The Origins of Modern Civil Society
In order to pursue the exploration sketched in the Introduction, the sociology of Islam should perform a preliminary step. It should contribute to replace a politically overloaded idea of civil society reflecting Western aspirations and postulates with a more malleable, yet historically sound and transculturally plausible, concept of civility. We should distill an adequate notion of civility out of the waves that have recurrently pushed up the banner of civil society, until the end of the 20th century.
The idea of civility binds together and, as it were, balances knowledge and power, innovative potential and institutional crystallization, against each other. However, we cannot ignore that civility, however reformulated here with a view to its usefulness for the sociology of Islam, comes to us heavily filtered through the more specific, integrated, and therefore strongly one-sided articulation and theorization of the historic Western concept of civil society. Due to the genealogy itself of Western social sciences, civility appears as first integrated into a full-fledged, and to a large extent modern, concept of society. This concept has been in turn modeled on specific, hegemonic Western trajectories, most notably those originating from North-Western Europe.
Surely in order to reconstruct a rather transversal notion of civility and emancipate it from its dependence on a unilateral Western heritage one needs to take into account non-Western experiences and trajectories. The inevitable tension between the need to start from an integrated Western model (or, as we will see, âdreamâ) of civil society and the goal of achieving a transculturally more suitable concept of civility is reflected in the fact that, as stated by Ćerif Mardin, civil society âdoes not translate into Islamic terms. Civility, which is a latent content of civil society, does, but these two are not interchangeable termsâ (Mardin 1995: 279). Translated into operational terms, this means that we need to explore the extent to which a transversal idea of civility can be extracted or redeemed, as it were, from the hegemonic model of civil society and put to the service of a more global vision, and specifically to a non-Eurocentric approach to Islam. The fact that since the end of the 18th century the Western notion of civil society has been gradually ingrained into the hegemonic processes that allowed for a climax in the Western exercise of power and knowledge over the non-Western world makes this move even more necessary, though also difficult.
Let us start by recalling that although first theorized by different branches of the European Enlightenment, civil society experienced a strong and sudden revival during the 1990s (most representative of it, Cohen and Arato 1992). It rapidly became a privileged tool, both conceptually and practically, for covering the emerging aspirations to democratic transformations within the Muslim world. In introducing his seminal two-volume Civil Society in the Middle East, Augustus Norton defined civil society as the icon of democracy:
This strategic opening to the concept of civil society in the study of both Muslim-majority societies and of transnational forms of Islam occurred in the wake of the collapse of the authoritarian regimes of Eastern and East-Central Europe belonging to the so-called Soviet bloc. The idea of civil society was quite swiftly adopted by movements within Muslim-majority societies, from the Arab world to Southeast Asia, in the popular struggles against overtly autocratic or pseudo-democratic regimes, variably associated with the ongoing neoliberal globalization (Hefner 2000). In cases like that of Egypt, where the regime claimed a democratic legitimacy by holding parliamentary elections curtailed by state violence, intimidation, and fraud, the act of raising the banner of civil society pointed out that democratization can never be a top-down concession of autocratic cliques. Democratization rather needsâso the message goesâa bottom-up process that starts at the level where associations, unions, parties, but also informal groups (the ensemble of which, it was remarked, constitutes civil society), are formed in order to represent citizens' grievances and claims to distant and exploitative state authorities.
This surging enthusiasm for civil society as a panacea against corruption and authoritarianism in the Muslim world and particularly in the Middle East was clearly misplaced. This was partly due to the fact that many of the same Western governments and donors that were ostensibly supportive of the ideal were in fact undermining it through the continued support of authoritarian regimes. Yet there was an even deeper contradiction to this facile operationalization of civil society that was revealed by the ways through which much too often aid policies weakened rather than strengthened the associational bonds of basically spontaneous cooperation (Salvatore 2011). In this context, civil society, which had been reconceived as the privileged arena for preparing democratic transformations, shrank into a mere logo impressed on the business cards of a new generation of professionally staffed non-governmental organizations committed to public advocacy around often narrow questions of good practices and policy optimization (Challand 2011). The encompassing idea initially written on the banner proved hardly suitable to enable activists and citizens to grapple with the larger questions surrounding the essentially undemocratic and inequitable nature of regimes and their political economies. Yet while the promise of civil society, increasingly identified with Western-certified NGOs, became less obviously regenerative, other potentially formative (and transformative) patterns of civility were still latent in the process. As Mardin warned, the one-sided and not seldom fraudulent nature of an imitative politicization of Western civil societyâa notion that, as we will see, is already in itself (due to its origin and history) a hardly coherent platform of changeâdid not exclude that more complex and less streamlined articulations of civility through Islamic idioms could be gradually and honestly unveiled.
In the post-9/11 trajectory of the Muslim-majority world up to the Arab Spring, also due to the petering out of the latter's initial impetus, popular responses to oppressive state systems have become more nuanced. In this context, the extent to which ideas and practices of civility can facilitate democratic transformations beyond the one-sidedness of European models of civil society's functional interactions with modern, Westphalian states has been subject to reappraisal (Gervasio 2014). In parallel, there have been attempts to critically reframe ideas of the civic glue of the social bond in a historically more diversified perspective that has shown the inherent limits of a sheer application of the civil society model to potentially every locale on a global scale (Challand 2011; Volpi 2011). Particularly, the 2000s have been important for inflicting a dystopian twist to the more specifically Western âdreamâ of civil society, due to its slipping toward thin conceptions of market democracy often forcefully married to the rhetoric on the War on Terror. Let us, in this chapter, take stock and analyze the historical precedents and ideological bias that make the construct of civil society a far cry from being a limpid, universally extendable site of societal self-empowerment.
