Rescuing Civil Society

...HENCE THE permanence of the state: it isn't going to wither away...

...But unpaid work is not greatly respected in capitalist societies...

...I know that this isn't the case in all existing democracies, but it seems to me the appropriate aim of a democratic politics—that everyone whose life is directly determined by the state, everyone directly subject to its coercive power, should be represented in state decision making...

...But these two groups had hardly any overlapping membership...

...The first kind of communitarianism, the civic-republican model, must have some reality over and above the pluralist solidarities of class, faith, ethnicity, and neighborhood...

...Ideally (in Rousseau's description, for example) they "fly" to the public assemblies...

...ARECENT STUDY of the Weimar Republic by Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Princeton, suggests that the totalizing ambition of (some of) its most important groups was one of the causes of the troubles that lay ahead...

...And if the state is a democracy, and the citizens are active within it, they will inevitably deal with one another every day, in many different ways, in conflict and cooperation...

...But this equality of communal capabilities requires the engagement of the state itself...

...A guaranteed annual income is one possibility, though many people might find such a sharp break between work and reward morally problematic (and then it would be politically problematic, too...

...For they coexist with other associations defending other universal creeds and competing for new members...

...Members of both Catholic and social democratic associations, for example, were more resistant than other Germans to the appeals of Nazism...

...they don't have the same access to political power as older, more established communities...

...And the solidarity of the citizens would also have to be very strong if those engaged in productive work were to agree to be taxed to pay for those who opt out...

...Only the two together can bring excluded men and women into the common life...

...All the available evidence suggests that activists in civil society are also active citizens...

...All the different groups that coexist in civil society should be capable of serving their own members and also of providing services to needy individuals beyond their boundaries...

...One thing, however, seems clear: the contemporary neoliberal campaign against the state (or, better, against the state budget) will have to be defeated before we can even hope for the full flowering of civil society...

...Though participation in civil society cannot substitute for democratic engagement, it can inspire and sustain that engagement...

...they advance particular interests that conflict with other particular interests...

...I want to describe these two, and then argue that each of them can play a part, but not in isolation from the other, in helping us address the hardest problems of contemporary society...

...The voluntary giving of money, and also of time and energy, is central to associational life...

...It is clearly exemplified in (some) contemporary versions of identity politics, which serve indeed to reinforce necessary solidarities but do so at a very high cost, for they divide the citizens and make democratic politics harder than it need be...

...unions bring together people with different religious and ethnic affiliations...

...Bringing civil society to the rescue of the state would require state action on a very large scale...

...But these far-reaching ideological divisions were closely connected to the virtually total institutional division between the two groups...

...If state programs are to help them, they will have to be designed specifically for that purpose...

...THE MOST radical proposals for bringing civil society to the rescue of the state (they come mainly from dissident social democrats in Europe: see Claus Offe, "Full Employment: Asking the Wrong Question," Dissent, Winter 1995) involve changing all of this...

...Once again, however, only a very strong state would be able to collect and distribute the necessary funds...

...Indeed, a whole series of graphs, put together by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, show exactly the same pattern of decline: a line angled sharply downward that measures voting...

...I am speaking now in the imperative mode, reiterating a programmatic commitment that I am not sure I know how to implement...

...and so on...

...The goal of any pluralist communitarianism must be an equalizing of capacities, so that all men and women are capable of organizing in defense of their interests...

...other forms of political activity...

...Fragmentation Civil society is a realm of fragmentation and division...

...Within the movement, at least, they commanded great respect and often wielded real power...

...nonetheless, the people doing that work would not be paying taxes, and so they would depend on the goodwill of the others...

...If we don't achieve this, we will repeat in civil society the pattern of clientage and dependency that has sometimes characterized state welfare services and undermined their effectiveness...

...when they choose positions, they regularly set the common good over their private interests...

...In the different communities, participation, because it is generated by very strong feelings of solidarity, is focused less on argument and decision making (though the members do have to make decisions) than on mutual aid, and the professional civil service is partly replaced by voluntary social service...

...In the United States, a number of recent studies have demonstrated (though not beyond scholarly dispute) a sig62 DISSENT / Winter 1999 nificant decline in associational activity—a loss of membership in many of the most important social unions and a sharp drop in attendence at meetings...

...One remedy for this divisiveness comes from within civil society itself: if it is a realm of fragmentation, then identities within it are neither given for all time nor singular in character...

...Still, I know what is necessary: democratic participation must be not only a value, but a valued experience of large numbers of citizens—so that the sense of common effort works in the singular political community as it works in the plural communities of civil society...

...In principle, at least, all the citizens participate in deciding how they are to be served, and then the civil service serves everyone...

...This is most clearly true among men, since so many of the helping activites are thought to be women's work: nice things to do, but not compatible with success in the marketplace...

