Civil Society’s Proper Place

Contrary to the old saw, history never repeats itself as farce. History is too high stakes ever to be considered a farce. Rather, historical trends disintegrate over time into fragments of pastiche.

Consider the recent trend of “The Great Resignation” and “quiet quitting,” which developed in the context of media speculation about a world in which people did not have to work as much, or in an office, or, ideally, at all. “Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?” as Philip Larkin put it. It seemed as though the world was on the verge of a revolution in social and economic life similar to the transformations that occurred in the wake of the Second World War, when western European countries evolved into various degrees of social democracy. But that paradigmatic shift occurred as a result of a global economic crash and a world war’s massive devastation, and it was also a concession in the face of the communist threat. “Quiet quitting,” by contrast, was the creation of a bored TikToker playing around online in the most prosperous country on earth. (As for Larkin, he wryly concluded in a letter that “work, paradoxically enough, is a comfort. One wakes up wanting to cut one’s throat; one goes to work, & in 15 minutes one wants to cut someone else’s—complete cure!”)

Or look at the new style of right-wing populist writers, who indignantly beat their chests over corporations’ heedless treatment of workers. Reading them is like being caught in a double warp of time and ideology. The rhetoric dates back to the 1930s radical left, and the political sentiment has existed on the liberal side of things for over a century. Since it is hard to imagine the American political right becoming pro-labor or attempting to diminish the power of corporations, the rhetoric is—leave aside what often feels like a veiled authoritarian purpose behind it—surreal, familiar words whirling unfamiliarly in a bespoke political snow globe. They have no actual place to go.

Like the children in a materially pressed family, these days we dress up our language—as new material conditions leave our language far behind—in the hand-me-down ideas of previous generations. One of the most stubbornly enduring terms is “civil society.” As our politics have failed us, civil society often appears as that revered American chimera: “the solution.” Since the advent of Donald Trump in 2016, use of the term has proliferated.

Emergency measures imposed to control the pandemic “restricted the possibility for civil society to get involved in the political process,” worried The New York Times in early 2021. Who Killed Civil Society asks the title of a 2019 conservative book, concluding, unsurprisingly, that it was the “modern social service state.” One year earlier, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg proposed in the Times that “To Restore Civil Society, Start with the Library.” “Civil Society is Ukraine’s Secret Weapon Against Russia,” announced The Wall Street Journal two months after Russia’s invasion. Shortly after the Hamas attacks on October 7, the Journal reported that “as Israel’s government reels… civil society mobilizes….” Writing last January about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the case of a Christian postal worker refusing to work on Sundays (Groff v. DeJoy, Postmaster General), the Times’ Linda Greenhouse fretted over “The Latest Crusade to Place Religion Over the Rest of Civil Society,” feeling certain that “the court doubtless rules for [Groff] later this term.” (In fact, the court refused to take a clear position, essentially leaving such conflicts to the lower courts to decide on a case-by-case basis.) And just recently, a Times editorial affirmed the conclusion reached by a prominent legal scholar whom it quoted: “I do think that some of the underlying assumptions of how a civil society operates can no longer be assumed.”

Civil society is almost always invoked as a quality of democracy upon whose survival the existence of a healthy democracy depends. Existing between the economy and the state, civil society indeed offers a vital space of comparative freedom and autonomy. But the very idea of civil society, resorted to in this way, as some sort of sacred refuge, is a symptom of the failure of both the marketplace and the state.

The origin of the idea of civil society goes back to Aristotle and Cicero, but it acquired today’s urgent rhetorical function at two recent junctures of history. The first was the tremendously influential ideas of Antonio Gramsci, who, in effect, turned Marx nearly on his head and argued that although material conditions precede consciousness, consciousness is the instrument by which material conditions can be most affected. The second was the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989, when movements like Solidarity in Poland and Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia explicitly used the idea of civil society as the antidote to a totalitarian system that had overwhelmed both the public and private realms with an asphyxiating politics. Lenin and the party meeting gave way to jazz clubs and Dexter Gordon. Civil society offered a space beyond politics and a thoroughly politicized economy, a space in which citizens could be free to remake themselves as individuals.

