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Political Discourse – Sociology Notes – For W.B.C.S. Examination.
The second and third of these strands have been most influential in shaping the thinking of Western theorists since the late 20th century.Continue Reading Political Discourse – Sociology Notes – For W.B.C.S. Examination.
After a period of relative philosophical disinterest in the term in the middle decades of the 20th century, the terminology of civil society became ubiquitous in political thinking during the 1980s. Many of the ideas of this phase of its intellectual history can be connected to the three traditions previously identified.
The English strand has been powerfully reappropriated in the contemporary period by various neoliberal theorists and ideologues. For them, civil society stands as a synonym for the ideal of the free market accompanied by a constitutionally limited, but powerful, state. This last idea figured powerfully in the idealization of civil society that prevailed in eastern European intellectual circles following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In these settings, civil society signified either the survival (in countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland) of a web of autonomous associations that were independent of the state and that bound citizens together in matters of common concern or a necessary means of achieving the economic prosperity and civil freedoms of Western democracy.
The German strand’s concern with the sources and importance of the ethical ends learned through participation in the corporations of civil society reemerged in the work of a body of American political scientists and theorists who came to view civil society organizations as sources of the stocks of social capital and mutual reciprocity that a successful democracy is supposed to require.
And, third, the Scottish conception was powerfully revived by left-inclined thinkers who hoped to provide a more pluralist, and less statist, reformulation of a socialist ideology that was experiencing a profound political recession among Western publics.
As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor observed, these and other influential ways of thinking about civil society rested upon the twin assumptions that, in empirical terms, independent civil societies did come into existence at various points from the 18th through the 20th century and that their existence depends, in part, upon the separation of the concepts of state and society in the Western political imagination. Neither of these assumptions is uncontentious. While there clearly does exist a plethora of groups, communities, and associations in relative separation from the state, the boundary between state and civil society in many countries is rarely as clear or firm as the first assumption suggests. In various democracies, the state and other public authorities succeeded in incorporating institutions and organizations from civil society—for instance, trade unions, environmental groups, and business associations—into key networks of influence and decision making. Equally, individual groups and even oppositional social movements often expend considerable resources and energy attempting to interact with government officials, elected politicians, and state bureaucracies. The notion that the state–civil society distinction exists in all Western societies therefore requires considerable clarification and qualification in empirical terms.
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