustrated by Marx's own dislike of syndicalism...
...Can We Find a Synthesis...
...To live well is to participate with other men and women in remembering, cultivating, and passing on a national heritage...
...It is also true, however, that once liberation has been secured, nationalist men and women are commonly content with a vicarious rather than a practical participation in the community...
...They are not at all like those heroes of republican mythology, the citizens of ancient Athens meeting in assembly and (foolishly, as it turned out) deciding to invade Sicily...
...Perhaps this worrisome picture follows—in SPRING • 1991 • 293 Civil Soddy part, no more, but what else can a political theorist say?—from the fact that we have not thought enough about solidarity and trust or planned for their future...
...In Favor of Inclusiveness I mean to defend a perspective that might be called, awkwardly, "critical associationalism...
...But can any of these local and small-scale activities ever carry with them the honor of citizenship...
...They need the state but have no loyalty to it...
...moreover, contests can't be won by invoking one or another account of the preferred setting—as if it were enough to say that market organizations, insofar as they are efficient, don't have to be democratic or that state firms, insofar as they are democratically controlled, don't have to operate within the constraints of the market...
...They have too many other things to worry about...
...the participation of ordinary men and women in the activities of the state (unless they are state 294 • DISSENT Civil Society employees) is largely vicarious...
...There is nothing wrong with vicarious participation, on the nationalist view, since the good life is more a matter of identity than activity — ffaaiitthh,, not works, so to speak, though both of these are understood in secular terms...
...No state can survive for long if it is wholly alienated from civil society...
...National minorities need help in organizing and sustaining their own educational programs...
...States are tested by their capacity to sustain this kind of participation— which is very different from the heroic intensity of Rousseauian citizenship...
...Associational engagement is conceivably as important a project as any of the others, but its greatest virtue lies in its inclusiveness, and inclusiveness does not make for heroism...
...Liberalism appears here as an anti-ideology, and this is an attractive position in the contemporary world...
...Nationalism has often been a leftist ideology, historically linked to democracy and even to socialism...
...Above all, they have to earn a living...
...Publicists and preachers warn us of a steady attenuation of everyday cooperation and civic friendship...
...so do (even more often) capitalist entrepreneurs and firms...
...Let's begin with the political community and the cooperative economy, taken together...
...Even as Central and East European dissidents take power, they remain, and should remain, cautious and apprehensive about its uses...
...Service is more easily reconciled with a vision of human beings as social animals than with homo faber...
...But this vision of the cooperative economy is set against an unbelievable background—a nonpolitical state, regulation without conflict, "the administration of things...
...Civil society also challenges state power, most importantly when associations have resources or supporters abroad: world religions, pan-national movements, the new environmental groups, multinational corporations...
...in states with more than one nation, the density of the networks prevents radical polarization...
...In the first case, the state pressures the corporation...
...But the state can never be what it appears to be in liberal theory, a mere framework for civil society...
...the purpose of the struggle is to win, and victory brings an end to democratic instrumentality...
...A few years ago, in a book called Anti-Politics, the Hungarian dissident George Konrad described a way of living alongside the totalitarian state but, so to speak, with one's back turned toward it...
...These aren't aims that can be underwritten with historical guarantees or achieved through a single unified struggle...
...but I also have no desire for simplicity, since a world that theory could fully grasp and neatly explain would not, I suspect, be a pleasant place...
...many people, perhaps most people, live very loosely within the networks...
...Only a democratic state can create a democratic civil society...
...But it rests, exactly like political singlemindedness, on a failure to recognize the pluralism of associational life...
...Not any particular choices, for no choice is substantively the best: it is the activity of choosing that makes for autonomy...
...The problem with inequality is not merely that some individuals are more capable, others less capable, of making their consumer preferences effective...
...2) to socialize the economy so that there is a greater diversity of market agents, communal as well as private...
...Living in civil society, one might think, is like speaking in prose...
...It serves, or it doesn't serve, the needs of the associational networks as these are worked out by men and women who are simultaneously members and citizens...
