The renaissance of civil society

The term ‘civil society’ has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance. Politicians and academics in many countries have embraced it as a prescriptive model for the future organisation of society. Edwards (Reference Edwards2004) suggests that civil society may be ‘the big idea’ of the twenty-first century. Exponents of civil society present it as a mediating space between the private and public spheres in a pluralist democracy. But there are several versions of civil society. Mary Kaldor (Reference Kaldor2003: 10) suggests five: (i) societas civilis – based on the rule of law and civility; (ii) burgerliche gessellschaft – encompassing all organised social life between the state and the family; (iii) activist – represented by social movements and civic activists; (iv) neoliberal – in which she includes third-sector organisations such as charities and voluntary organisations; and (v) postmodern – which she associates with nationalist and fundamentalist movements. These five versions cover the scope of civil society as we understand it today. Edwards (Reference Edwards2004: 2–3) also recognises this variety of models but suggests a basic Left/Right division informing the debate about the meaning of civil society.

In social policy literature and the wider discourse of welfare, civil society is usually equated with the third sector, composed of voluntary and community associations. However, there is a compelling case for broadening this conception of civil society beyond popular ideas of charity to embrace a wider consideration of the meaning of democratic association and active citizenship in contemporary society, the role of social movements and the future of welfare in an era when fiscal and social conservatism has once again become dominant. Furthermore, we need to consider the variety of versions of civil society, as advanced by Kaldor (Reference Kaldor2003) and Edwards (Reference Edwards2004). The concept of civil society is complex and not as unidimensional as some of its liberal advocates proclaim (Etzioni, Reference Etzioni1993; Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama1995; Putnam, Reference Putnam2000). Unidimensional presentations based on a liberal view can be reductionist and in certain instances deny the importance of alternative perspectives, experiences and understandings of civil society that arguably constitute a Social Left (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1998; de Sousa Santos, Reference De Sousa Santos2007, Reference De Sousa Santos2008; Touraine, Reference Touraine2001). What is clear is that civil society is the product of modernity, which essentially means the modes of social life that emerged in Europe from the Renaissance onwards, percolating outwards to envelope most of the rest of the world.

Modernity and civil society

Modernity gave birth to a movement called ‘modernism’, which was revolutionary in its impact, both in politics and culture. It spawned a vigorous civil society. The debate about civil society in modern social and political thought started in the Old World, but quickly crossed the Atlantic to the New World of the American colonies. Essential to the widening of the debate was Tom Paine (Reference Paine1969) (1737–1809), raconteur, polemicist and commoner, who dominated progressive political thought in Britain, France and America during the age of revolutionary struggle against absolutist tyranny in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In his highly influential pamphlet, Common Sense, published in 1776, Paine introduced the term ‘civilised society’ as a natural and potentially self-regulating form of association, counterposed to ‘government’, which was in his view, at best, a necessary and artificial evil. While Paine was vague about what precisely he meant by civil society, he popularised the values and ideas that shaped this alternative view of the world, where active citizens freely associated in pursuit of liberty and equality. His publication, The Rights of Man (1791), provided a template for modern democratic civilisation. Paine's final great work, The Age of Reason (1807), in which he propounded his views on religion, alienated him from Washington and many of his supporters. But no one better epitomised the spirit of the times in thought and action because he made the vital link between civil society and the democratic right to associate. His ideas were discussed in the emerging urban coffee house society, where a new political public was being created.

The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in the 1830s, was a great deal more cautious. Liberal by political persuasion, De Tocqueville is sometimes regarded as having depoliticised the term ‘civil society’, celebrating any form of associational activity for its own sake in his study Democracy in America, first published in 1835. In fact, De Tocqueville laid considerable stress on participation in local democracy as the best method for ensuring that civic association reinforced and protected liberty ‘the magic of freedom’ against tyranny. However, the core of his conception of civil society rested on the health of intermediate institutions, usually the family, the community and churches. As De Tocqueville (Reference De Tocqueville1956: 202) put it: ‘Amongst the laws which rule human societies, there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilised, or to become so the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ration in which the equality of conditions is increased.’ For him, equality meant political equality, which involved ending hereditary aristocratic rule – a heresy in Europe (Ringen, Reference Ringen2006: 6). De Tocqueville's conception of civil society was to become the defining paradigm of the liberal democratic approach, epitomised by Putnam (Reference Putnam2000), Etzioni (Reference Etzioni1993) and Fukuyama (Reference Fukuyama1995). Its emphasis on the private as opposed to the public sphere places civil society in a depoliticised context (Harriss, Reference Harriss2002). Social capital is its modern form, meaning a sense of interconnectedness, in a globalised world shaped by market economics. This is the neo-Tocquevillian vision that underpins the neoliberal perspective on civil society. It seeks to address the growing public perception of political inequality – the problem of democratic deficits and voter apathy – with the concept of social capital built upon the architecture of social life.

