23
chapter 2
2
Real Civil Societies:
Dilemmas of Institutionalization
V
ital concepts enter social science by a striking process of intellectual
secularization. An idea emerges ﬁrst in practical experiences,
from the often overwhelming pressures of moral, economic, and
political conﬂict. Only later does it move into the intellectual world of
conceptual disputation, paradigm conﬂict, research program, and empirical
debate. Even after they have made this transition, vital concepts retain
signiﬁcant moral and political associations, and they remain highly disputed.
What changes is the terrain on which they are discussed, compromised, and
struggled over. The intellectual ﬁeld, after all, has a very distinctive speciﬁcity
of its own.
This secularization process created such basic concepts as class, status,
race, party, religion, and sect. More recently, we can see a similar process at
work with the emergence of such concepts as gender, sexuality, and identity.
The subject of this book, civil society, is being subjected to the same kind
of secularization today.
Civil society enters into intellectual discourse from the ongoing tumult
of social and political life for the second time. We must make every effort
to reﬁne it in a theoretical manner so that it will not disappear once again.
If we fail, the opportunity to incorporate this idea might disappear from
intellectual life for another long period of time. Not only normative theory
civil society in social theory
24
but moral life itself would be impoverished if this opportunity were missed,
and empirical social science would be much the worse as well. There is a
new theoretical continent to explore, a new empirical domain waiting to
be deﬁned. But we will not be able to make out this new social territory
unless we can look at it through new theoretical lenses. Our old conceptual
spectacles will not do.
To forge these spectacles is the aim of this book. Its ambition is to develop
a set of concepts that can illuminate a new kind of social fact and open up
a new arena for social scientiﬁc study, one much closer to the spirit and
aspirations of democratic life.
Civil society has been conceived in three ideal-typical ways. These have
succeeded one another in historical time, though each remains a signiﬁcant
intellectual and social force today. After situating these ideal-types temporally,
and evaluating them theoretically, I will introduce the analytical model at
the core of this book, a model which aims to deﬁne the relationship between
civil society and other kinds of institutional spheres. Only by understanding
the boundary relations between civil and uncivil spheres can we push the
discussion of civil society from the normative into the empirical realm. And
only by understanding civil society in a more “realist” manner can we lay
the basis for a critical normative theory about the incompleteness of civil
society in turn.
Civil Society I
It is well known that in its modern, post-medieval, post-Hobbesian form,
“civil society” entered into social understanding only in the late 17th century,
with the writings of ﬁgures like Locke and James Harrington.1
Developed
subsequently by such Scottish moralists as Adam Ferguson and Adam
Smith, by Rousseau and Hegel, and employed energetically for the last time
by Tocqueville, “civil society” was a rather diffuse, umbrella-like concept
referring to a plethora of institutions outside the state. It included the capitalist
market and its institutions, but it also denoted what Tocqueville called
voluntary religion (non-established Protestant covenantal denominations),
private and public associations and organizations, and virtually every form
of cooperative social relationship that created bonds of trust—for example,
currents of public opinion, legal norms and institutions, and political parties.