Yet what really lay behind Gramsci’s popularity among Western intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s was not just his skepticism toward change managed from above the ordinary currents of life. What won Western intellectual hearts was the special status Gramsci conferred on… intellectuals. Gramsci considered intellectuals to be the primary moving force behind a shift in consciousness that would lead to revolutionary change; Benedetto Croce, he wrote, was no less than “a sort of lay pope.” For left-wing American academics, whose long march through the institutions had ended in mind-numbing departmental meetings, this was a kind of rebirth.

The 1990s saw countless op-eds devoted to analyzing the nature and function of the “public intellectual,” the human embodiment of civic values that transcended, even defied, both market and state. It was a time of great nostalgia (which I shared): for City College’s famed Alcove One, the formative meeting-place of the New York Intellectuals; for postwar intellectuals like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin; and for what was regarded as the golden postwar form of journals like Partisan Review. As Bill Clinton shifted the Democratic Party to a neoliberal center, and the Democrats’ working-class base moved rightward, the image of the American public intellectual suddenly acquired the glamorous power of the Eastern European dissident, and public intellectuals’ principled disgust with politics began to be channeled into the so-called “culture wars.” These burgeoning conflicts, between practitioners of “identity politics” and “political correctness” and their adversaries, seemed to put the new high priests of civil society, the public intellectuals, at the center of American public life.

But here was the catch: the new public intellectuals, so fluent and active in civil society, exhibiting such forcefulness on the op-ed page, or even, if fortune smiled, on the Charlie Rose Show, possessed no political power. Adam Michnik had political power. Vaclav Havel had political power. The iconoclastic chairman of this or that academic department, the author of this or that brilliant polemic, the popular, charismatic lecturer—they lacked the ability to affect the policies that affected the people. The reading group, the intellectual coterie, the little literary journal, the jazz club, the opera guild, the progressive church or synagogue, the myriad structures of university life—these were all essential forms of civic existence that bound people together on the basis of shared beliefs, interests, and tastes. Hannah Arendt had loved to frequent the Abstract Expressionists’ club on Eighth Street; she also evinced a special fondness for Thomas Jefferson’s notion of “wards,”—those early conceptual bastions of civil society—which came to nothing. But Arendt never bothered to formulate a theory of civil society for the simple reason that, like Aristotle, she believed that the crucial space in collective life was one that bound the citizen, through discourse and debate, to the praxis of politics, the only collective form that could preserve and protect the individual. E.P. Thompson wrote that if the strong civic associations of England’s handworkers in the 19^th Century had not been situated so far from London, the center of political power, “the course of English history would have been changed.”

Thompson had an acute sense of the practical dynamics of political power. The anti-woke fervors of the right, who have assimilated Gramsci’s prescriptions for Kulturkampf—his “war of position”—more effectively than has the left, have had almost no positive effect on the political fortunes of the right. Erst kommt das Fressen. The Times article worrying that pandemic measures “restricted the possibility for civil society to get involved in the political process” misunderstood the nature of civil society. Civil society rarely has an influence on political decisions, whether you are bowling alone or with 20 other people.

Then, too, even as American public intellectuals were celebrating themselves in the 1990s—there was a veritable American Idol of people explicitly auditioning for “the George Orwell of our time”—and touting the glories of civil society, Ratko Mladic was using soccer clubs to organize the genocide of Bosniak Muslims. During the 1950s, McCarthyism had fostered or empowered vigorous civil institutions such as The American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, the American Council of Christian Laymen, the Catholic Freedom Foundation, the Freedom Club, Freedom in Action, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers, to name but a few ardent anti-communist groups. Here was a case of politics preceding and creating a segment of civil society. Robert Putnam could lament, in his 2000 classic, Bowling Alone, that Americans had become atomized and alienated, but in fact groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers continue to flourish. These civic institutions don’t only embody extremist tendencies; they organize mixers, picnics and softball games, civic activities in which people can exchange ideas and notions of taste just as the artists and their devotees once did on Eighth Street.

If romanticism was, as someone once said, “spilled religion,” the idea of civil society in our time is a splash of spilled romanticism. It is often a self-protective fantasy. American declarations of the sacredness of civil society represent a reaction against the rapid retraction into screen life of public realm and private experience, as well as a despair over a completely dysfunctional political system.

In fact, a healthy marketplace and a healthy state both contain robust civic elements, just as a healthy civil society would be fluidly connected to the economy and to the state without being subsumed by them. We also might wonder whether any civic form can exist unconditioned by either the transactional dynamics of the marketplace or the power relations of politics. That is not necessarily a bad thing. A civil society that does not overlap at some points with the realms of money and organized power would be as alienating as it would be uninteresting, and unrewarding.

