Ehrenberg - Civil society: the critical history of an idea

The Critical History of an Idea

John Ehrenberg

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London

1999 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrenberg, John, 1944
Civil society : the critical history of an idea / John
Ehrenberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-2208-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8147-2207-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Civil societyHistory. I. Title.
JC336 .E35 1999
301'.09ddc21 98-40140
CIP

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America
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This book would never have seen the light of day if my wife Kathleen hadnt urged me to write something relevant. This is often difficult for political theorists, but my students desire to navigate a complex world also provided early motivation and continuous support. I have also been helped by the interest, encouragement, and assistance of many friends and colleagues, among whom Stephen Bronner, Mark Naison, and Bertell Ollman deserve special mention. Finally, I want to thank Cecelia Cancellaro for getting me inand Eric Zinner and Niko Pfund for getting me out.

For three days toward the end of April 1997, the Presidents Summit for Americas Future focused national attention on a succession of speeches, workshops, and exhibits in Philadelphia. President Clinton gathered George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Nancy Reagan, Colin Powell, thirty governors, dozens of corporate executives, and Oprah Winfrey to urge Americans to volunteer for community service. The campaign, which General Powell is heading, seeks to mobilize volunteers and corporate money to help two million children by the year 2000, reported the New York Times. It hopes to compensate for a retreating federal governmentmuch of the retreating done under Mr. Bush and Mr. Clintonby providing children with mentors, safe places after school, health care, job skills and a chance to perform community service themselves. Articulating a central theme of his administration, the President called on volunteers to tutor children, paint schools, revitalize communities, and strengthen habits of good citizenship and public service.

The Philadelphia summits emphasis on local action and voluntary associations captured an important moment in a period marked by rapid economic change, sweeping attacks on the welfare state, and general withdrawal from political engagement. It articulated a distinctively American way of thinking about civil society, a notion that has figured prominently in academic and political discourse for most of the past decade. In the absence of noble public goals, admired leaders, or compelling issues, many observers have charted an alarming erosion of civic spirit and a corresponding decline in the quality of public life. An increasingly distressed literature has alerted the country to the damage done by cheapened standards of behavior, rude political speech, road rage, and offensive jokes. Experts worry that an overworked, disengaged, acquisitive, and self-absorbed population has allowed its moral connections, social engagements, and political participation to atrophy. Their concern is not limited to bad manners but has spilled over into political affairs and generated many suggestions about how public life could be improved in a period marked by fraying communities, widespread apathy, and unprecedented levels of contempt for politics. The American Political Science Association, for example, has organized a Civic Education Project for the Next Century to support research and stimulate teaching about civic trust, civic engagement, and civic education. In an effort to combat rampant cynicism and anger about public affairs, the project seeks to reinvigorate a particularly American orientation toward the civic work of ordinary people who, located in diverse, plural communities, work on behalf of their communities and seek eagerly for common goods, both heroic and mundane. Driven by an uneasy sense of decline and animated by a deep suspicion of the state, a growing body of contemporary work hopes that civil society can revitalize public life.

But the view that local voluntary activity sustains democracy is only one way of understanding civil society. Ironically, those who brought this notion to the center of contemporary political life conceptualized it in very different terms. In the early 1980s, a remarkably broad series of civic forums, independent trade unions, and social movements began to carve out areas of free political activity in the Eastern European countries of actual existing socialism. Their leaders talked of the rebellion of civil society against the state, and when they started coming to power in 1989 the stage was set for an explosion of interest that has been gathering force ever since. Liberal political theory was revived in demands for law-governed states that would protect private life and public activity from the intrusive hand of meddling bureaucracies. It was not surprising that Eastern Europeans should conceptualize civil society in terms of limiting state power, or that Americans should express it in the neo-Tocquevillean language of intermediate organization. If civil society meant constitutional republicanism in one area and local volunteerism supported by informal norms of solidarity and mutual aid in another, both bodies of thought sought to theorize it as a democratic sphere of public action that limits the thrust of state power.

As important as such formulations have been, the current literature leaves a great deal unsaid and unexplored. Seemingly new and hastily used concepts sometimes turn out to have revealing and instructive genealogies. Civil society is a very old idea and has long provided a fruitful vantage-point from which to evaluate the central categories of political thought. But many of the lessons that the past offers are obscured by the restricted political environment that conditions much contemporary work. Because its antecedents have not been adequately explored, civil society is often deployed in a thin, undertheorized, and confusing fashion. There is considerably more to this concept than meets the eye, and an explication of tradition can help us evaluate contemporary assumptions about its democratic potential.