1.1 Introduction
As a concept, civil society has a history stretching back more than 2,300 years, to the city-states of ancient Greece and to the Roman Republic. Yet for much of the twentieth century it largely disappeared from political discourse, marginalized by the rise of modern, virtually omnipotent, states such as Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Communist China. For much of the twentieth century, the state was seen as the pivotal institution in modern society, both in established democracies and in more autarkic or authoritarian regimes. The twentieth-century state harnessed the industrial and technological might of the modern economy, maintained public order, defended national interests against rival states, and provided public goods and services to an ever larger percentage of the worldās population.
It was from a position of relative obscurity, therefore, that civil society re-emerged as a global phenomenon in the late 1980s, heralded by Salamonās famous assertion of a newly born āglobal associational revolutionā (Salamon 1994: 109). This reinvigoration stemmed from three distinct but mutually reinforcing developments: the declining fortunes of welfare states in Western Europe and the associated rise of neo-liberal anti-statism (from 1979); the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule in developing countries such as South Korea, Pakistan and Brazil (from 1986); and the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in allied states (from 1989). Each of these phenomena heralded a re-evaluation of the state as the pre-eminent institution in modern society and a rollback of its powers and scope, opening new opportunities for civil society and for the market-based economy.
Today, civil society is a familiar and popular concept among activists, policy makers and social scientists that is backed by an extensive body of academic literature, by supportive laws and government policy initiatives and by activist discourses and campaigns. Since its re-emergence in the late 1980s, civil society has come to be seen by democrats of many hues as a realm of free association in which people are empowered to organize and to associate as they see fit (often on the margins of legality), to hold governments to account, and in certain cases to remove them from power where they lose broad-based popular support. This allows people to express a variety of identities, to associate with like-minded people and to oppose, where necessary, those with conflicting views who threaten their interests. Democrats also view civil society as a realm of cooperation in which people combine and help their local, national or global neighbours, for instance by providing goods and services which particular social groups cannot procure on their own. Additionally, it is a realm in which people organize to help themselves, to challenge their disempowerment and to secure the public goods and services that they need to improve their welfare.
Inevitably, this makes civil society both a malleable concept, whereby different people invest it with different meanings, often stretching it beyond tolerable boundaries, and a contested terrain in which different actors jockey to advance particular institutional or ideological agendas. For politicians and policy makers on the right, civil society is an antidote to excessive state intervention in the lives of ordinary people and to efforts at excessive social engineering, promoted by statist ideologies such as communism, socialism or even the Keynesian welfare state. In this view, civil society can often provide public goods and services more cheaply and efficiently than state agencies, while state support for an active civil society through tax concessions and light regulation encourages the well-off to engage in, or to support, philanthropic activity, which helps the less well-off on the basis of well-established charitable norms. For politicians and policy makers on the left, however, especially in developing countries, engaging with civil society helps to mobilize additional funds for ambitious social strategies in the face of limited state budgets, provides insulation from charges of inefficiency on the part of centralized state providers or alternatively provides state agencies with civil society partners that enhances technical capacity in specialized areas of service delivery or provides political allies in taking on entrenched social groups in market-based economies.
For grassroots activists, civil society can also have different meanings. To conservatives, an active and autonomous civil society enables people to organize and to protect the things they hold dear. It allows them to form neighbourhood associations to maintain the fabric and appearance of their physical environment, to form volunteer patrols to discourage local crime and defend local property, to hold local schools and teachers to account through parentāteacher associations or to lobby local government for measures to uphold their interests. For activists on the left, however, civil society is a realm in which the less well-off can organize to challenge their relative disempowerment. Forming CSOs helps to challenge social apathy, to bolster group confidence and to generate community resolve. It helps people to make claims on government and to secure their entitlements or rights. It helps them to provide for themselves and to generate counterpart contributions to secure government funding for public goods and services. It helps them to ward off the attention of predatory elites such as loan sharks, property developers or rack landlords.