Dilemmas of Institutionalization
25
It is vital to see that in this ﬁrst period of its modern understanding, civil
society was endowed with a distinctively moral and ethical force. As Albert
Hirschman showed in The Passions and the Interests, the civilizing qualities
associated with civil society most deﬁnitely extended to the capitalist market
itself, with its bargaining and trading, its circulating commodities and money,
its shopkeepers and private property. Identiﬁed by such terms as le doux
commerce, the processes and institutions of the capitalist market were benignly
conceived—particularly by the progressive thinkers of the day—as helping
to produce qualities associated with international peace, domestic tranquility,
and increasingly democratic participation. Capitalism was understood as
producing self-discipline and individual responsibility. It was helping to
create a social system antithetical to the vainglorious aristocratic one, where
knightly ethics emphasized individual prowess through feats of grandeur,
typically of a military kind, and ascriptive status hierarchies were maintained
by hegemonic force. Montesquieu provided high ethical praise for capitalism
in this early phase.2
Benjamin Franklin’s inﬂuential Autobiography, which
identiﬁes public virtue with the discipline and propriety of market life, might
be said to provide an equally important example of a more popular, more
bourgeois, but perhaps not less literary kind.3
The decidedly positive moral and ethical tone that CS I attributed to
market society underwent a dramatic transformation in the early middle of
the nineteenth century. The development of capitalism’s industrial phase
made Mandeville’s famous fable of capitalism’s bee-like cooperation seem
completely passe´.4
The pejorative association of capitalism with inhumane
instrumentality, domination, and exploitation ﬁrst emerged among radical
British political economists like Thomas Hodgskin in the 1820s and 1830s.5
Marx encountered this Manichean literature in the early 1840s, and he
provided it with a systematic economic and sociological theory. His voice,
while by far the most important in theoretical terms, was for contemporaries
only one among many.
The emerging hatred of capitalism, its identiﬁcation with all the evils of
feudal domination and worse, was expressed among a wide and growing
chorus of utopians, socialists, and republicans. It is noteworthy that, for their
part, the new industrial capitalists and their liberal economic spokesmen did
not shy away from this new view of capitalism as an antisocial force. Brandishing
the doctrine of laissez-faire in a decidedly un-Smithean way, their
motto seemed to be, “society be damned!” There exists no better represen-
civil society in social theory
26
tation of this self-understanding of the supposedly inherent and ineradicable
antagonism between an evil, egotistical market, and “society” in the moral
and collective sense, than Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation,6
which
dramatically took the side of “society” against the market. Despite its interpretive
power and normative force, however, Polanyi’s inﬂuential book has
reinforced the very theoretical understandings I wish to make problematic
here.
Civil Society II
In social theory, this dramatic transformation of the moral and social identity
of market capitalism had fateful effects on the concept of civil society. As
Keane7
and Cohen8
were among the ﬁrst to point out, the connotations of
this fecund concept became drastically narrowed. Shorn of its cooperative,
democratic, associative, and public ties, in this second version (CSII), civil
society came to be pejoratively associated with market capitalism alone.9
Marx’s writings between 1842 and 1845 reﬂected and crystallized this reduction
in a fateful way. Not only does civil society come to be treated
simply as a ﬁeld for the play of egoistical, purely private interests, but it is
now viewed as a superstructure, a legal and political arena that camouﬂages
the domination of commodities and the capitalist class. For Marx, industrial
capitalism seemed only to consist of markets, the social groups formed by
markets, and market-protecting states. Society in the collective and moral
sense had dissolved into a morass of particularistic interests. Only the submerged
and repressed cooperative ties that deﬁned the proletariat’s true
economic interest could provide a counter-balancing universalism. Only the
collectively-binding social organization of the bourgeoisie’s class enemy
could sustain a social alternative to selﬁshness that the ideals of civil society
provided only in name.
As Cohen10
observed in her devastating critique, in Marx’s theory of
civil society “social, political, private, and legal institutions were treated as
the environment of the capitalist system, to be transformed by its logic but
without a dynamism of their own.” Nothing more clearly illustrates the
paradigm shift from CSI to CSII than the accusations Marx made against
Hegel, namely, that he had sought, in a reactionary manner, to justify just
Dilemmas of Institutionalization
27
such a privatized, selﬁsh vision of civil society, that he had identiﬁed the
civil sphere only with the ‘system of needs’ that became the mode of
production Marx’s own work.11
But Hegel actually never did any such thing.