...And yet that is what civil society requires: men and women actively engaged—in state, economy, and nation, and also in churches, neighborhoods, and families, and in many other settings too...
...We can think of this as the socialist answer to the questions I began with...
...Increasingly, associational life in the "advanced" capitalist and social democratic countries seems at risk...
...No one, I think, quite shares this faith today, but something like it helps to explain the tendency of some leftists to see even the liberal and democratic state as an obstacle that has to be, in the worst of recent jargons, "smashed...
...And this same neoclassical idea of citizenship resurfaced in the 1960s in New Left theories of participation, where it was, however, like latter-day revivals of many ideas, highly theoretical and without much local resonance...
...Sometimes, certainly, they are narrowly conceived, partial and particularist...
...Before that time, in the Marxist here and now, political conflict is taken to be the superstructural enactment of economic conflict, and democracy is valued mainly because it enables socialist movements and parties to organize for victory...
...Confronted with an overbearing state, citizens, who are also members, will struggle to make room for autonomous associations and market relationships (and also for local governments and decentralized bureaucracies...
...We are likely to feel differently about these challenges, especially after we recognize the real but relative importance of the state...
...But civil society encompasses or can encompass a variety of market agents: family businesses, publicly owned or municipal companies, worker communes, consumer cooperatives, nonprofit organizations of many different sorts...
...Though often violent, the struggle held open the possibility of peace...
...And their more single-minded adherents, who have exaggerated the effectiveness of the state or the market or the nation and neglected the networks, have probably contributed to the disorder of contemporary life...
...Associational freedom serves for them to legitimate a set of market relations, though not necessarily the capitalist set...
...Entrepreneurial activity tracks consumer preference...
...A democratic civil society is one controlled by its members, not through a single process of self-determination but through a large number of different and uncoordinated processes...
...It fixes the boundary conditions and the basic rules of all associational activity (including political activity...
...In the modern world, nations commonly seek statehood, for their autonomy will always be at risk if they lack sovereign power...
...Still a Need for State Power But there is no escape from power and coercion, no possibility of choosing, like the old anarchists, civil society alone...
...We can see it at work in a liberal such as John Stuart Mill, in whose writings it produced an unexpected defense of syndicalism (what is today called "workers' control") and, more generally, of social democracy...
...even party militants are more likely to argue and complain than actually to decide...
...Exactly how one can work with other people and still do whatever one pleases is unclear to me and probably to most other readers of Marx...
...Civil society is a project of projects...
...The second leftist position on the preferred setting for the good life involves a turning away from republican politics and a focus instead on economic activity...
...Every nationalist will, of course, find value in his or her own heritage, but the highest value is not in the finding but in the willing: the firm identification of the individual with a people and a history...
...Competing with one another, they maximize everyone else's options too, filling the marketplace with desirable objects...
...Each is importantly wrong...
...It is because groups like these are entangled with other groups, similar in kind but different in aim, that civil society holds out the hope of a domesticated nationalism...
...Families with working parents need state help in the form of publicly funded day care and effective public schools...
...I don't doubt that the active and engaged citizen is an attractive figure—even if some of the activists that we actually meet carrying placards and shouting slogans aren't all that attractive...
...This is the point of Engels's little essay on authority, which I take to express Marx's view also...
...Because this regulation is nonpolitical, the individual producers are freed from the burdens of citizenship...
...Their protagonists could imagine conflicts between political communities and between classes but not within either...
...Professional associations need state support for their licensing procedures...
...For there is no reason to think that only leftists love singularity...
...Civil society simply is that place where the stakes are lower, where, in principle at least, coercion is used only to keep the peace and all associations are equal under the law...
...The first view leads, often, to a more interesting and more genuinely liberal mistake: it suggests that pluralism is self-sufficient and self-sustaining...
...The exact character of our associational life is something that has to be argued about, and it is in the course of these arguments that we also decide about the forms of democracy, the nature of work, the extent and effects of market inequalities, and much else...
...The helpmate, like the housewife, was never assimilated to the class of workers...