Finally, it could be that it is the intellectuals, who spend most of their lives in solitude, thinking, reading and writing, who need the gregarious bonds of civil society more than, say, any tradesperson or service worker. Many non-intellectual people have relatively uncomplicated family lives, connections to a place of worship, gratification in watching sports with their friends, and countless other civic activities that, if the intellectual class had not so completely unmasked and delegitimized them, might make civil society less the response to an emergency and more a simple joy of life.

A thriving civil society is precious, as much for a people searching for a space to breathe between commerce and the administrative state as for a people yearning to be free from a suffocating totalitarian universe. It is too precious to be refuge, salvation or last resort. We need to de-sacralize civil society, as it were, and to search for opportunities to make civil society interact meaningfully with the state and economy without allowing it to be subsumed by them. Letting civil society be, without looking to it for salvation, might even have the more immediate effect of making our politics, if not functional, at least marginally endurable.

A response by Jonas Rolett:

Civil Society’s Beating Heart

As Lee Siegel notes in these pages, the concept of civil society has been in use since the 4^th century BCE, when Aristotle posited theories of political association. Cicero may have been the first to use the exact phrase, societas civilis, which for him encompassed communities governed by the rule of law and typified by a degree of urban sophistication—in contradistinction to the political systems of barbarian societies. The idea evolved further during the Scottish and Continental Enlightenments of the late 18^th Century, and again through political theorists like Thomas Paine and Georg Hegel, who argued that civil society was a domain parallel to but separate from the state.

Contemporary definitions are rife and rather fuzzy, but many of them focus on the political role of NGOs as a third sector, complementing—or fighting against—government and the market. Siegel notes that “civil society is almost always invoked as a quality of democracy upon whose survival the existence of a healthy democracy depends.” He believes this is a mistake because depending on civil society to right the world’s wrongs reflects a failure of the marketplace and the state. Better to accept what Aristotle and Hannah Arendt believed: “that the crucial space in collective life was one that bound the citizen, through discourse and debate, to the praxis of politics, the only collective form that could preserve and protect the individual.”

Although this is an elegant description of civil society, it focuses too narrowly on its political dimensions. Siegel frets that we put too much faith in civil society, even though it “rarely has an influence on political decisions, whether you are bowling alone or with 20 other people.” That may be true if one thinks of civil society simply in terms of well-meaning NGOs, but broaden the concept and you get the French Revolution and the U.S. civil rights movement. It’s more accurate to say that political decisions are constantly influenced by social actors outside of government.

Tom Carothers, in a piece he wrote for Foreign Policy in 1999, spent some time puncturing common misconceptions about civil society. He posited that NGOs are not at the heart of the concept; that civil society isn’t necessarily warm and fuzzy, and that it can’t ensure democratic governance. For him, civil society is “a broader concept, encompassing all the organizations and associations that exist outside of the state (including political parties) and the market.” That includes not just advocacy groups, but also chambers of commerce, labor unions and religious organizations. And just to make the point that civil society isn’t inherently “good,” he also lists the Russian mafia and militia groups from Montana.

The relationship between politicians and civic actors isn’t binary; it’s manifold, complex and reactive. If that weren’t true, societies would remain rigid and inert. That’s why countries where dictators neutralize political competitors for long periods often stagnate—until the cork flies out of the bottle. Because while one can dampen the Brownian motion that characterizes civic life for a while, the pressure that builds up in closed societies almost always bursts into the open.

Siegel also ponders whether intellectuals need civil society more than tradespeople or service workers. “Many non-intellectual people have relatively uncomplicated family lives, connections to a place of worship, gratification in watching sports with their friends, and countless other civic activities that, if the intellectual class had not so completely unmasked and delegitimized them, might make civil society less the response to an emergency and more a simple joy of life.” That seems to debase both intellectuals, who may have happy families, go to synagogue, and enjoy watching soccer, and “non-intellectual people,” whose lives are as complex and varied as anyone else’s.

Human beings are inherently social. They get together in pairs to play tennis or in the thousands to see a rock concert. They write for publication so other people can read and respond to their thoughts. As social creatures we need to interact with each other, whether in competition or cooperation, for love or money. It’s this often-turbulent interaction that’s really at the heart of civil society, or, you might say, human nature.

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