Civil Society, Second Edition

The Critical History of an Idea

John R. Ehrenberg

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781479891603
• eBook ISBN: 9781479871629
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensive discussion and analysis of two and a half millennia of Western political theory

In the absence of noble public goals, admired leaders, and compelling issues, many warn of a dangerous erosion of civil society, which includes families, religious organizations, and all other NGOs. Are they right? What are the roots and implications of their insistent alarm? How can public life be enriched in a period marked by fraying communities, widespread apathy, and unprecedented levels of contempt for politics? How should we be thinking about civil society?

In Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea, John Ehrenberg analyzes both the usefulness and the limitations of civil society and maps the political and theoretical evolution of the concept and its employment in academic and public discourse. From Aristotle and the Enlightenment philosophers to Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement, Ehrenberg provides an indispensable analysis of the possibilities of what this increasingly important idea can, and cannot, offer to contemporary political affairs.

In this new, second edition Ehrenberg brings the historical overview up to present day, specifically considering how major events such as 9/11, the global financial crisis, economic inequality, and rapidly advancing technologies alter and shape our relationship to contemporary civil society. Civic engagement, political participation, and volunteerism in contemporary life has faded, he argues, and in order to bring civil society—and all its virtues—back to the fore, we need to counter the suffocating inequality that has taken hold in recent years. Thorough and accessible, Civil Society gives a sweeping overview of a foundational part of political life.

Part I

The Origins of Civil Society

1

Civil Society and the Classical Heritage

The classical understanding of civil society as a politically organized commonwealth received its first coherent formulation in the cities of ancient Greece. It revolved around the initial understanding that men and women lived their lives in separate spheres, and Greek theory considered a wide range of human relations. Love, friendship, teaching, marriage, citizenship, the duties of slaves and responsibilities of masters, the skills of artisans and the division of labor—all were studied in their uniqueness and in their connectedness. The observation that people live together in distinct yet related associations stimulated debate about uniqueness and commonality, autonomy and responsibility, particularism and universalism. Systematic political theory arose out of these discussions, and political categories framed the first approach to civil society.

Classical thought consistently maintained that political power separated men from beasts and made civilization possible. The celebrated distinction the Greeks drew between themselves and barbarians separated those whose membership in a political association enabled them to live in civil society from those who were unable to do so. As the broadest and only “self-sufficient” level of activity, politics made it possible for men to rise above their immediate circumstances and consciously establish the principles of moral life. If the idiotes was the solitary man whose life was constituted by individual drives, the self-governing citizen personified what public action guided by reason could accomplish. “Here,” said Pericles in his celebrated testament to Athens, “we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own affairs; we say that he has no business here at all.”1

The willingness to voluntarily subordinate one’s private interests to those of the city was the decisive mark of the citizen-soldier. Pericles knew firsthand how powerful civic spirit could be: “No one of these men weakened because he wanted to go on enjoying his wealth; no one put off the awful day in the hope that he might live to escape his poverty and grow rich. More to be desired than such things, they chose to check the enemy’s pride.”2 Forged in the aftermath of the ruinous Peloponnesian War, classical Greek political philosophy insisted that the common good could be discovered through public debate and organized by public action. It followed that civic decay was the inevitable consequence of private calculation and individual interest. Plato first articulated political theory’s orientation toward the comprehensive public life of a moral community. In so doing, he revealed some of the strengths—and dangers—of a civil society organized around a common moral project.

The Danger of Private Interest

The son of a prominent Athenian family, Plato tried to counter the political and moral confusion of his day with a philosophical realm of absolute categories supported by a rationalistic approach to knowledge. Born in 428 BCE, the year after Pericles’s death, he came to maturity in an environment shaped by Athenian military defeat, economic chaos, political instability, and ethical confusion. His drive to establish the moral principles of government was a direct response to the uncertainty and disorder of his day. The primacy he accorded to political knowledge and power shaped a theory of civil society that owed as much to its unified conception of truth as to its powerful aversion to private interests and separate spheres. Unable to theorize any category of social life apart from the political community, Plato’s understanding of civil society was ultimately betrayed by the same orientation to universality that gave it life.

The Crito established Socrates’s position that the community is ethically and chronologically prior to the individual, and the Republic was Plato’s first step toward a comprehensive theory of the state. It rested on the claim that individual interest can never provide a sufficient foundation for a happy, just, or civilized life. Legitimate power, authority, and knowledge exist only for the welfare of those for whose sake they are exercised. Just as a doctor’s craft lies in curing disease and a captain’s authority is exercised on behalf of his crew, “no ruler, in so far as he is acting as ruler, will study or enjoin what is for his own interest. All that he says and does will be said and done with a view to what is good and proper for the subject for whom he practices his art.”3 Political power exists to serve the welfare of the city and its citizens. Civil society can be comprehended only in relation to the organizing principles of the state.