European notions of civil society were built upon the right to associate for emancipatory purposes. European's view of what that right meant went far beyond Alexis de Tocqueville's bucolic picture of Americans associating in a utopian world, where communitarianism flourished (De Tocqueville, Reference De Tocqueville1956). For Europeans, the right to associate encompassed political, economic and social rights. In other words, association envisaged a robust democracy, based on conflict, in marked contrast to the American consensus. European civil society grew out of clandestine Masonic lodges that sought to promote progressive political change, notably in France and Germany (Archambault, Reference Archambault1997: 52; Anheier and Seibel, Reference Anheier and Seibel2001: 36). Freemasonry emerged as the first substantive expression of this right to associate, building on medieval roots in guilds and brotherhoods. Engels (Reference Engels1993: 222–3) dated ‘the right of free association’ from 1824 and saw it as the beginnings of a ‘society man’ who joined with others to advance his political, social and economic objectives. We can date social movements from this time, notably Chartism.

Necessity produced a flowering of civil society amongst the emergent industrial working-class in cities across the world as a forum of collective self-help that was to transform social relations. We see the first signs of a Social Left. Within the labour movement, many workers identified with socialism, as a form of people's democracy. The rise of working-class political parties, often led by intellectuals, who articulated the felt needs and democratic aspirations of their supporters, was one side of the associationalist coin. On the other hand, many working-class people viewed their best means of protection as collective self-help through friendly societies, co-operatives, mutuals and trade unions. The link with the mutualist tradition that underpinned utopian socialism was clear. Many viewed their future needs as best resolved through civil society rather than the state, with its totalitarian tendencies. However, Marxists disagreed. Engels (Reference Engels1993: 87) viewed civil society as being merely a product of the competitive capitalist ‘battle of all against all’. Marxists adopted the Jacobin model of the centralised state, calling it ‘peoples’ democracy’.

Pre-modern social policy was based on egoistic and paternalistic charity offered in the name of religious virtue. The state was the enemy of the poor, whom it sought to coerce with cruel stratagems (Davies, Reference Davies1997). Equality changed all that. During the eighteenth century, people in Europe and America came to believe that they could transform their world by transforming the state. In Europe, that meant a secular, republican and socialist future based on the pursuit of equality for all people. Equality entailed greater social justice. Politically, at a practical level, people were redefined as citizens, with the entitlement to legal, political and eventually social rights. But there was also at a deeper level a sense that the world was being transformed and a moral community constructed, where life would be better. The ideals of human progress and social equality became intertwined in the popular mind. It was an irresistible force for change that was to transform political economy, sweep away the Dickensian world of poverty and build a new citadel – the Welfare State.

The Welfare State and human rights

For many, the post-war achievement of the Welfare State became the realisation of human rights in concrete terms they could understand. The Fabians’ dream of building a moral community became a reality in post-war Europe. For much of the developed world, the Welfare State came to symbolise the universalisation of social justice as a public ethic. Even the atavistically anti-collectivist Americans were drawn to its Zeitgeist. Welfare became the defining public ethic of state policy in the post-war years. It seemed that a virtuous society was, after all, an attainable goal (Powell, Reference Powell2007: 111–15). The emergence of the Welfare State coincided with the abandonment of the role of social mobilisation and collective action during the twentieth century in favour of elite representative democracy (de Sousa Santos, Reference De Sousa Santos2007: xxxvii). Participatory democracy was replaced by the Welfare State, which sought to incorporate civil society into a fusion called social democracy (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt1996: 22).

The Welfare State finally put the ghost of the Poor Law State and the indignity of charity to rest. The philosophical case for the Welfare State was most convincingly articulated by T.H. Marshall, who argued that social policy had heretofore been perceived as a residual activity aimed at the poor. With the Welfare State, social policy set out to address the needs of the whole of society. For Marshall (Reference Marshall1950), the Welfare State was the culmination of a long socialisation process that began with the recognition of civil rights enshrined in the principles of legal equality, free speech and religious toleration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through to the campaign for political rights to form political organisations and vote during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to social rights in the twentieth century. The Welfare State represented the realisation of full citizenship for all. Viewed from this perspective, the Welfare State epitomised human rights. But nowhere did it exist in its pure form. Nor did it bring peace. It was a universalist idea that existed in many national versions, of which Europe was simply one model (Esping-Anderson, Reference Esping-Andersen1990). Moreover, women, ethnic minorities and disabled people, along with many other marginalised social groups, felt deeply frustrated by its limitations, giving rise to new social movements that were to transform civil society. While the Welfare State had eclipsed the traditional role of charity and voluntary organisations, new social movements at global, national, local and community levels gave civil society new life. New social movements counter-posed an entirely different conception of civil society that challenged its top–down construction as ‘the voluntary sector’ by a bottom–up activist discourse that created new time-spaces and rediscovered social agency.