...The capacity of the nation to elicit such sacrifices from its members is proof of the importance of this fourth answer...
...This again is much the best thing to be...
...We have reasons of our own for accepting the invitation...
...This is so in two senses...
...Our cities really are noisier and nastier than they once were...
...When they are free to celebrate their histories, remember their dead, and shape (in part) the education of their children, they are more likely to be harmless than when they are unfree...
...It is, then, a mistake to set politics and work in opposition to one another...
...Hence I am uneasy with the idea that there might be a fifth and finally correct answer to the question about the good life...
...This argument goes back to the Greeks, but we are most likely to recognize its neoclassical versions...
...We know ourselves best as persons who propose, debate, and decide...
...Each is predicated on an assumption I mean to attack: that such questions must receive a singular answer...
...But before I try to suggest what further progress might look like, I need to describe two more ideological answers to the question about the good life, one of them capitalist, the other nationalist...
...They are known only by their brand names, which, unlike family names and country names, evoke preferences but not affections or solidarities...
...It can't be the case that living on this ground is good in itself...
...Each neglects the necessary pluralism of any civil society...
...In the West, by contrast, we have lived in civil society for many years without knowing it...
...People would be less ready to take risks once the stakes were lowered...
...For civil society, left to itself, generates radically unequal power relationships, which only state power can challenge...
...Most of us will be happier elsewhere, involved only sometimes in affairs of state...
...Their singlemindedness takes the form of market imperialism...
...It doesn't matter who the managers are so long as they are committed to this goal and rational in its pursuit...
...And that is not an understanding about which we can be entirely confident these days...
...Definitions from the Left I shall begin, since this is for me the best-known ground, with two leftist answers...
...To reach this goal is not as easy as it sounds...
...they are too caught up in particularity...
...What the syndicalists proposed was a neat amalgam of the first and second answers to the question about the good life: for them, the preferred setting was the workercontrolled factory, where men and women were SPRING • 1991 • 295 Civil Society simultaneously citizens and producers, making decisions and making things...
...His understanding of citizenship as moral agency is one of the key sources of democratic idealism...
...Join the associations of your choice" is not a slogan to rally political militants...
...it can be found in Marx and also, though the arguments are somewhat different, among the utopians he hoped to supersede...
...A democratic state is the preferred setting not for the good life but for the class struggle...
...confronting the democratic state, they are advocates of privatization and laissez-faire...
...The associational life of civil society is the actual ground where all versions of the good are worked out and tested . . . and proved to be partial, incomplete, ultimately unsatisfying...
...It is only necessary to add that among the groups in but not of the state are market organizations, and among the groups in but not of the market are state organizations...
...No more do they seek economic arrangements of any particular kind...
...Production, too, is free even if it isn't, as in the Marxist vision, freely creative...
...Unlike religious believers who are their close kin and (often) bitter rivals, nationalists are not bound by a body of authoritative law or a set of sacred texts...
...Democratic citizenship, worker solidarity, free enterprise, and SPRING • 1991 • 297 ChM Sodstv consumer autonomy—all these are less exclusive than nationalism but not always resistant to its power...
...The actual experience of civil society, when it can be had, 300 • DISSENT Civil Sodetv seems to work against these two...
...The problem is that inequality commonly translates into domination and radical deprivation...
...family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space...
...Nor is it possible to imagine, in accordance with one or another of the great simplifying theories, a way to choose among them—as if we were destined to find, one day, the best social formation...
...A Capitalist Definition The third answer holds that the preferred setting for the good life is the marketplace, where individual men and women, consumers rather than producers, choose among a maximum number of options...
...only a democratic civil society can sustain a democratic state...
...But if oppression is the cause of seditious commotion, what is the cause of oppression...
...The picture here is of people freely associating and communicating with one another, forming and reforming groups of all sorts, not for the sake of any particular formation—family, tribe, nation, religion, commune, brotherhood or sisterhood, interest group or ideological movement—but for the sake of sociability itself...
...The exact nature of the limits would depend on the strength and density of the associational networks (including, now, the political community...
