2
Civil Society Theory
The Tradition

In his wide-ranging inquiry into the global history of democracy from antiquity to the modern world, political scientist David Stasavage makes the case for viewing it not simply through the conventional lens that begins with the Greeks. Instead, he goes so far as to argue that in the ancient world, "Early democracy was so common in all regions of the globe that we should see it as a naturally occurring condition in all societies" (Stasavage 2020: 5), it being just about as readily encountered as its alternative, autocracy. In differentiating democracies from autocracies, he argues that the former were "more likely in small-scale settings, in the absence of strong state bureaucracies and finally in the absence of many technological developments that we commonly associate with civilization" (Stasavage 2020: 61).

If, in Stasavage's rendering, early democracies were widespread, he is clear that modern democracies were not. They were different from the past insofar as they were located in a limited part of the globe - taking root first in England and then in the United States. One might ponder whether he should also have included France, but the larger point is that modern democracy is in many ways different from early democracy. The modern variant is a narrative with deep intellectual roots that necessarily takes us back to the Greek and Roman past, for it is here that the subsequent modern articulations of civil society and democracy first germinated.

Most scholarship begins with Aristotle and his idea of koinonia politike, which is often translated as a political community. In his Politics, Aristotle sought to specify the conditions in which people differing along a range of lines - citizenship status, economic location, social background, skill levels, and so forth - could live harmoniously in a society that its members perceived to be just. John Ehrenberg (2017: 18-26) reads Aristotle's view of citizenship as one that is at once a legal and a moral category. Given that only a minority of Athens's residents were citizens, his understanding of democracy took as a given its exclusionary nature: not only did he accept the idea of a large segment of the population being by nature slaves, but he also understood the role of women to be in the household and not in the public sphere. In this, of course, his thinking would be reflected in Western thought for centuries. Aristotle was concerned with the threat to a harmonious political order posed by economic inequality, and to that end he called for regulatory restrictions on commercial activity (Islamoglu 2015: 1891). In his formulation, there is no differentiation made between state and society.

As Simon Susen (2021: 380) summarizes the relationship, "[C]ivil society can be understood as political society, or indeed as a political community, in which the 'social' and the 'political' are so deeply intertwined that they constitute two ontological cornerstones of human reality" (original emphases). In the move from the Greek polis to the Roman republic, the thought of the Stoic philosopher Cicero looms large, his idea of societas civilis was his translation of Aristotle's koinonia politike, and in turn became the basis for the term "civil society" today (Kumar 1993: 376). Cicero's focus was on an active citizenry involved in the creation of a regulated civil society predicated on a system of laws and a spirit of civility that would establish a social order based on reason and comity (Ehrenberg 2017: 33). Like Aristotle, Cicero did not differentiate the state and society. Indeed, treating civil society as synonymous with political community would persist until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As such, this duo constituted exemplars of the first chapter of civil society theorizing - a chapter that extended from antiquity to the late medieval period (Van Dijck, De Munck, and Terpstra 2017). As we shall see, the second chapter begins with a new understanding predicated on differentiating state and society. As with Stasavage's distinction between early and modern definitions of democracy, so is it with early and modern understandings of civil society.

On the Road to Modernity: Conceptually Freeing Society from the State

The origins of the modern idea of civil society are embedded in and intertwined with the origins of novel conceptualizations of society itself - both the products of new modes of thinking that became known as "social theory." According to Johan Heilbron (2021; see also Heilbron 1995), John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel played singularly important roles in rethinking the received meaning of the word "society" and advancing a broader understanding of what is meant by the social, doing so by moving away from discourses rooted in religious, political, or moral language to a secular conceptualization of the term. In the process, "'civil society' gradually came to refer to a sphere distinct from and potentially opposed to the state" (Heilbron 2021: 2). This secular shift in language resulted in the possibility of "viewing political and moral issues in an entirely different manner. The arrangements of human groups were no longer viewed in terms of subjection, but more generally as constituting relations of interdependence" (Heilbron 2021: 4, original emphasis; see also Alexander 2006a: 23; Hall 1995; Keane 1998).

The secular shift did not constitute a clean break with earlier discourses, but the novelty of the framing was most evident in the varied articulations of what might be seen as an implicit expression of early differentiation theory. Locke's social contract theory, seeking as it did to respond to the authoritarian implications of the earlier Hobbesian version of contract theory, represents ground zero for the pre-sociological development of civil society theory. In offering a philosophical alternative to the absolutist state Hobbes defends, Locke made a case for a realm separate from but intertwined with the state, a realm predicated on rights - pertaining to both individuals and property. In differentiating state and civil society, Locke (1988 [1689]) provided the foundation for thinking about the conditions and possibilities of a political order that is both liberal and democratic. In his framing, civil society and society were essentially synonymous terms, the adjective serving to highlight what Simon Susen (2021: 383) refers to as its "civilizing function, facilitating the construction of social networks built on trust, reciprocity, and solidarity," which he links to its "democratizing function" (original emphases), predicated on the possibility of a political system characterized by "participation, engagement, and debate."

The contributions of both Montesquieu and Ferguson can be read as further elaborations of the line of thinking originating with Locke. In the case of the former, the state/civil society divide was grounded in institutional analysis, evident in his The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu 1989 [1748]). There he distinguished between political law and civil law, while also making the case that civil society needed to be protected from state encroachments, which he thought could be accomplished by the separation of state powers. Thus, in calling for the relative autonomy of executive, legislative, and, less clearly, of judicial powers, he sought to construct a bulwark against the absolutist state. In other words, civil society was only possible if the state's institutional structure was designed to constrain the power of various state actors while still permitting the performance of their legitimate duties.

Ferguson, as a member of that constellation of thinkers collectively identified with the Scottish Enlightenment, is often associated with the conviction that reason alone guides human interrelationships. However, as Thomas Ahnert (2015) argues, this view overlooks the fact that these thinkers were in fact more skeptical of reason alone succeeding in making for a tranquil and prosperous society (see also DeWiel 1997: 21). Adam Smith's idea of the centrality of "moral sentiments" was shared with others, certainly with Ferguson, whose own take on republicanism stressed the importance of virtue in public life (Ferguson 1996 [1767]; see also Reinert 2008; C. Smith 2018). Curiously, for a book titled An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson never defined what he meant by civil society. Moreover, he used the term infrequently in the text. Boris DeWiel (1997: 23) writes that "[w]hen he did come close to a definition, it revolved around the idea of the character and virtues of a free people," rather than describing an arena of social life.

We need not concern ourselves here with the debates about Ferguson's position on commercial society - whether his association of commercial society with corruption could be seen as a critique of early capitalism, or whether his objective was to refine what Gary McDowell (1983: 536) calls "the idea of commercial republicanism." What is important is his pointing to the cultural requisites of civil society, rooted in a conception of virtue that he derives from classical figures, none more important than Machiavelli. Ferguson...