To the contrary, he sought to rework the liberal line of CSI in a more
communal, solidaristic way. It is true that the available linguistic resources
and the peculiarities of German history had led Hegel, as it had led Kant
before him, to translate the English term, civil society, as Burgerlich Gesellschaft,
literally ‘burger’ but more broadly ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle class’ soci-
ety.12
But Marx’s contention that Hegel, and non-socialists more generally,
had identiﬁed civil society simply with capitalist class structures was an
ahistorical distortion reﬂecting the sense of crisis that marked the birth of
industrial society. For Hegel, the civil sphere was not only the world of
economic needs but also the sphere of ethics and law, and other intermediate
groupings that we would today call voluntary organizations.13
It is not surprising that in this social and intellectual situation, in the
middle of the nineteenth century, civil society as an important concept in
social theory shortly disappeared. If it was no more than an epiphenomenon
of capitalism, then it was no longer necessary, either intellectually or socially.
In the context of the ravages of early industrial capitalism, social and intellectual
attention shifted to the state. Substantive rather than formal equality
became the order of the day. Issues of democratic participation and liberty,
once conceived as inherently connected to equality in its other forms,
became less important. Strong state theories emerged, among both radicals
and conservatives, and bureaucratic regulation appeared as the only counterbalance
to the instabilities and inhumanities of market life.14
In the newly
emerging social sciences, mobility, poverty, and class conﬂict become the
primary topics of research and theory. In social and political philosophy,
utilitarian and contract theories assumed prominence, along with the neoKantian
emphasis on justice in terms of formal rationality and proceduralism
at the expense of ethical investigations into the requirements of the good life.
The legacy of this century-long distortion of the capitalism-civil society
relationship has had regrettable effects. Identifying society with the market,
ideologists for the right have argued that the effective functioning of capitalism
depends on the dissolution of social controls. Secure in the knowledge
that civil society is the private market, that economic processes by themselves
will produce the institutions necessary to promote democracy and mutual
civil society in social theory
28
respect, they have labored righteously to disband the very public institutions
that crystallize social solidarity outside the market place. Such efforts have
continued to this day.15
Yet if, for the right, the capitalism-civil society identiﬁcation suggested
abolishing society, for the left it suggested abolishing markets and private
property itself. If civility and cooperation were perverted and distorted by
capitalism, the latter would have to be abolished for the former to be
restored. In this way, the big state became the principal ally of the left, and
progressive movements became associated not only with equality but with
stiﬂing and often authoritarian bureaucratic control.
This was by no means conﬁned to the Marxist left. For thinkers from
Walter Lippman and John Dewey to C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt,
Jurgen Habermas, and most recently Robert Putnam, the disappearance of
public life became axiomatic to any thoughtful consideration of twentieth
century modernity.16
Captives of the historical shift in intellectual presuppositions
which I have described as CSII, these inﬂuential thinkers were
unable to think reﬂexively about it. They were convinced that capitalism
was destroying public life, that in democratic mass societies an all-powerful
market was pulverizing social bonds, converting citizens into egoists, and
allowing oligarchies and bureaucracies full sway. Capitalism and mass societies
were conceived as social worlds in which privacy ruled. That this was,
in fact, far from the case had become for even the most acute social observers
very difﬁcult to see. Because CSI had given way to CSII, they could no
longer draw upon the idea of an independent civil sphere. The social conditions
that had triggered the demise of CSI still held sway.
In a paradoxical manner, the civil society thinking of Antonio Gramsci,
which differed signiﬁcantly from the reductive understandings of traditional
CSII, actually seemed to buttress these fateful lapses in critical democratic
thought, whether liberal or socialist. Drawing on a less reductive reading of
Hegel, in the early decades of the 20th century Gramsci had developed his
own, thoroughly anti-individualistic and anti-economistic approach to civil
society. He deﬁned it as the realm of political, cultural, legal, and public life
that occupied an intermediate zone between economic relations and political
power.17
With this idea, Gramsci meant to challenge the evolutionary line
of Marxist thinking, which held that socialist revolution would be triggered
automatically, by a crisis in the economy alone. Broadening Lenin’s earlier
critique of economism, Gramsci suggested that civil society itself would have
Dilemmas of Institutionalization
29
to be challenged, and transformed, independently of the strains created by
capitalism’s economic base. Yet, even while Gramsci challenged the instrumentalism
of Marx’s thinking about the civil sphere, he reinforced CSII by
insisting that, within the conﬁnes of capitalist market society, there would
never be the space for institutionalizing solidarity of a more universalistic
and inclusive kind. Gramsci did not associate civil society with democracy.