In order to understand the lopsided effects of the mere extension of a revived notion of civil society on the Muslim-majority world since the 1990s, it is important to fully grasp how the weakness of the theory is coextensive to its potential strength in depicting an exceptional development in parts of Western Christendom across the epoch conventionally dubbed the Enlightenment. The idea of civil society envisions a society whose constituting ties are shaped by the prevalence of politeness and affection rather than violence and fear. This notion is not the innocent pleonasm that it appears at first sight. The concept imbues the construction itself of society, which can be hardly taken for granted, with the no less problematic attribute of civility. This, in turn, is intended as both the outcome and the engine of a continual social process that tames violence by facilitating the inculcation of proper codes of behavior and cooperation in the members of society. While society and civility appear in themselves as contested concepts, predicating society through civility construes the former as a stable, functional, and cohesive entity almost by default. This is true to the extent that society appears organized in a civil way, namely according to modalities that restrict and ultimately prevent recourse to arbitrary violence. On the positive side, a society thus made civil provides, according to the theory, agency, rights, and ultimately the benefits and entitlements of citizenship to its members. Ernest Gellner, one of the major theorists of civil society throughout its late 20th-century revival, maintained that the red thread unfolding through a variety of Western definitions of civil society is a âhighly specific,â and in this sense not easily replicable view of the social bond among individuals as âunsanctified, instrumental, revocable.â According to Gellner, civil society is a highly modern construct to the extent that it relies on ad hoc associations and cooperations which overcome any traditional, indissoluble bonds and dependences among individuals (Gellner 1995: 42).
The process underlying what appears as a well-rounded conception of civil society reflects quite immediately the experience of modern transformations in North-Western Europe, most notably of Scotland, particularly in the 18th century. According to this conception, society can be sufficiently civilized only under quite exceptional conditions like the prevalence of secure frameworks for the implementation of the law and the guarantee of contracts. Ultimately, in the words of Gellner, this condition is reflected in the acceptance of the âtyranny of kingsâ over the âtyranny of cousins.â Through this suggestive formula he emphasized the Westphalian regimes' capacity to effectively overcome bonds of kin and build an (even if initially despotic) enlightened, centralized rule. It clearly emerges from this formula that, paradoxically perhaps, civil society is premised on the prevalence of a political regime over the autonomy of the social bond. It is also important to stress that the interests and aspirations of an emerging commercial and industrial bourgeoisie were decisive in supporting the process. To prevail in the process is exactly the type of modern power (first absolutist, then liberal, finally democratic) that enables the individual to pursue her interests. This can only occur within a legal framework gravitating around a law of contract ultimately secured by the Westphalian state's monopolization of force, operating alongside the administration of society through a well-functioning bureaucracy. This monopolization purportedly extinguishes tribal or clan-based forms of social power and control (the âtyranny of cousinsâ). These indeed provide the allegedly premodern socio-political background against which Scottish views of civil society took form.
Mardin (1995) echoes Gellner (1995) in evidencing the specificity, even the peculiarity, of the Western dream of civil society. The Turkish scholar stressed that what needs to be carefully analyzed are not only the factors that make society civil. One also needs to focus on what habilitates society itself to provide the cohesive yet innerly differentiated macro-dimension of the social bond. Mardin agrees with Gellner in seeing civil society as the foil of the prevalence of forms of cohesiveness transcending bonds of kin and locality. Underneath the formulaic emphasis on individuals and rights, the genie in the lamp of civil society is in the empowerment of agents to autonomous action and the pursuit of their interests via benefiting from a legal frame that does not fully absorb, and so risk to hijack, individual creativity and freedom.
Nonetheless, this view is a dream, according to Mardin, in that it presupposes that the state can steadily project a protective shadow on individual interactants without degenerating into becoming an intrusive despot. This condition is not necessarily matched by the way modern bureaucracies work. Yet it is even more of a dream since the factors of cohesion which allow individuals to be bound to each other socially while pursuing their particular interests are assumed to reside in factors other than the law or the individual rights that they exercise. Civil law can be an instrument of civil society, but the latter cannot be collapsed into the former, since it presupposes a type of agency that is non-legal or prelegal. There seems to be a mysterious factor that matches right with liberty: a factor so evanescent that Mardin can locate it only at the level of aspirations, if not wishful thinking (Mardin 1995).
As shown by Adam Seligman (1992; 2002), the crux of the idea of civil society lies in the fact that it presupposes ties of trust that it cannot actually produce or explain. This evanescence is reflected by the vague and even naĂŻvely sounding postulation by the thinkers belonging to the so-called 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment of a natural sympathy or a âmoral senseâ spontaneously binding even heterogeneous individuals, across class identities and status ascriptions. Individual interests are matched by reciprocal affections and ultimately mutual trust among individuals. According to Seligman it is particularly evident that the notion of trust underlying this view overstates the individual moral agency of social actors or at least its unitary character (see Silver 1997).
This reconstruction of the nature of the social bond goes back in particular to 18th-century Scottish thinkers like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Ferguson. The individual social agent is depicted as knowing her own interest and possessing a capacity to act autonomously, while also sharing a sense of affection and sympathy toward other individuals/agents. This nexus of sympathy between ego and alter provides the kernel to the type of bond that, if replicated on a mac...