Postmodernity, citizenship and social movements

Postmodernity (or late modernity) represents a rupture with modernity because it detaches it from modernism. Neoliberalism based upon ‘modernisation’ has become hegemonic in the postmodern world (Kline, Reference Kline2007). It is presented as ‘good’ change, led by innovation in an era of ‘supercapitalism’ (Judt, Reference Judt2007). But is it ‘good’ change? Sceptics, such as Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu2000: 26), disagree:

What Bourdieu is suggesting is that modernity has been turned against itself in a similar manner to the fascist threat during the 1930s. Kline (Reference Kline2007) calls it ‘disaster capitalism’. In this reconfiguration of ‘the political’, the state has become resituated towards the market and increasingly shaped by oligarchical influences. The challenge for democracy is to reinvent itself from the ‘bottom–up’ as a counter-hegemonic force in a globalised world.

Participative democracy in the shape of new social movements has emerged in this counter-hegemonic role, challenging modernity to reinvent itself once again in a new and heightened democratic form. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Reference De Sousa Santos2007: xliv–v) argues that a new social grammar is being invented: ‘social movements would be inserted into movements for the widening of politics, for the transformation of dominant practices, for the expansion of citizenship and for the insertion of social actors excluded from politics’. Essentially, de Sousa Santos is arguing that social emancipation is being reinvented (at least in the Southern hemisphere) in which ‘another world is possible’, where the excluded became included through participatory democracy. He views representative democracy as ‘constituting an island, of democracy in a wide ocean of social despotism’, concluding ‘from this substantive point of view, there is no true democracy, there is only democratization, a process without end’ (de Sousa Santos, Reference De Sousa Santos2007: lxii–iii). For de Sousa Santos (Reference De Sousa Santos2007: lxiii–vi) ‘demo-diversity’ has become an important democratic imperative in which participatory and representative democracy are combined in a relationship of ‘coexistence and complementarity’. He warns that ‘with the loss of intensity of representative democracy we run the risk of entering a period in which many societies are politically democratic and socially fascist’ (de Sousa Santos, Reference De Sousa Santos2007: lxvi). Current debates about curtailing the rights of migrants and the crisis in multiculturalism in the Northern hemisphere suggest he may be right.

What is the most striking about new social movements is their explicit role in politicising civil society, redefining the boundaries of institutional politics and democratic practice. Some view the rise of social movements as containing a more limited brief representing ‘a defensive reaction against the “inner colonization” of civil society by an increasingly technological state’ (Byrne, Reference Byrne1997: 52). Either way, social movements are highly political, regardless of whether they are proactive or reactive. The use of the prefix ‘new’ is intended to differentiate this phase of social movement activity from older social movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dedicated to workers rights and the cause of universal suffrage. New social movements embraced ecology, women's rights, disability equality, ethnic rights, gay rights, grey power and many other minority rights issues. Postmodern politics challenges modernist visions of social policy, inviting its reinvention into new reflexive forms of citizenship. The survival of welfare in postmodern society is about a search for new paradigms, designed to empower the socially excluded in a discursive shift that reconstructs social policy as civic engagement and the claimant as citizen. Mouffe (Reference Mouffe2000: 20) observes: ‘Our societies are confronted with a proliferation of political spaces which are radically new and different and which demand that we abandon the idea of a unique constitutive space of the constitution of the political, which is particular to both liberalism and civic republicanism.’

Postmodernity has witnessed a cultural shift in attitudes towards the poor and oppressed that has been evident since the 1970s. Social policy, under the influence of the New Right, is increasingly being used not for the benefit of those who are thought to be conditional citizens, with a view to their rehabilitation and inclusion, but against those who are increasingly regarded as non-citizens to punish and exclude them in a disciplinary ‘Penal-Welfare’ state (Garland, Reference Garland2001: 98–102). Refugees and asylum seekers are the designated ‘community aliens’ of postmodern society. Their expertise is part of the historical narrative of social exclusion. But, as we shall see below, poor people's movements, what the French call sans (without) movements, do contest for emancipation – social movements are not simply the preserve of the radical intelligentsia. This is a world in which individual citizens resist or protest about what they dislike through new collectivities called social movements.

The concept of active citizenship that underpins civil society opens up a new site for democratic practice. The pursuit of an ethically based citizenship provides new space for social activism. In this context, the traditional conflict between capitalism and socialism is moved on to new ground. In essence, the struggle for recognition is against social exclusion, which can be defined as the absence of social, cultural and political rights. Social movements have become the embodiment of this new politics in which civil society is recuperating democracy by offering alternatives to the elite representative model.