It was a product of class-divided capitalism understood in the broad sociocultural
and economic sense. The values, norms, and institutions of civil
society were opposed to the interest of the mass of humanity, even if they
did provide a space for contesting their own legitimacy in a public, counterhegemonic
way. Civil society was inherently capitalist. It was a sphere that
could be entered into but not redeﬁned. Its discourse could not be broadened
and redirected. It was a sphere that would have to be overthrown. In this
book, my argument is directed in an opposite way.
Return to Civil Society I?
In recent decades a series of social and cultural events has created the circumstances
for a renewed intellectual engagement with civil society. Big
state theory has lost its prestige, economically with the falling productivity
of command economies, morally and politically with the overthrow of state
Communism and bureaucratic authoritarian regimes.18
Within social science,
there is now more interest in informal ties, intimate relationships, trust,
cultural and symbolic processes, and the institutions of public life.19
In
political and moral philosophy, there has not only been a return to democratic
theory, but renewed interest in Aristotle, Hegel, critical hermeneutics
and Pragmatism–all marking a return to investigations of the lifeworld ties
of local culture and community.20
The problem is that this re-engagement with civil society has largely
meant a return to CSI. In Democracy and Civil Society, a path-breaking work
in many ways, John Keane deﬁnes civil society broadly as “the realm of
social activities,” a realm that includes “privately owned,” “marketdirected,”
“voluntarily run,” and “friendship-based” organizations, phenomena
that are by no means necessarily theoretically complementary or
practically congenial. Keane goes on to assert, moreover, that such civil
activities are at once “legally recognized” and “guaranteed by the state,”
civil society in social theory
30
even as they form an “autonomous [sphere of] social life.” Civil society is
said to be “an aggregate of institutions whose members are engaged primarily
in a complex of non-state activities–economic and cultural production,
household life and voluntary association,” seemingly private activities that
Kane identiﬁes as distinctly “sociable” and at the same time “public
spheres.”21
Similarly, when Andrew Arato22
ﬁrst employed civil society in
his important articles on the Solidarity movement in the early 1980s, he
suggested that the civil sphere in its Western form was tied to private
property, a traditional understanding that not only contradicts the broad
range of references employed by Keane but threatens to render the concept
useless for distinguishing democratic from nondemocratic capitalistic societies.
A decade later, in their major philosophical rethinking of civil society
theory, Cohen and Arato23
severed this connection, and in its place they
offered a substantially improved three-part model of society that went well
beyond CSI and CSII. Nonetheless, perhaps by relying so heavily on Hegel,
this major work failed to deﬁne the civil sphere as distinctive vis-a-vis such
arenas as family life, and neglected entirely the relation between the civil
sphere and such arenas as culture, religion, ethnicity, and race.24
Here they
were following Habermas, who insists on separating rational discourse in
the public sphere from the traditions of cultural life.25
The same tendency toward diffuseness marked Alan Wolfe’s26
identiﬁcation
of civil society with the private realm of family and voluntary organization,
and Adam Seligman’s27
insistence that it corresponds to the rule of
reason in the Enlightenment sense. Carole Pateman28
claims civil society to
be inextricably linked to patriarchal family relations, and Shils29
and Walzer30
,
while disagreeing with Pateman in virtually every other way, likewise revert
to an understanding of civil society that reﬂects its earlier diffuse and
umbrella-like form. Victor Perez-Diaz31
argues, indeed, that only such a
‘maximalist’ approach to civil society can maintain the necessary linkages
between a democratic public sphere and particular forms of economy, state,
family, and cultural life. Though Robert Putnam’s model for strengthening
democracy through voluntary associations does not focus explicitly on the
civil society idea, this neo-Tocquevillian approach looks backward to CSI
in very much the same way.32
It is most deﬁnitely a good thing that the destructive and overly narrow
understandings of CSII have been undermined by the recent revival of
democratic thought. But social life at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst
Dilemmas of Institutionalization
31
century is much more complex and more internally differentiated than the
early modern societies that generated CSI. The old umbrella understanding
will no longer do. We need a much more precise and delimited understanding
of the term. Private property, markets, family life, and religious ideals
might all be necessary at some point or another to create the capacities of
the civil sphere, but they are by no means sufﬁcient to sustain it. Rejecting
the reductionism of CSII, but also the diffuse inclusiveness of CSI, we must
develop a third approach to civil society, one that reﬂects both the empirical
and normative problems of contemporary life.