This chapter therefore explores the relationship between civil society, democracy and (in)equality as captured in the work of prominent social theorists. The literature is vast but monographs and edited collections such as Keane (1988a, 1988b, 1998, 2003), Cohen and Arato (1994), Gellner (1994), Hall (ed.) (1995), Hann and Dunn (1996), Alexander (1988), Ehrenberg (1999), Eberly (2000b), Kaviraj and Khilnani (eds) (2001) and Colas (2002) have been influential in plotting the development of the concept since the mid 1980s by exploring the history of civil society and its relevance to modern conditions, by making the case for renewed interest in civil society amid changing social, economic and political conditions over the last three decades and by pushing the concept of civil society in new directions, applying it to circumstances unforeseen by earlier theorists. This evolving literature directly addresses the disputed relationship between civil society, democracy and (in)equality, and polarizes into two distinct perspectives: one democracy-focused and the other focused on political economy. In the democracy-centred perspective, civil society liberates people from the overbearing reach of the modern state, frees them from state-directed and divisive forms of political association (e.g. centrally directed political parties or mass organizations) and enables them to associate on the basis of self-defined interests rather than on the basis of instrumental identities dictated to them from on high. In this view, civil society actors and organizations help to make governments accountable to the electorate beyond the ballot box and help voters to articulate their preferences once periodic election campaigns are over. They help citizens to organize around their multiple identities and to express their preferences through social or political competition mediated by democratic values and the rule of law.
The political economy perspective, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship between civil society and modern industrial economies and the system of liberal capitalism on which they are based. In this view, modern states are often unable to manage and regulate the free market effectively. This regulatory deficit fuels socio-economic inequalities, undermining social cohesion and creating social and economic fissures that undermine political stability. A strong civil society, however, can help to limit the excesses of modern liberal capitalism by providing an institutional space in which politicians and activists can coalesce and mobilize in opposition to the entrenched forces of corporate society, and in which they can generate ideologies or value systems which challenge entrenched norms, policies or laws that disproportionately favour liberal capitalism. But while acknowledging the positive role of civil society in restraining overly zealous state initiatives, especially in limiting the rights of citizens, theorists also point to the role of CSOs in helping powerful or privileged forces to secure disproportionate influence over the policy-making process, limiting state initiatives that threaten their interests and helping to secure the passage of those that coincide with them.
A number of other authors have referred to these opposing camps. Keane (1988b: 19ā20), for instance, distinguishes between ādemocracy-centredā and ācapitalism-centredā perspectives,1 while Lipschutz (2006: xiv) distinguishes between approaches focusing on āpolitics and the public sphereā and others focusing on the āmarket economy and the private sphereā. Keane also suggests a distinct national or ethno-cultural basis for these contending perspectives, associating the democracy-centred perspective with Anglo-American social and political theory, and the political economy perspective with mainland European thought (cf. Keane 1988d). Keane (1988c) points to the 100 years between 1750 and 1850 as a pivotal period in the development of the modern concept of civil society, providing the basis for the contemporary debate between democracy and political economy-centred conceptions of civil society; but in reality the origins of the debate can be traced back more than 2,300 years. This chapter therefore provides an overview of the problematic relationship between civil society, democracy and (in)equality: a relationship at the heart of the analysis of Philippine civil society, which appears in later chapters.