...Democratic politics requires vigorous associations, but it must also cope with the inequalities that arise within the associational world, the frequent divisiveness of communal solidarities, and the fitful and undisciplined character of voluntary work...

...But if the state is to play its part, there must be a solidarity of citizens...

...In fact, even in America, civil society's points of light depend on electricity provided by the DISSENT / Winter 1999 63 state, largely in the form of tax money...

...Let's look more closely at the three obstacles to the project of a civil-society rescue...

...This is a paradox, I suppose, but one that can, at least in theory, be solved...

...They will argue and organize, but also bargain and compromise...

...Communities and associations inhabit the space of civil society, which is framed but not dominated by the state...

...In a famous speech delivered at the Republican Party convention in 1988, George Bush described the voluntary activities of ordinary men and women in civil society as "points of light," as if the encompassing state were a realm of darkness (a common American view, which is more rare in Europe...

...They both have revivalist aims...

...Like republican citizens, they are amateurs, but they are more widely committed than citizens commonly are: they work as recruiters, organizers, administrators, teachers, fund raisers, "helping hands...

...Many men and women never volunteer at all...

...But if this pattern of overlapping association is to be sustained, we need a critique of, and some signficiant resistance to, what Lewis Coser once called "greedy institutions"—organized groups that demand total commitment from their members, that lay claim to all their time, energy, and available money...

...In the United States today, however, fewer than 50 percent of our citizens even bother to vote (voting percentages are much higher in Europe, though there are signs of decline in some countries...

...This same interdependence holds also with regard to the second obstacle 64 DISSENT / Winter 1999 to civil society's rescue mission...

...The activists would be, at least initially, men and women already active in the many different associations that stand to gain from public recognition of voluntary work...

...Loosening the ties involves real losses, which are nonetheless necessary to the survival of pluralism...

...But it is still a question, given one further feature of civil society, just how extensive these possibilities really are...

...they "give the law to themselves," and live in accordance with this self-legislation...

...Something like 60 percent of the money spent by Catholic Charities and the Jewish Federations, the examples that I know best, comes from tax money...

...These would still be volunteers, for they would forgo the greater incomes that might be available in the marketplace...

...membership in the mainstream churches (though evangelical and pentecostal sects are growing...

...And it is these solidarities that make possible the gifts of time, energy, and money, and the widespread (though perhaps declining) readiness to join in political struggle, religious communion, and mutual aid...

...Even for the most conscientious, work in civil society is rarely a day-in, day-out commitment...

...it displays and reinforces previous economic success...

...The state is now understood as a framework, a social union of social unions (in immigrant societies like the United States, a "nation of nationalities"), where intensity, commitment, and the most satisfying forms of common work are realized in the plural social unions, which the singular state supports and facilitates...

...So churches bring together men and women from different classes, professions, and political parties...

...They proudly exemplify the civic virtues...

...IWANT TO argue that these two communitarianisms can help each other—and will have to do that if there is to be any help at all...

...In the United States, the most extreme forms of identity politics have developed among groups that are seriously underrepresented in the political arena or withdrawn or excluded from it...

...and so they were not able to cooperate against the Nazis...

...And when the state commitment to welfare declines, so does the capacity of Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, and so on, to provide services of their own...

...But the more common idea is that the second communitarianism must rescue the first...

...It would be a movement for social change...

...I have looked there too, as in my Dissent article "Socializing the Welfare State," Summer 1988...

...Given the various financial, political, and moral difficulties of the contemporary state, it is to civil society that many people now look to solve the problems that the state was once expected to solve— above all, the problems of poverty, unemployment, and exclusion...

...But any increase in the number of volunteers would improve the services provided by civil society, and the payments would presumably make for less fitfulness, more discipline, in the different associations...

...At least, that is one of the dangers always present in civil society...

...This would obviously require considerable commitment on the part of civil society's steady workers—of a kind familiar on the old left, whose militants often committed themselves to something like fulltime work for the Cause...

...Citizenship is a status available to all the residents of the territory the state controls (with whatever qualifications of time for new immigrants...

...many of those who do are enthusiastic for a while and then drift away...

...1) The civic republican, Jacobin, statist model—which holds that there is only one really important community, the political community, whose members and agents are the citizens themselves, all of them, conceived as active participants in democratic decision making...

...THE MORE likely alternative would involve subsistence pay, with benefits, for men and women who chose to work for all their lives or some part of their lives in civil society...

...But today the working class is as dispersed as many ethnic and religious communities—or, it might be better to say, its members are similarly integrated into a mass society and a commercial culture that don't allow for the easy reproduction of any particularist community, whether it is based on social class or religious belief or ethnic history or residential proximity...

...Perhaps cooperation wasn't in the cards anyway: the church was far more conservative in those years than it is today, and social democrats were often militant atheists...