...It appeared among nineteenth- and twentieth-century democratic radicals, often with a hard populist edge...
...When we are all engaged in productive activity, social division and the conflicts it engenders will disappear, and the state, in the once-famous phrase, will "wither away...
...A11 this is not to say, however, that we need to accept the capitalist version of competition and division...
...Locke may have put the claim too strongly when he wrote, "There is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotions, and that is oppression," but he was close enough to the truth to warrant the experiment of radical tolerance...
...And this is, of course, much the best thing to be...
...it requires no political choices and no activity beyond ritual affirmation...
...In states dominated by a single nation, the multiplicity of the groups pluralizes nationalist politics and culture...
...They miss the complexity of human society, the inevitable conflicts of commitment and loyalty...
...Theorists of civil society, by contrast, have a more realistic view of communities and economies...
...They attend instead to the things they make and to the cooperative relationships they establish...
...My argument here is not that autonomy collapses into egotism, only that autonomy in the marketplace provides no support for social solidarity...
...All these function in the market even though they have their origins outside...
...Their ideal is a society in which all goods and services are provided by entrepreneurs to consumers...
...factories could not be both democratic and productive...
...Or, better, since the Scottish Enlightenment, or since Hegel, the words have been known to the knowers of such things but they have rarely served to focus anyone else's attention...
...These socially engaged men and women — part-time union officers, movement activists, party regulars, consumer advocates, welfare volunteers, church members, family heads— stand outside the republic of citizens as it is commonly conceived...
...The texts suggest an extraordinary faith in the virtuosity of the regulators...
...That is why democratic citizenship, socialist production, free enterprise, and nationalism were all of them liberating projects...
...But were the market to be set firmly within civil society, politically constrained, open to communal as well as private initiatives, limits might be fixed on its unequal outcomes...
...Later on, however, I shall have to argue that this position too, so genial and benign, has its problems...
...Imagine that the following questions were posed one or two centuries ago to political theorists and moral philosophers: what is the preferred setting, the most supportive environment, for the good life...
...For we are by nature social, before we are political or economic beings...
...Not everyone can compete successfully in commodity production, and therefore not everyone has access to commodities...
...Hence my account in these pages, which suggests the need (1) to decentralize the state so that there are more opportunities for citizens to take responsibility for (some of) its activities...
...I have no hope of theoretical simplicity, not at this historical moment when so many stable oppositions of political and intellectual life have collapsed...
...But there can be no victory at all that doesn't involve some control over, or use of, the state apparatus...
...First, though the power of the democratic state has grown enormously, partly (and rightly) in response to the demands of engaged citizens, it can't be said that the state is fully in the hands of its citizens...
...In the market, this formal equality often has no substance, but in the world of faith and identity, it is real enough...
...And the state is an indispensable agent—even if the associational networks also, always, resist the organizing impulses of state bureaucrats...
...And across the entire range of association, individual men and women need to be protected against the power of officials, employers, experts, party bosses, factory foremen, directors, priests, parents, patrons...
...Freedom, in the capitalist view, is a function of plenitude...
...And a citizen, on this view, is much the best thing to be...
...Individual members seek the good life by seeking autonomy not for themselves but for their people...
...Because the market has no political boundaries, capitalist entrepreneurs also evade official control...
...Despite the successes of capitalist production, the good life of consumer choice is not universally available...
...It seems, in any case, worthwhile to wait and see...
...The most penetrating criticism of this first answer to the question about the good life is not that the life isn't good but that it isn't the "real life" of very many people in the modern world...
...The rule of the demos is in significant ways illusory...
...Nor need these people stand alone even in the marketplace...
...Civil society itself is sustained by groups much smaller than the demos or the working class or the mass of consumers or the nation...
...But none of them has yet produced a general, coherent, or sustainable liberation...
...This second view takes on plausibility from the extraordinary havoc wrought by totalitarian economic "planning...
...it is to make personal choices...