Toward Civil Society III
We need to understand civil society as a sphere that can be analytically
independent, empirically differentiated, and morally more universalistic visa`-vis
the state and the market and from other social spheres as well. Building
upon important directional signals from empirical theoretical traditions in
sociology and normative traditions in political theory and philosophy–which
I have discussed in chapter 1 and will elaborate further in chapter 3—I
would like to suggest that civil society should be conceived as a solidary
sphere, in which a certain kind of universalizing community comes to be
culturally deﬁned and to some degree institutionally enforced. To the degree
that this solidary community exists, it is exhibited and sustained by public
opinion, deep cultural codes, distinctive organizations—legal, journalistic
and associational—and such historically speciﬁc interactional practices as
civility, criticism, and mutual respect.33
Such a civil community can never
exist as such; it can only be sustained to one degree or another. It is always
limited by, and interprenetrated with, the boundary relations of other, noncivil
spheres.
The solidarity that sustains the civil sphere amidst the complex and highly
conﬂictual spheres of contemporary life draws from long-standing cultural
and institutional traditions that have sustained individual and collective obligation.
CSII theories were quite mistaken to link not only individualism
(its emergence) but the collective sense of social obligation (its decline) with
market society. The individuality that sustains civil society has a long history
in Western societies, as a moral force, an institutional fact, and a set of
interactional practices. It has a non-economic background in the cultural
civil society in social theory
32
legacy of Christianity, with its emphasis on the immortal soul, conscience,
and confession; in aristocratic liberty and Renaissance self-fashioning; in the
Reformation’s insistence on the individual relation to God; in the Enlightenment’s
deiﬁcation of individual reason; in Romanticism’s restoration of
expressive individuality. Institutions that reward and model individuality can
be traced back to English legal guarantees for private property in the eleventh
century; to the medieval parliaments that distinguished the speciﬁcity of
Western feudalism; to the newly independent cities that emerged in late
medieval times and played such a powerful historical role until the emergence
of absolutist states. The economic practices of market capitalism, in
other words, did not invent either moral or immoral individualism. They
should be viewed, rather, as marking a new speciﬁcation and institutionalization
of it, along with other newly emerging forms of social organization,
such as religious sect activity, mass parliamentary democracy, and romantic
love.34
Just as individualism in its moral and expressive forms preceded, survived,
and in effect surrounded the instrumental, self-oriented individualism institutionalized
in capitalist market life, so did the existence of “society.” Civil
ties and the enforcement of obligations to a community of others were part
of the fundamental structure of many British towns centuries before the
appearance of contemporary capitalist life.35
The notion of a “people” rooted
in common lineage, of the community as an ethnos, formed the early basis
for an ethically binding, particularist conception of nationhood from at least
the ﬁfteenth century.36
Karl Polanyi well described the “double movement”
that characterized the emergence of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth
century, pitting “moral forces” representing “the moral entity ‘man’ ” against
the egoistical, impersonal, and degrading practices of the market. The upshot
of this struggle was that the “general interests of the community” created
“protectionist measures” regulating the conditions of land, labor, and productive
organization inside the very bowels of economic life. “Once we rid
ourselves of the obsession that only sectional, never general, interest can
become effective,” Polanyi writes, “as well as the twin prejudice of restricting
the interests of human groups to their monetary income, the breadth
and depth of the protectionist movement lose their mystery.”37
Still, Polanyi
is wrong to describe this “countermovement” as of a “purely practical and