...But if this rescue is to be accomplished, we must address frankly three features of civil society—inequality, fragmentation, and fitfulness —that stand in its way...

...Greedy institutions are the enemies of civil society and of the only viable form of democratic politics in the modern world: the politics of coalition and compromise...

...The plural social unions are called to the rescue of the singular social union...

...They assist the poor, visit the sick, and console the bereaved...

...Administration and distribution are left to professionals, to a civil service whose work is determined but not joined by ordinary citizens...

...Fitfulness Civil society is a realm of fitfulness, of parttime engagement and occasional, undisciplined work...

...when undertaken by working men and women, it comes after the workday or -week...

...It is because associations are specific and enclosed that intense solidarities arise within them...

...they are eager to join in debates over public policy...

...All this defines a pattern of difference: creeds, interests, associates, and activities...

...This is an intermittent activism, not subject to market or bureaucratic controls...

...membership in political parties, labor unions, philanthropic organizations, and parent/teacher groups...

...It is radically unclear whether significant numbers of people would choose this kind of volunteering...

...The associations of civil society, by contrast, are ineradicably particularist, even when they defend a universal creed and are as open to new members as their specific character and purposes allow...

...These people were certainly volunteers, but they were paid subsistence wages and they looked forward to revolutionary triumph...

...the point of the payments would be to make it economically possible...

...Another remedy for the divisiveness of civil society lies in the actual experience of democratic politics...

...they don't have a sufficient material and institutional base of their own...

...there was very little coming and going between them and little mutual understanding or respect among their members...

...When we do that, we will see that the communities of civil society require help from the same state that they are called to rescue...

...What would be necessary is a political movement of a sort that isn't historically uncommon, though nothing like it is currently on the horizon...

...the one includes the many...

...And, of course, many associations are not universal in any sense...

...The first communitarianism responds to a decline in the commitment and participation of citizens—manifest in nonvoting, distrust of governmental institutions and officials, resignation, and apathy...

...This kind of help can't come from within civil society, except in the form of political and moral support...

...But the process works the other way, too: if political alienation undermines civil society, so associational weakness undermines the value of citizenship...

...Since the payments would be the same across all (or almost all) the groups that make up civil society, they would also serve to reduce the inequalities of associational life...

...Of course, it has its own full-time professionals (in American schools of business and management these days, students are trained to run nonprofit organizations), but for most people volunteering in civil society is an after-hours activity...

...Its activists would be drawn from civil society...

...2) The pluralist, multiculturalist, model— which holds that there are many communities, based on class, religion, ethnicity, neighborhood, and so on...

...The social union of social unions cannot dispense with either its singularity or its pluralism...

...Indeed, European social democracy was the product of that concentration and cooperation...

...So let me begin there...

...there isn't any other—no compensation of any sort, no expense accounts, no health insurance or pensions, very little public recognition...

...THE FAMOUS American liberalism/ communitarianism debate, which is now being reproduced (at least among academic political theorists) in many parts of the world, is far less important for real politics than the recognition of two competing kinds of communitarianism, one focused on the state and one on civil society...

...And this goodwill would have to run deep, since there are sure to be abuses...

...All the forms of inequality—of education, wealth, political access, and professional competence—are reflected and even magnified in the organizational life of civil society, so that the weakest groups have the weakest organizational presence...

...both express anxiety as much as ambition, and if the anxiety is sometimes exaggerated, it is nonetheless legitimate...

...In principle, work in civil society is socially valued (hence George Bush's "points of light...

...Both these communitarian doctrines are reactive in character...

...Bringing them into the state would open new possibilities for cooperation in civil society also...

...For men already successful, of course, leading a philanthropic campaign or serving as the lay president of a religious or cultural association is more than a nice thing to do...

...Nor can it be: making a living, making a home, raising one's own children all come first...

...The same people can commit themselves to different associations, and their cross-cutting memberships and the blurred boundaries that result provide the best social background for democratic politics...

...This means that men and women active in civil society won't have the effects we need them to have unless they are also committed citizens, working (voluntarily) to create a state that values and supports their activism...

...Strengthen these groups, and you intensify the differences among them...

...The state, by contrast, at least in principle, is a universal society...

...It will not be easy to reproduce conditions of that sort in associations where the work goes on and on with no expectation of a glorious conclusion...

...They aren't organized to receive it...

...Massive apathy and withdrawal not only weaken the democratic state, they make civil society a more dangerous place...

...the number of people regularly reading newspapers...

...Nonetheless, it is possible to imagine new forms of reward that might allow men and women to sustain a life in civil society or to 66 DISSENT / Winter 1999 move back and forth between civil society and the market, committing themselves for years at a time in each place...

...Of course, the stronger groups sometimes extend their help to members of the weaker ones—as when unions work for the benefit of workers generally or church-supported hospitals and nursing homes serve the larger community...