...Dominated and deprived individuals are likely to be disorganized as well as impoverished, whereas poor people with strong families, churches, unions, political parties, and ethnic alliances are not likely to be dominated or deprived for long...
...To make one of these one's own was a serious commitment...
...The phrase "social being" describes men and women who are citizens, producers, consumers, members of the nation, and much else besides—and none of these by nature or because it is the best thing to be...
...On the ground of actuality (unless the state usurps the ground), citizenship shades off into a great diversity of (sometimes divisive) decision-making roles...
...They are more deeply engaged in the economy than in the political community...
...Civil society is sufficiently democratic when in some, at least, of its parts we are able to recognize ourselves as authoritative and responsible participants...
...This also means that all social forms are contestable...
...I have no magic formula for making connections or strengthening the sense of responsibility...
...The quality of nationalism is also determined within civil society, where national groups coexist and overlap with families and religious communities (two social formations largely neglected in modernist answers to the question about the good life) and where nationalism is expressed in schools and movements, organizations for mutual aid, cultural and historical societies...
...In similar fashion, politics in the contemporary democratic state does not offer many people a chance for Rousseauian self-determination...
...Indeed, it works so well, some observers think, that neither religious faith nor national identity is likely to survive for long in the network of free associations...
...I don't doubt that there is a materialist story to tell here, but I want to stress the central role played by ideological singlemindedness: the intolerant universalism of (most) religions, the exclusivity of (most) nations...
...there isn't any other place to live...
...I want to join, but I am somewhat uneasy with, the civil society argument...
...Then nationalism requires a more heroic loyalty: self-sacrifice in the struggle for national liberation...
...These are the crucial social formations that we inhabit, but we don't at this moment live comfortably in any of them...
...Though nations don't compete for members in the same way as religions (sometimes) do, the argument for granting them the associational freedom of civil society is similar...
...They will have their votaries, 298 • DISSENT Civil Society but these people will not be models for the rest of us—or, they will be partial models only, for some people at some time of their lives, not for other people, not at other times...
...Nineteenth- and twentiethcentury social thought provides four different, by now familiar, answers to these questions...
...I shall stress this attractiveness as I try to explain how civil society might actually incorporate and deny the four answers...
...Because I believe that two are better than one, I take this to be progress...
...In practice, however, work, though it begins in necessity, takes on a value of its own—expressed in commitment to a career, pride in a job well done, a sense of camaraderie in the workplace...
...The kinds of "action" discussed by theorists of the state need to be supplemented (not, however, replaced) by something radically different: more like union organizing than political mobilization, more like teaching in a school than arguing in the assembly, more like volunteering in a hospital than joining a political party, more like working in an ethnic alliance or a feminist support group than canvassing in an election, more like shaping a co-op budget than deciding on national fiscal policy...
...It is Rousseau's argument or the standard leftist interpretation of Rousseau's argument...
...Multinational corporations, for example, need to be constrained, much like states with imperial ambitions...
...If politics is our highest calling, then we are called away from every other activity (or, every other activity is redefined in political terms...
...So arms merchants sell the latest military technology to foreign powers, and manufacturers move their factories overseas to escape safety codes or minimum-wage laws...
...These two leftist versions of the good life systematically undervalued all associations except the demos and the working class...
...The state, in this view, ought to be managed in such a way as to set productivity free...
...The argument is a liberal version of the four answers, accepting them all, insisting that each leave room for the others, therefore not finally accepting any of them...
...In fact, if this vision were ever realized, it is politics that would wither away...
...That's why so many dissidents are ministers now...
...Indeed, a state of this sort, as we shall see, is necessary if associations are to flourish...
...Though not without its own excitements, it is mostly instrumental: the aim of all entrepreneurs (and all producers) is to increase their market power, maximize their options...
...Post-totalitarian politicians and writers have, in addition, learned the older antipolitics of free enterprise—so that the laissez-faire market is defended in the East today as one of the necessary institutions of civil society, or, more strongly, as the dominant social formation...
...And the civil society project doesn't confront an energizing hostility, as all the others do...