pragmatic nature,” as producing measures that “simply responded to the
needs of an industrial civilization with which market methods were unable
Dilemmas of Institutionalization
33
to cope.”38
The protectionist movement did not simply grow naturally in
response to a moral violation that was there for all to see. Rather, this
defensive moral response emerged precisely because there had already existed
strongly institutionalized and culturally mandated reservoirs of non-market,
non-individualistic force in Western social life. It was from these sources
that there emerged protests against capitalism on behalf of “the people.”39
To identify civil society with capitalism (CSII) is to degrade its universalizing
moral implications and the capacity for criticism and repair that the
existence of a relatively independent solidary community implies. The civil
sphere and the market must be conceptualized in fundamentally different
terms. We are no more a capitalist society than we are a bureaucratic, secular,
rational one, or indeed a civil one. Yet, to suggest the need to acknowledge
the environment outside of economic life is not to embrace the kind of
relativism that the pluralism of CSI implies. Michael Walzer has argued
eloquently that there are as many spheres of justice as there are differentiated
social spheres.40
Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, in a parallel argument,
suggest that complex societies contain several “regimes of justiﬁcation,” each
of which must be respected in its own right.41
As these American and French
theories persuasively remind us, no social sphere, not even the economic,
should be conceived in anti-normative terms, as governed only by interest
and egoism. They have immanent moral structures in their own right. It
remains vital, nonetheless, to specify and differentiate the “regime of justiﬁcation”
or the “sphere of justice” that makes a clear and decisive reference
to the common good in a democratic way. This is the criterion of justice
that follows from ideals that regulate the civil sphere. The codes and narratives,
the institutions, and the interactions that underlay civil solidarity
clearly depart from those that regulate the world of economic cooperation
and competition, the affectual and intimate relations of family life, and the
transcendental and abstract symbolism that form the media of intellectual
and religious interaction and exchange.
When the domination of one sphere over another, or the monopolization
of resources by elites within the individual spheres themselves, has been
forcefully blocked, it has been by bringing to bear the cultural codes and
regulative institutions of the civil sphere. This, at least, is the thesis that
informs this book. Civil and noncivil spheres do not merely co-exist in a
kind of harmonious interchange, as functionalist theories of differentiation
from Spencer and Durkheim to Parsons and Luhmann imply. It is not only
civil society in social theory
34
the pluralization of spheres that guarantees a good society, nor the free play
and good will of interlocutors willing to compromise their interests in the
face of competing and persuasive claims for moral justiﬁcation. To maintain
democracy, and to achieve justice, it is often necessary for the civil to ‘invade’
noncivil spheres, to demand certain kinds of reforms, and to monitor them
through regulation in turn. In modern times, aggrieved parties have demanded
justice by pointing angrily to what they come to see as destructive
intrusions into the civil realm, intrusions whose demands they construct as
particularistic and self-serving. In response, the forces and institutions of civil
society have often initiated repairs that aim to mend the social fabric.
In terms of the normative mandates established by democratic societies,
it is the civil sphere of justice that trumps every other. The universality that
is the ambition of this sphere, its demands to be inclusive, to fulﬁll collective
obligations while at the same time protecting individual autonomy—these
qualities have persistently made the civil sphere the court of last resort in
modern, modernizing, and postmodernizing societies.42
For the last two
centuries explicitly, and implicitly for many centuries before, it has been the
immanent and subjunctive demands of the civil sphere that have provided
possibilities for justice.