...Commitment would still be necessary...

...It may be too soon to say what all this means, but it does make the two forms of communitarianism alike in this respect—that they both represent a worried politics...

...Given the eighteenthand nineteenth-century bourgeois critique of aristocratic parasites, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialist critique of bourgeois parasites, and the contemporary rightwing campaign against welfare parasites, I find that arrangement very difficult to imagine .. . or to justify...

...But no dispersed community, without coercive power, can fund by itself the services necessary in a modern society...

...That old Marxist vision, which has been taken over in the United States by libertarians and free-marketeers, is still a fantasy...

...Hence the argument that brings together the two communitarianisms: that only a revival of associational life will produce a political revival, and only a political revival will produce the commitment (and eventually the resources) necessary to overcome the inequalities of associationalism...

...Marx thought that the factory system would rescue the working class from this dispersion, bringing its members together in large numbers and requiring very high levels of cooperative work...

...An interesting alliance of conservatives and radicals put their hopes in associational vitality, voluntary work, and philanthropic contributions...

...its activities would take place in the arena of democratic politics...

...For state membership always DISSENT / Winter 1999 • 65 overlaps with the various associational memberships...

...I don't mean to suggest that work in civil society isn't importantly productive...

...The second responds to a kind of freewheeling individualism that undercuts religious, ethnic, class, and regional identification and, what may be more important, weakens the familial loyalties that ground all the forms of collective identity and help to reproduce them...

...The strongest groups in American society (which tend to be ethnic/religious combinations, like Irish Catholics, German and Scandanavian Lutherans, Jews, and so on) could not pay for the life-cycle services they currently provide, from day care centers and nursery schools to old-age homes and burial societies, without access to state funds...

...Ordinary members serve each other, committing themselves to the everyday work of welfare, schooling, communal upkeep, and celebration...

...Weaker groups (black Baptists the most important, given the long history of racism in the United States) could in principle get the same money but in fact don't get it on the same scale...

...And that makes the mobilization of resources in civil society harder than it once was—and the role of the state crucially important...

...When undertaken by unemployed women, still the most common volunteers though their numbers are declining, it comes after the work of family and household (for these women are never really unemployed...

...Its various groups do not have anything like the same capacity to accumulate resources and provide services...

...the members of civil society must do what the citizens of the state can't do—even though these are the same people...

...But this is too abstract...

...In both these cases, the associations promote identities that are shared with specific people, and not with others, and work in civil society engages some men and women, and not others...

...The mainstream religious groups, and the new environmental and feminist organizations, might take the lead...

...and the number engaged in team sports (as distinct from solitary exercise, which is definitely on the rise...

...Certainly, the various associations find ways of honoring their most important volunteers— especially, but not only, those who volunteer their money...

...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...

...At least this can happen, if the encounters are frequent and the outcomes important to the citizens...

...they meet to argue about the great issues of the day...

...So democratic encounters serve over time to moderate associational difference...

...But social change of this sort would also be in the interest of labor unions, not only because their own volunteers would benefit but also because the possibility of work in civil society might tighten the labor market, reducing the size of Europe's "reserve army" or creating alternatives to America's "second economy...

...even the churches, or most of them, are not ready in the last years of the twentieth century to proclaim the near coming of the end of days...

...Still, we haven't seen a social movement of this scope for a long time, and the weaknesses in both state and civil society that inspire communitarian revivalism suggest that it may be a long time coming...

...DISSENT / Winter 1999 67...

...Its extensive organizational network, the many services it provided for its supporters, and the time, energy, and money that they contributed to it—all this was made possible by a common class culture, which had its origin in the experience of the modern factory...

...Inequality Civil society is a realm of inequality...

...This suggests a degree of political alienation that is disastrous for American welfarism...

...If everyone had the same guarantee, workers in civil society would be true volunteers, but there would be a social price to pay: productive work would be taxed not only for the benefit of people who volunteered, but also for the benefit of people who didn't volunteer, who chose leisure instead...

...They are highminded amateurs, devoted volunteers, but only for the highest tasks...

...For ordinary volunteers, the work has to be its own reward...

...It isn't only a question of strengthening associational activism but of making it into steady work for significant numbers of men and women who are unlikely to find useful work or, in many countries today, any work at all in the market economy...

...Theirs is a noble image, but, perhaps for that reason, their work doesn't extend to the more prosaic administrative and distributive activities of the republican state...

...For obvious reasons, greedy institutions make for intolerance, whereas plural memberships and divided loyalties make for toleration...

...And yet the very greed of these institutions inspires in their members an exceptional devotion and commitment...

...What we look for in civil society, however, is self-help and mutual aid...

...The one and the many are often described in philosophical literature as if they were opposed to each other, but in politics and society what we must hope for is their cooperation...

...But any lesser work is likely to be thought demeaning...