Globality, Democracy and Civil Society

Terrell Carver, Jens Bartelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136888090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globality, Democracy and Civil Society explores the relationship between the concepts of democracy and civil society through a comparison of their meaning and function in different historical and cultural contexts.

This volume presents detailed contextual studies in Europe, North America, Japan, Russia and Turkey. The contributors explore different ways of understanding and developing democratic practices and institutions. Rather than projecting the conditions of modern representative, state-centric democracy onto the global realm, they propose ways of rethinking these very conditions in terms of human diversity and difference. This is done by exploring conceptions of democracy that reconcile cultural plurality with democratic practices, and by using a number of examples and perspectives framed by a global context, rather than by geographical divides between East and West. The contributors are not trying to define the concept of civil society, but rather demonstrating the different ways it is deployed in political practice and disseminated through on-going processes of globalisation.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of global democracy and governance, cosmopolitan democracy, the future of civil society in a globalising world, comparative politics and political thought.

Part I
Engaging the issues in theory

1
Civil society and class

Centrality and occlusion in discourse and practice

Terrell Carver

Any political theory organises itself around certain concepts and hence marginalises or occludes others. And any political theory ‘performs a politics’, often only discursively (yet invoking Derrida’s ‘metaphysics of presence’), giving us the idea that the politics is ‘really there’ and is ‘really happening’ as we read about it (Derrida, 1993: 41–2). Sometimes, of course, the link between theory and practice is rather more immediate, and the politics comes to life because of the concepts that participants invoke. Or politics seems to come to life as an instance of the theory, whereas actually a great many political struggles dissolve into complaints that actions and activities did not make real the ideas, or enough of the ideas, that the participants or adherents originally had in mind. Hope and betrayal are not uncommon sentiments, and political theories have a role in providing the ideas that start this off. Alternatively when things start off in politics, the associated ideas sometimes come to count as political theory, often of a slightly inferior sort, in spite of (or perhaps because of ) their association with things that actually happen. The metaphysics of presence is useful for political theorists, and valued by them, because in their discursive world they are the controllers. Nothing happens unless they say so, whereas out in the political realm, most things happen without their involvement. Perhaps this explication of political theory as doing things with words (whether doing very much or very little) is obvious, but on the presumption that the obvious often needs restating (as is it so often invisible), and indeed closer examination, I put the analysis above to the reader, as a preliminary to looking at the concepts of civil society and class. While my aim is to comment on theory as it is at present, this necessarily requires historical invocation. Old theorists never die; they live on as new incarnations in the authorial imaginary.

This chapter is thus a critical exploration of a number of recent essays in political theory, taking up civil society as an important concept. However, my aim is not so much to say what others say it is as to discover what occlusions and marginalisations occur when they centre their discussions on it. To do this I engage with critiques of liberal theory that derive from Marxism and the emphasis there on the economy and social class, starting with John Ehrenberg’s historical survey and accompanying political argument, moving on to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – where the line between class politics and identity politics nearly fades away, taking up Alan Carling’s provocative challenge to socialist thinking about ‘the market’, and concluding with critical consideration of Darrow Schecter’s move from civil society to ‘the political’. My conclusion is not that any one of these writers has ‘got it right’ about civil society, nor that any one view was even right ‘in context’ where the concept of civil society was an issue, but rather that all these accounts need to be read as works of theory and of practice (or at least implied practice) that occlude what is at the margins as much as they enlighten us about what they put front and centre. In particular this succession of theorists and their theorisations trace out the terms of politics that have been emerging with industrialisation, mass education, popular mobilisations and the economification of everyday life through which contemporary political activity proceeds. In my account civil society emerges as a somewhat empty, or at least highly protean signifier, one that never solves the problems that theorists understand to be political. Rather theorists find new ways to restate these problems, by rearranging the occlusions.

‘Civil society’ in America

John Ehrenberg’s (1999) Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea opens with a genealogy, attaching civil society as an almost timeless analytical concept to the whole canon of political theory, starting with Plato, and identifying it with the origins of civilisation as such, and so with the earliest politics that Western political theorists like to recognise: ‘the Greeks’. The danger here is that the analysis is so much a canter through the political theory canon that civil society as any kind of identifiable concept might nearly evaporate. While it seems plausible that different thinkers at different times will define a concept in different ways (or that different political movements at different times will do likewise), the enormous range of differences involved means that Ehrenberg’s historical survey is less than convincing that any centred concept can bring all these things together to any purpose, except to get us through the Fathers of the Church (of Political Theory) and up to the present, where we can give concepts some purchase, because we know what we want to do with them.

