The Idea of Civil Society

Seligman examines the notion of the civil society. He argues that the combination of individal rights and interests with a social and political system based on a shared morality found its clearest concrete expression in 18th-century America. Since then, successive societies and social experiments have sought in vain to approximate to the society in which individual interests and the public good are identical. The problems of modern mass democracies which require intense centralization to be functional, and the growth of socialism and the notion of unearned entitlements have served to undermine the foundations of the civil society.