Pierre Bourdieu, in a witty polemic against globalisation, Acts of Resistance (1998), contextualises these political changes. According to Bourdieu's analysis, the crisis of politics and the rise of street protests in France and other countries is due to the hollowing out of the state, which has undermined the public sphere. He argues that citizens who are rejected by the state in turn reject the state: ‘In the same way, one has the sense now that citizens, feeling themselves ejected from the state (which, in the end, asks no more than enthusiasm), reject the state, treating it as an alien power to be used so far as they can to serve their own interests’ (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1998: 4–5).

Poor people's movements: a Social Left?

The Social Left embraces both the politics of difference (recognition/respect) and equality (social justice/redistribution) through the social mobilisation of the poor. It has been classically analysed by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in their Reference Piven and Cloward1979 US study, Poor People's Movements. We have already noted that Engels had identified the origins of poor people's movements in the first half of the nineteenth century (Engels, Reference Engels1993: 220–47). In France, the sans (without) movements were to become a vibrant part of post-war political life during the twentieth century. Touraine (Reference Touraine2001: 51) comments that ‘the positive goal of today's social movements, which oppose both the reign of markets and the domination of communitarian-inspired movements, is the defence of the cultural and social rights of individuals and minorities’. Take, for example, the beur movement, founded by young Franco-Algerians who feel culturally disrespected by the society they were born into as French citizens. Its campaigns have focussed on the need for French society to address the cultural identity and need for respect of its immigrant population. Kedward (Reference Kedward2005: 504) notes that ‘the Beur movement developed an inner pluralism through its identity with place and freedom of association’, a contested issue in France. Les exclus raised fears about culture. The debate about girls from Islamic backgrounds wearing the hijab (headscarf) in school is symbolic of deeper concerns about cultural recognition. The san papiers (immigrants without residence rights and associative status) are also campaigning for homes, jobs and citizenship rights. In France, the homeless have fought hard for the droit au logement (right to housing) since the 1950s, paving the way for other sans movements. France was somewhat taken by surprise by the emergence of an unemployed (chômeurs) movement. Pierre Bourdieu called it a ‘social miracle’. Speaking of the occupation of the École Normale Superieure in Paris by the chômeurs on 17 January 1998, Bourdieu declared that ‘the first conquest of the movement is the movement itself, its very existence. It pulls the unemployed, and with them all insecure workers, whose numbers increase daily, out of invisibility, isolation, silence, in short, out of non-existence’ (cited in Kedward, Reference Kedward2005: 569). Community development has become the grassroots expression of the Social Left, with the state repositioned towards the market, seeking its incorporation through social partnership (Powell and Geoghegan, Reference Powell and Geoghegan2004).

Poor people's movements emerged in other parts of the world. Kirby (Reference Kirby2003: 163) comments: ‘Over the final decades of the twentieth century, Latin America saw the emergence of a vibrant civil society as new collective actors such as shanty town organisations, human rights movements, Christian-based communities and various forms of self-help groups made their presence felt in the social and political life of their countries.’ These movements can be dated from the 1960s partly as a survival strategy for the poor against state tyranny but latterly as a critique of neoliberalism, which has been largely rejected by electorates in Latin America since the turn of the new century. They have ‘restored social actors in modern society to fully conscious life’ (Kirby, Reference Kirby2003: 164). What is clear is that Latin America has recently become a theatre in which a civil society from ‘the bottom up’ has flourished. Porto Allegre has become its symbol, where the World Social Forum convenes annually to develop a counter-hegemonic vision of globalisation, which rejects both neoliberalism and the epistemological dominance of the Northern hemisphere (De Sousa Santos, Reference De Sousa Santos2008)

Arguably, a Social Left had emerged. Soon the contradictions of the Welfare State began to emerge. The quest for equality was incomplete. The lesson a rising humanistically minded intelligentsia learned was to become social actors on their own behalf. New social movements became the vehicles that gave expression to this new politics. Issues ranging from the safety of the planet to identity politics reshaped the debate about equality and justice. Human rights had become an overarching discourse, used by new social movements to benchmark their campaigns for greater democracy and social justice. Poor people's movements gave a cross-class character to these new social movements. The dominant motif was for change based on social justice for all. A radical civil society had taken shape during the post-war years. Much of its agenda was culturally orientated. But economic equality was never far form the centre of the social justice agenda. Perhaps, inevitably, the emergence of this new radicalised civil society produced a reaction in the form of cultural conservatism that has sought to resume what Engels (Reference Engels1993: 39) called ‘the social war’.