The concluding Part III of Ehrenberg’s study is therefore much better, as there he has twentieth-century communism and capitalism in his sights. Having disposed of the theory and practice involved in that particular opposition, he can then move on to post-Cold War ‘democratic politics’. While at that point he has some interesting things to say, his concluding chapter is disappointing because it deals almost exclusively with American theory and practice. In so far as theorists and politicians elsewhere believe that they participate in that world by proxy (another instance of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ as practised by political theorists), they will probably not find anything wrong with the chapter. But for those who reckon that their native politics is different, and their theoretical orientation is at least potentially different, there is a need for further reflection on additional material.

In respect of communism and capitalism Ehrenberg’s argument is simple. While the Western model of totalitarianism as applied to the former USSR and Eastern European ‘communism’ was overdrawn, complacent and nostalgic (depending on whether we are looking at Carl Joachim Friedrich, Friedrich Hayek or Hannah Arendt), the command economy and vanguard-party states of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the Cold War era were intrusive, arbitrary and undemocratic. Ehrenberg charts the development in ideas and practice of devices and activities intended in the latter days of these regimes to limit state power and to provide constitutional protection, and in particular the development of non-state, non-economic activities termed civil society. Whether these activities were purely social and voluntary, or whether they were market-oriented and ultimately based on self-interest, were questions that were raised and negotiated at the time. Relying on Adam Michnik, the Solidarity movement and Václav Havel, Ehrenberg discusses the varying claims and linkages involved. In the end he argues that there was really no way of ‘freeing up’ citizen energies that would challenge the communist state effectively without doing this on both the political front (i.e. multi-party elections) and the economic front (i.e. freedom to challenge state enterprises with self-managed economic units). Ehrenberg has considerable sympathy with the anti-state struggle and with the political liberalisation, but suggests that Eastern European dissidents were naïve (albeit understandably so in the circumstances) about the economic consequences of the rebellion of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The necessary consequence of supporting civil society against the state in that environment, at least in the first instance, was the reintroduction of capitalism (Ehrenberg, 1999: 173–98).

Back in the capitalist world, post-Second World War, the situation was rather different, and so necessarily was the thinking about civil society. Ehrenberg does not present much of a case why anyone on the ‘free’ side of the Iron Curtain needed civil society at all. Wasn’t liberal democracy bound to be enough? Didn’t the ‘free world’ already have Alexis de Tocqueville extolling the virtues of voluntary associations within the American democratic framework? What was the point of raising civil society as some supposed improvement on what was already there? While Ehrenberg does not say this, his argument seems to lead to the conclusion that Western civil society theorists were producing a mirror to their own view of ‘the East’ as totalitarian: given that ‘the Eastern bloc’ – with its one-party rule and authoritarian command economy – had ‘too much state’, it would have to follow that the West needed even more liberal democracy. Moreover in so far as the East was seen as an embodiment of Marxism, and given that the essence of Marxist politics was class struggle (and class rule), it would then follow that the West needed a way of expunging any nagging questions about class politics in its own patch.

Ehrenberg interprets civil society theorists from the 1950s as pluralists intent on displacing any question of the centrality of class in political theory or in political practice (in America, anyway). In Ehrenberg’s account, American pluralists displaced class politics as an evil onto ‘Europe’ as an ‘other’. Pluralist theories not only validated democracy in America as Tocqueville had seen it (or so they thought), but also validated both consensus and apathy as virtues. These were as far removed as possible from the contrary virtues of any class that ever moved from ‘in itself ’ to ‘for itself ’ in order to politicise and divide the polity (Marx, [1847] 1976: 211). Economic interests were factored down to individualised consumer interests in ‘buying’ what groups, including overtly political groups, had to offer. Economic interests were also factored across society as a uniform body of individualised consumers, all ‘out there’ in the marketplace, buying goods and services. Production or supply in the economy was factored into economic growth, a monolithic and autonomous entity beneficently invoked by the state but never constrained, only ‘set free’, and protected from monopoly control. On this view the concept of worker barely makes sense, and a union is just another group in the market for members. As with big business, big unions are monopolies.