...More important than the producers, however, are the entrepreneurs—heroes of autonomy, consumers of opportunity—who compete to supply whatever all the other consumers want or might be persuaded to want...
...The failure, however, has carried with it terrible costs, and so one can understand the appeal of contemporary antipolitics...
...We require many settings so that we can live different kinds of good lives...
...But we really don't know to what extent faith and identity depend upon coercion or whether they can reproduce themselves under conditions of freedom...
...Hence citizenship has a certain practical pre-eminence among all our actual and possible memberships...
...it requires many organizing strategies and new forms of state action...
...A democratic state, which is continuous with the other associations, has at the same time a greater say about their quality and vitality...
...Ideally, this attitude ought to survive the liberation struggle and provide a foundation for social solidarity and mutual assistance...
...Republican theorists (like Hannah Arendt) recognize this engagement only as a threat to civic virtue...
...Ideally, citizens should not have to work...
...The autonomous individual confronting his, and now her, possibilities—this is much the best thing to be...
...They look, most of them, for many partial fulfillments, no longer for the one clinching fulfillment...
...The collapse of totalitarianism is empowering for the members of civil society precisely because it renders the state accessible...
...And so we have neglected the networks through which civility is produced and reproduced...
...There is no ideal fulfillment and no essential human capacity...
...Marx seems to have regarded the combination as impossible...
...And if this is the case, then a more strenuous argument is called for from the left: we have to reconstruct that same density under new conditions of freedom and equality...
...The production and reproduction of loyalty, civility, political competence, and trust in authority are never the work of the state alone, and the effort to go it alone—one meaning of totalitarianism—is doomed to failure...
...and small and weak groups need to be protected against large and powerful ones...
...in the second it responds to environmentalist pressure...
...Autonomy turns out to be a high-risk value, which many men and women can only realize with help from their friends...
...Assembly-line workers don't quite seem to fit...
...They become part of the world of family, friends, comrades, and colleagues, where people are connected to one another and made responsible for one another...
...What is true is that the quality of our political and economic activity and of our national culture is intimately connected to the strength and vitality of our associations...
...I shall begin with the idea of civil society, recently revived by Central and East European intellectuals, and go on to talk about the state, the economy, and the nation, and then about civil society and the state again...
...There is no intrinsic value in democracy, no reason to think that politics has, for creatures like us, a permanent attractiveness...
...Today, perhaps in response to the political disasters of the late sixties, "communitarians" in the United States struggle to give Rousseauian idealism a historical reference, looking back to the early American republic and calling for a renewal of civic virtue...
...And just as the experience of democracy is expanded and enhanced by groups that are in but not of the state, so consumer choice is expanded and enhanced by groups that are in but not of the market...
...Multinational corporations stand outside (and to some extent against) every political community...
...The projects have to be relativized and brought together, and the place to do that is in civil society, the setting of settings, where each can find the partial fulfillment that is all it deserves...
...Society regulates the general production," Marx wrote in The German Ideology, "and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow . . . just as I have a mind...
...None of this can be accomplished without using political power to redistribute resources and to underwrite and subsidize the most desirable associational activities...
...When nations find themselves ruled by foreigners, however, ritual affirmation isn't enough...
...They are more accommodating to conflict—that is, to political opposition and economic competition...
...Theorists who regard the market as the preferred setting for the good life aim to make it the actual setting for as many aspects of life as possible...
...The value is instrumental and historically specific...
...They are only intermittently virtuous...
...But people come to the marketplace with radically unequal resources—some with virtually nothing at all...
...But we must have a state open to our sometime involvement...
...our energies are directed toward policy formation and decision making in the democratic state...
...Once productivity is free, politics simply ceases to engage anyone's attention...
...That some entrepreneurs would fail and many consumers find themselves helpless in the marketplace—this is the price of individual autonomy...
...Citizenship, taken by itself, is today mostly a passive role: citizens are spectators who vote...
...For Marx, the preferred setting is the cooperative economy, where we can all be producers— artists (Marx was a romantic), inventors, and artisans...