1.2 The classical concept of civil society
The history of civil society can be divided into three significant phases; a āclassical phaseā, from about 400 BC to roughly AD 100; a āmodernā phase from the early eighteenth century to the late nineteenth, and a more recent ācontemporaryā phase beginning in the late 1980s. Significantly, each phase is associated with fundamental challenges to political, economic and social orders. The āclassicalā concept originates in Athens, the most prominent and advanced of the city-states of ancient Greece and is most closely associated with the Athenian philosopher Aristotle. In contrast to his predecessor and mentor, Plato (who advocated an embryonic form of communism), Aristotle was a reformist rather than a revolutionary, supporting, for instance, the continuation of the family and of private property rights. But from a wide-ranging study of political systems in the city-states of ancient Greece and in neighbouring kingdoms such as Egypt, Macedonia and Persia, Aristotle identified six main forms of rule: monarchy (or kingship), aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy and two forms of democracy; extreme democracy, characterized by mob rule and moderate democracy (or constitutional government), which Aristotle labelled as the polis (literally ācityā, but here the āpolitical associationā).2
At the heart of Aristotleās concerns was the latent struggle between democracy and oligarchy played out between and within the Greek city-states (Stalley 1995: xx).3 As part of this struggle, Athens was forced to impose democratic regimes on other city states, but relations between states were unstable and the prospects for democracy unclear (ibid.). Against this background, Aristotle sought a new hybrid constitutional order that could survive the threat of oligar-chic rule and nurture greater political stability. Aristotle considered monarchy, aristocracy and constitutional government to be true forms of government and he sought to combine the best elements of each in the polis. In contrast, he considered tyranny, oligarchy and (extreme) democracy to be perversions.4
Modelled on Athens, the polis represented Aristotleās ideal political system: a plural system that could be expanded (within limits) to accommodate larger populations. It was underpinned by a politike koinonia, a single political community composed of subsidiary and differentiated parts, within a new constitutional framework premised on the rule of law (cf. Cohen and Arato 1994: 84). According to Ehrenberg (1999: 18), Aristotleās civil society:
was the politically constituted community that organized separate spheres of life in the state and, in the process, permitted them to express the full measure of their limited ethical potential.
Many authors trace the linage of civil society directly to Aristotleās polis and politike koinonia (cf. Keane 1988c, Cohen and Arato 1994: 84ā88, Ehrenberg 1999: 9ā19). This civil society was contiguous with the state, rather than a distinct institutional space, but Sabine argues that Aristotle reached āa very good first approximationā of the distinction between state and society, based on discrimination between the political structure and the underlying social and economic structure (Sabine 1951: 109). Aristotle acknowledged, for instance, the existence of distinct occupational āclassesā within the citizen body (as well as the very rich, the very poor and the middle class) and the competing (private) interests that shaped them, while he also defined, by exclusion from the polis, other distinct social groups including slaves, women and those without property (cf. Ehrenberg 1999: 17ā18).
Three centuries later in crisis-ridden republican Rome, its greatest political philosopher (and Senator) Marcus Tullius Cicero added significantly to this classical meaning. The vivid description of Republican Romeās predicament (c.53ā52 BC) provided by Ehrenberg frames a scene that will be familiar to any student of politics in the developing world (not least in the Philippines, as later chapters demonstrate in more detail):
Class conflict, slave rebellions, mutinies, assassinations, constant conspiracies and intensifying economic exploitation sapped the strength of the republican institutions as powerful warlords organized private armies to support their ambitions. Street fighting, periodic riots, widening inequality, unprecedented urban squalor and a numbing crisis of agriculture sparked demands for public works, democratic government, land reform and other measures to alleviate the misery of the poor. As the aristocracy shattered into an unstable mass of competing and suspicious cliques, Rome became a predatory war machine run by and for a narrow clique.
(Ibid.: 22)
Convinced that Romeās great weakness was the lawless competition for power and glory, Cicero linked the established notion of ājusticeā with the new concept of res publica, the common good, underpinned by agreement among people. Res publica, Cicero argued, was āthe peopleās possessionā, embracing the populus as a whole.5 In turn, according to Ehrenberg, civil society, was āan organisation of political power that made civilization possibleā (cf. ibid.: 22ā23). Cicero, however, also conceived of a civil society built āaround inherited property and political wisdom, enabling those of moderate wealth to protect the very rich and the very poor from one anotherā (ibid.: 22 and 25). As such, Cicero confirms Aristotleās dualist notion of civil society as both a progressive and an inclusive political community that unifies people, and as an institutional embodiment of social difference (or, more accurately, differentiation) and of the myriad inequalities that it entails.6 In an important sense, therefore, both Aristotle and Cicero anticipate the debate between democracy and political-economy centred perspectives and make tentative attempts to reconcile them. In time, the political philosophy of Aristotle, Cicero and others from ancient Greece and Rome came to be codified in the famous Latin motto societas civilis sive...