As we will see in our later analysis of the tense and shifting boundaries
between civil and uncivil spheres, CSIII allows us to revisit the ‘capitalism
problem’ in a more productive way.43
When exploitation leads to widening
class conﬂict, it signals strains and inequalities in economic life. When class
conﬂict leads to wide public discussion, to the formation of legal trade
unions, to urgent appeals for sympathy and support, to scandals and parliamentary
investigations, such expansion signals that market conﬂicts have
entered into the civil sphere. In such situations, the mandate of solidarity,
the presumptions of collective obligation and autonomy, come face to face
with the demands for efﬁciency and hierarchy. These conﬂicts are not accidental;
they are systematic to every society that opens up a civil sphere,
and they make justice a possibility, though not in any sense a necessary social
fact. In real civil societies, extending solidarity to others depends on the
imagination. As I have suggested in chapter 1, the counter-factual “original
position” that inspired Rawls’ philosophy of justice is assumed in fantasy, as
an idealization, via metaphor and symbolic analogy, not through pragmatic
experience or logical deduction. It is a matter of cultural struggle, of social
Dilemmas of Institutionalization
35
movement, of demands for incorporation, of broken and reconstructed
dialogue, of reconﬁguring institutional life.
Such tense and permeable boundary relationships between capitalist
markets and the civil sphere, barely visible during the early reign of CSI,
were denied in principle by CSII. Only if we develop a new model, CSIII,
can we understand why capitalistic and civil society must not be conﬂated
with one another. If these realms are separated analytically, we gain empirical
and theoretical purchase, not only on the wrenching economic strains of
the last two centuries, but on the extraordinary repairs to the social fabric
that have so often been made in response. Markets are not, after all, the only
threats or even the worst threats that have been levied against the democratic
possibilities of civil life. Far from the mere existence of plural spheres providing
the skeleton key to justice, each of the diverse and variegated spheres
of modern societies has created distortions and undermined civil promises.
Religious hatreds and repression, gender misogyny and patriarchy, the arrogance
of expert knowledge and the secrecy of political oligarchy, racial
and ethnic hatreds of every sort–each of these particularistic and anti-civil
forces has deeply fragmented the civil domain. The identiﬁcation of capitalism
with civil society, in other words, is just one example of the reductive
and circumscribing conﬂation of civil society with a particular kind of noncivil
realm.
Social and cultural movements of every kind, whether old or new,
economic or religious, have organized to expose the pretensions of civil
society and the hollowness of its promises. The theorists and ideologists who
have led these rebellious and critical movements have often concluded, in
their desperation and frustration, that civil society has no real force at all.
Whether such radical arguments focus on class, gender, race, or religion,
their argument is much the same. Justice is impossible; revolution and ﬂight
are the only options left. In this book, I will suggest that these radical, and
radically despairing, arguments for emancipation from civil society are not
empirically accurate, even if they are sometimes morally compelling. Generalizing
from distorted and oppressive boundary relations, they draw the
false conclusion that the civil sphere must invariably be distorted in this
manner, not only now but in the future as well. Building on this faulty line
of reasoning, they have outlined utopian projects that reject universalizing
solidarity as a social goal or have proposed a reconstructed social order in
civil society in social theory
36
which only peaceable relations will reign. I will suggest in the chapter
following why the aspiration to universalism simply cannot be dispensed
with, and in Part II of this book I will explain why continuous conﬂicts
over the structuring of solidarity are the inevitable result. There is no way
to avoid conﬂicts over boundary relations. They reﬂect the pluralism and
complexity that mark modern and postmodern life, especially in its democratic
forms. Between civil society and the other social spheres there is a
theoretically open and historically indeterminate relation. Sometimes, the
power of noncivil spheres has overwhelmed the universalistic aspirations of
the civil sphere. At other times, its relative autonomy has provided the
possibility for justice.