...All these answers are wrongheaded because of their singularity...
...These needn't all be democratic, for we are likely to be members of many 302 • DISSENT Civil Society associations, and we will want some of them to be managed in our interests, but also in our absence...
...Connected and responsible: without that, "free and equal" is less attractive than we once thought it would be...
...It compels association members to think about a common good, beyond their own conceptions of the good life...
...But they don't seek states of any particular kind...
...And I have no reason, as an autonomous individual, to accept any reductions of any sort for someone else's sake...
...They need the state but have no moral relation to it, and they control its officials only as consumers control the producers of commodities, by buying or not buying what they make...
...But just as speaking in prose implies an understanding of syntax, so these forms of action (when they are pluralized) imply an SPRING • 1991 • 303 Civil Society understanding of civility...
...Nonetheless, I want to warn against the antipolitical tendencies that commonly accompany the celebration of civil society...
...Now writers in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland invite us to think about how this social formation is secured and invigorated...
...Philanthropy and mutual aid, churches and private universities, depend upon tax exemptions...
...the profit motive brings them into conflict with democratic regulation...
...This represents an important change, in sensibility as much as in ideology, reflecting a new valuation of parts over wholes and a new willingness to settle for something less than total victory...
...His argument seemed right to me when I first read his book...
...Think of them as four rival ideologies, each with its own claim to completeness and correctness...
...They prescribe citizenship as an antidote to the fragmentation of contemporary society—for these theorists, like Rousseau, are disinclined to value the fragments...
...It cannot outlast its own coercive machinery...
...One can easily imagine groundless complaints and tumults, but Locke believed (and he was largely right) that tolerance would dull the edge of religious conflict...
...The greater problem, however, is that they seem so ordinary...
...The market, when it is entangled in the network of associations, when the forms of ownership are pluralized, is without doubt the economic formation most consistent with the civil society argument...
...Among ourselves what is required is nothing so grand...
...and, similarly, production shades off into a multitude of (sometimes competitive) socially useful activities...
...The market, however, is not a good setting for mutual assistance, for I cannot help someone else without reducing (for the short term, at least) my own options...
...To live well is to be politically active, working with our fellow citizens, collectively determining our common destiny—not for the sake of this or that determination but for the work itself, in which our highest capacities as rational and moral agents find expression...
...The picture Marx paints is of creative men and women making useful and beautiful objects, not for the sake of this or that object but for the sake of creativity itself, the highest expression of our "species-being" as homo faber, man-the-maker...
...Large numbers of people drop out of the market economy or live precariously on its margins...
...They call themselves democratic socialists, focusing on the state as well as (in fact, much more than) on the economy and doubling the preferred settings for the good life...
...These are conceivably the just rewards of market success...
...Beyond liberation, they have no program, only a vague commitment to continue a history, to sustain a "way of life...
...This is, indeed, the experience of the dissidents: the state could not destroy their unions, churches, free universities, illegal markets, samizdat publications...
...The market is preferred (over the political community and the cooperative economy) because of its fullness...
...According to the fourth answer, the preferred setting is the nation, within which we are loyal members, bound to one another by ties of blood and history...
...Once incorporated into civil society, neither citizenship nor production can ever again be all-absorbing...
...But political power alone cannot accomplish any of it...
...This pluralist perspective follows in part, perhaps, from the lost romance of work, from our experience with the new productive technologies and the growth of the service economy...
...It both frames civil society and occupies space within it...
...All of these are competitive with the values of citizenship...
...they aimed at the abolition or transcendence of particularism and all its divisions...
...Other people, strangers on the street, seem less trustworthy than they once did...
...It played a part in the reiterated demand for social inclusion by women, workers, blacks, and new immigrants, all of whom based their claims on their capacity as agents...
...Nor does Marx (or any socialist thinker of the central tradition) have much to say about those men and women whose economic activity consists entirely in helping other people...
...It can't be said that nothing is lost when we give up the singlemindedness of democratic citizenship or socialist cooperation or individual autonomy or national identity...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
