Civil society

« society but, unlike Hegel, he sought a revolutionary reunification of the civil and the political ( Marx 1843 ). Finally, Tocqueville worked with a three-part model that differentiated, albeit unsystematically, between a civil society of economic and cultural associations and publics, a political society of local, provincial and national assemblies, and the administrative apparatus of the state ( Tocqueville 1835-40 ). The professionalization of philosophy and the emergence of differentiated social sciences in the twentieth century seemed to leave the concept of civil society without an intellectual home.

Nevertheless it continued to play a role outside, and even within, the disciplines.

In Marxian social philosophy, Gramsci (§3) and his followers made the concept of civil society central to their strategy of maintaining a Hegelianized Western Marxism distinct from Soviet Marxism (see Marxism, Western §2 ).

Albeit without using the term, the Durkheimian-Parsonian tradition in sociology continued to develop the idea of intermediary associations and a community of free and equal citizens in order to promote normative integration and combat the atomizing tendencies of the modern state and the capitalist economy.

In political theory, the idea of pluralistic limits on the centralizing impulse of the modern state continued to play a role, from Gierke to the British philosophical and the US empirical pluralists.

Yet, with the emergence of the structuralist school in Marxism, and the decline of functionalism in sociology and of pluralism in political science, these efforts to translate the originally philosophical concept of civil society into the language of social science and theory apparently came to an end. 2 Revival of the discourse of civil society Nevertheless, the concept of civil society began to reappear about fifteen years ago in the milieu of neo-Marxist critics of socialist authoritarianism.

The pioneering theorists of this revival were Kolakowski, Mlynar, Vajda and Michnik in the East, Habermas , Lefort, Touraine and Bobbio in the West, Weffort, Cardoso and O'Donnell in the South.

All knew the works of Hegel, the young Marx or Gramsci and thus had access to the concept of civil society and the idea of a state/society dichotomy.

At an earlier stage, neo-Marxists had sought to deepen Marxian social philosophy by drawing upon non-Marxist theorists such as Weber, Simmel, Croce and Freud.

They used concepts like alienation, fetishism, hegemony, reification and rationalization to explain and target the endurance of capitalism in the West, as well as new forms of domination and injustice in the East.

The recent revival of the concept of civil society seemed to be an analogous move, since its presence in the young Marx justified a critical appropriation of the ideas of another series of non-Marxist thinkers, from Tocqueville to Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt (§1) .This time, however, instead of invoking Marx to criticize orthodox Marxism, the theorists of civil society located the conceptual origins of communist totalitarianism in the young Marx's demand that the differentiation of state and civil society be overcome (see Totalitarianism ).

With this self-critique, neo-Marxists became ‘post -Marxist' . The historical success of the revival of the concept of civil society was due to its anticipation of and convergence. »