Plato knew that people lived in different spheres of association that have their own intrinsic organizing logic. It was important for him to understand each—but only because he wanted to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the whole. Like the human body or the crew of a ship, civil society is composed of different elements with particular characteristics and roles; indeed, the division of labor based on natural aptitudes lies at the heart of Plato’s theory of justice, politics, and civil society. Guided by the master virtue of reason, justice enables each part to contribute to the welfare of the whole by doing that for which its nature has suited it—whether in family life, friendships, or political affairs. Plato’s is a functional theory; the welfare of the soul, of the body, and of the state depends on the balanced harmony that results when their constituent elements discharge their proper functions. He always investigated these reciprocal relationships, for “without justice men cannot act together at all.”4 Understanding the division of labor and the consequent relations of subordination and guidance is essential for justice and health.

For Plato, the task of political theory was to address the twin problems of corruption and decay. He was sure of their source. “Does not the worst evil for a state arise from anything that tends to rend it asunder and destroy its unity, while nothing does it more good than whatever tends to bind it together and make it one?” he asked.5 The persistent search for unity drove his understanding of the state and civil society and lay behind his famous claim that political disease is caused by the same forces that make individuals sick. If justice is balance and health, then injustice is strife and disorder. All disturbances can be traced to the inability of the state’s constituent parts to function according to their natures and to the consequent disruption of the health of the whole. Just as wickedness stems from ignorance, so the corruption afflicting Athens originated in division. If “injustice is like disease and means that this natural order is inverted,”6 it follows that political theory should seek to discover the principles that could organize civil society into a coherent whole.

Unity was as important for the soul as it was for the state. Plato was guided by the Socratic dictum that the happy man will orient himself according to his knowledge of life’s ultimate purposes. “The Good” denotes what is worthy of pursuit for its own sake rather than for the sake of any subsidiary or consequent advantages it might bring. Plato’s bitter dispute with the sophists was driven by his conviction that they prostituted knowledge by reducing it to a set of narrow skills for the pursuit of personal advantage. Elevating private interest over the common good encouraged the anarchical forces that were weakening Athens, but the sophists were only one element of a larger problem. The Republic was organized around Plato’s attempt to contain the centrifugal tendencies that constituted the city’s crisis. The unity he sought required that private interests and passions be brought under conscious control. The desire for too much honor, wealth, and other legitimate goals caused social, political, and psychic conflict, and Plato’s ascetic sense of stability required that all “luxurious excess” be eliminated.7 The private interests that often animated the action of rich and poor will always erode the ties that hold civil society together: “The one produces luxury and idleness, the other low standards of conduct and workmanship; and both have a subversive tendency.”8 Nothing was more dangerous to the unity Plato sought than the anarchy caused by concern for self.

And this disunion comes about when the words “mine” and “not mine,” “another’s” and “not another’s” are not applied to the same things throughout the community. The best ordered state will be the one in which the largest number of persons use these terms in the same sense, and which accordingly most nearly resembles a single person. When one of us hurts his finger, the whole extent of those bodily connections which are gathered up in the soul and unified by its ruling elements is made aware of it and all share as a whole in the pain of the suffering part; hence we say that the man has a pain in his finger. The same thing is true of the pain or pleasure felt when any other part of the person suffers or is relieved.9

Unless it is nipped in the bud, concern for self will spread from the city’s leadership to the general population, for “diversity, inequality, and disharmony will beget, as they always must, enmity and civil war. Such, everywhere, is the birth and lineage of civil strife.”10 Plato was certain that ambition, greed, and competition were constant threats to civil society because it was difficult to control private appetites with external sanctions in the absence of shared commitments. Force was important, but in the end civil society rested on patterns of thought. Unhealthy states were like diseased souls because their lack of balance orients them toward individual purposes and thus renders them indifferent to the common good. Private strivings stand behind all diseased personalities and political formations because they cripple the master virtue of reason and precipitate psychic breakdown and civil war. The glue that holds the soul and civil society together is supplied by the integrative power of reason, which discerns the single truth that organizes the world. Strong, effective leadership could counteract the centrifugal force of the very diversity Plato had initially recognized because it could root civil society in an ethical totality: “For the moment, we are constructing, as we believe, the state which will be happy as a whole, not trying to secure the well-being of a select few.”11 Civil society fused truth, beauty, and goodness with knowledge, power, and the state. Plato’s drive to unify all aspects of human experience around an unvarying Good drove him to the first systematic defense of state censorship. Founded on a recognition of diversity and a sophisticated understanding of the division of labor, his civil society ended with a frozen unity and a silent stability.

Such an orientation had important institutional ramifications. Leadership was reserved to “those who, when we look at the whole course of their lives, are found to be full of zeal to do whatever they believe is for the good of the commonwealth and never willing to act against its interest.”12 If absolute ethical knowledge could be located in a few highly trained experts, then democracy stood condemned by its mediocrity, permissiveness, and disorder. At the same time, anyone could become a leader, even women, a feature of Plato’s thinking that often surprises first-time readers. In a true meritocracy, political leadership represented the self-sacrificing union of power with knowledge. The famous “myth of the cave” made it clear that the philosopher-king has to be forced to assume power against his will. But legitimate political authority required more than training and knowledge.