As Ehrenberg tells the tale, this idyll was rudely shattered by the ‘new social movements’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, because they repoliticised social life, stepped outside the realm of voluntary groups that supported consensus (and apathy), and – so Ehrenberg argues – put social class back on the political map. The last claim is quickly factored from political practice (where the claim is surely questionable) into political theory, where the Gramscian turn (from pluralism back to Marx and class in a new guise) saves his argument. Marxism and class struggle re-emerge not as motivators for a politics of revolutionary struggle but as categories essential to explaining why this did not happen and the working class did not triumph. Besides control over the economy and hence the state, bourgeois hegemony extends to civil society – other organisations in society through which working-class politics can be contained and neutralised through ideology and culture. Given this line-up, the bourgeoisie can hardly lose the battle, and working-class politics can hardly break out of it to fight. As a Marxist exercise in explaining the failure of Marxism, this scenario cannot be faulted; however, Ehrenberg does fault the Frankfurt Marxists for attempting to accomplish the same general result while paying even less attention to the economy, and failing to link their accounts of ideology and culture to it as the Gramscians had faithfully done.

After that, politics and theory fade from Ehrenberg’s American perspective, save for his consideration of moralising neo-Tocquevillian attempts to rescue certain supposed virtues of collective life from the ravages of commodified individualism and post-1960s moral decline by invoking civil society. While Ehrenberg does not explicitly paint this strand of American communitarianism as pluralism revisited (i.e. the pluralism of consensus and apathy), it looks much the same in theory and practice. It is just that at this stage, post-civil rights, post-feminism, post-gay liberation, there is even less excuse for the blinkered nostalgia that Ehrenberg sees in his target writers. For Ehrenberg their invocations of intimacy are really a cover for ‘family values’, their insistence on localism is naïve given the history of localised discrimination and reaction, and their views on citizenship are really a vehicle for an arbitrary moralism that demonises and disadvantages in a very undemocratic way (Ehrenberg, 1999: 199–232).

Ehrenberg’s argument has a distinct advantage in alerting us to the presumptions of civil society discourse of this type. Family patriarchy, the local Ku Klux Klan and participatory bigotry could all be features of civil society; it follows that any theory and practice that recommended localism, families and civic values must have some programmatic and institutional limitations and guarantees built in. On this score Ehrenberg opts for an unfashionable defence of state power, national standards and regulation of the market, especially with respect to capital and labour. His anti-Tocquevillian recipe for renewal is – in effect – to write a book for Americans called Democracy in France, where a class politics of overt struggle is an essential part of the scene, even if this involves an element of entrenched interest and republican ritual (Ehrenberg, 1999: 233–50).

Overall Ehrenberg’s accounts seem to say this: from the centrality of class in Marxism, as a theory of how civil society (including the market) conditions and constrains the state, there follows the occlusion of class in liberal theories of civil society. In those liberal theories a self-limiting state ‘sets free’ a profusion of non-market ‘groups’ (presumed to be good because voluntary and local), which are sustained by the capitalist market economy (which ticks over benignly in the background, so it seems). Political theory fuses with political practice when class politics disappears, or rather it remains erased. This presents us with quite an interesting, if surprising, question about Marxism. What concept of class was it that was so central in Marxist theory? And was it in those terms, or indeed in any terms relating to class, that Marxist politics was successful – if indeed it was successful?

Individuals of the world, unite!

While an instant definition of workers and capitalists is easy to give (sellers of labour-power, owners of means of production), and has good textual roots in Marx’s work (The Communist Manifesto, Capital, vol. 1, etc.), Marx’s own attempt to write more generally about class was not a success. The manuscripts forming the posthumous Capital, vol. 3, notoriously break off just after posing the question: ‘What makes a class?’ (Marx, [1894] 1998: 870–1). The ambiguities around class and reverse-determination problems presented in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte a...

Table of contents

• Democratization studies
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Engaging the issues in theory
• Part II Engaging the issues in practice
• Index