Plato’s communism, reserved for the Republic’s leadership, was motivated by his conviction that property, the family, and other institutions of private life always tend to establish a pole of particular interest and draw the leaders away from the objective interests of the whole. The guardians would own no private property beyond the barest necessities, have no permanent family attachments, receive their food from their fellow citizens, eat in common, and live the ascetic life of soldiers. If civic corruption began with the pull of individual interest, the guardians could have no private life. Those who organized and defended civil society would not be part of it:

This manner of life will be their salvation and make them the saviors of the commonwealth. If ever they should come to possess land of their own and houses and money, they will give up their guardianship for the management of their farms and households and become tyrants at enmity with their fellow citizens instead of allies. And so they will pass all their lives in hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, in much greater fear of their enemies at home than of any foreign foe, and fast heading for the destruction that will soon overwhelm their country with themselves.13

For all his emphasis on unity, Plato knew that civil society coordinates the activities of people with different skills and aptitudes. An articulated understanding of the division of labor lies at the center of his political and psychological theories and informs his epistemology as well. But diversity, different spheres, and the division of labor only identified the problem. That which comes into being and passes away does not constitute the truth. The indeterminate, changing, and mortal world of sensible things is the outward manifestation of the eternal and unchanging Forms, knowledge of which is the key to peace and justice. Civil society can live up to its ethical potential only if it is organized on the same invariant basis as the Forms. Most people might be content to live among the shadows of the cave, but leadership requires an understanding that moral potential cannot be reduced to pleasure. Politics is not about coordinating particular self-serving activities or resolving conflicts of interest but setting the conditions where individuals are oriented toward the general and where the universal can be discerned in the particular, for “the law is not concerned to make any one class specially happy, but to ensure the welfare of the commonwealth as a whole. By persuasion or constraint it will unite the citizens in harmony, making them share whatever benefits each class can contribute to the common good; and its purpose in forming men of that spirit was not that each should be left to go his own way, but that they should be instrumental in binding the community into one.”14

Plato tried to provide a counterweight for the centrifugal pull of different interests with a public philosophy that would ground politics in moral wisdom and the good life. But the Republic’s breadth turned out to be the cure that killed the patient. People move in different spheres and civil society is a composite of different functions, but this seemed to make it all the more important that Plato provide an invariant center for public life. His drive toward unity rested on a single Good that effectively erased his great insight that a coherent public life composed of different elements required an integrative moral purpose. His insistence that civil society could be held together by moral principles buttressed by political power assumed that social organization was defined within a set of distinctly political boundaries, but it was left to his greatest student to develop a more nuanced conception of civil society even as he agreed that politics was “the master science of the Good.”

The Mixed Polity

Born in 384 BCE, Aristotle spent twenty years as a student in Plato’s Academy but concluded that it was impossible to conceptually unify all aspects of Being. Every intellectual synthesis was necessarily incomplete because different realms of thought and life are governed by their own particular logics. As important as this insight would be for classical theories of civil society, it was easier for Aristotle to proclaim than to implement. Living in the final years of an independent Athenian city-state, one of humanity’s most encyclopedic intellectuals remained attached to a relatively limited aristocratic view of public life and was never able to accommodate his thinking to the comparatively vast scope of a Macedonian world-empire.

The very first paragraph of his Politics established Aristotle’s understanding that people live in different kinds of associations—and his equally important observation that politics is the most comprehensive of them all. Less finished levels of organization have their own logic but can be fully comprehended only in relation to the more complete levels to which they contribute. His classic view that all subsidiary affiliations find their culmination in the state framed his orientation toward civil society as the politically organized community:

Observation shows us, first, that every polis or state is a species of association, and, secondly, that all associations are instituted for the purpose of attaining some good—for all men do all their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in their view, a good. We may therefore hold . . . that all associations aim at some good; and we may also hold that the particular association which is the most sovereign of all, and includes all the rest, will pursue this aim most, and will thus be directed to the most sovereign of all goods. This most sovereign and inclusive association is the polis, as it is called, or the political association.15

Aristotle shared Plato’s understanding that human bonds are rooted in material need and that the division of labor rests at the heart of civil society. Since it was the basic productive unit of the ancient world, the household was the foundation of Aristotle’s state. Several families compose a village. Both spheres of organization were constituted by the particular ends or purposes around which they were organized. But the core of classical political philosophy was its ability to theorize the whole, and Aristotle knew...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Inequality and Democracy’s Uncertain Future
• Part I. The Origins of Civil Society
• Part II. Civil Society and Modernity
• Part III. Civil Society in Contemporary Life
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author