[PEN-L:4349] Re: Re: Re: civil society

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

U.S. jurisprudence has a binary opposition category civil/criminal law. Then there are civil rights, civil liberties, civil defense ,the Civil War and "civilization".

 19th Century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan distinguished between civitas and societas (Latin terms) The former form of culture has a state and relates to its land as territory. Everybody within a certain area are part of the state. Societas is pre-state society based on kinship , not territory. Groups are defined by kinship not area of residence.


"Civilization" is based on the Latin root for city , I believe.

Charles Brown


>>> "Michael Hoover" <hoov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 03/15/99 05:42PM >>>
from John Ehrenberg's "Civil Society & Marxist Politics," *Socialism
& Democracy*, Vol. 12, Nos. 1-2, 1998...article is based on his
recently published _Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea_...
any listers read it?  Michael Hoover

'The contemporary obsession with "civil society" began with the attempt
of dissident East European intellectuals to develop a credible theoretical
grounding in the early 1980s.  As they began to describe the crisis of
Soviet-style communism as "the revolt of civil society against the state,"
it became clear that they understood "civil society" as the anti-communist
opposition organized in forums, associations and similar bodies.  Two sets
of claims came to characterize the period.  They drew on classical
political economy, Tocqueville, and liberal republicanism, and were
indebted to the Cold War's literature on mass society and totalitarianism.

At an immediate level, the following charges were typical: "Actual
existing socialism" has degenerated into a bureaucratically-driven
commitment to central economic planning for its own sake, systematic
stifling of initiative, hypocritical claims of service to the working
class, and a grasping state apparatus which crushes all authentic
movement emerging spontaneously from "society."  Socialism in power
is little more than a state-driven strategy of planned industrialization.

At a more basic level, Marxism itself came under attack, on the grounds
that its explicit intention to "transform" civil society expresses an
inherent disposition toward statist totalitarianism.  Correspondingly,
Marxism's claim that the state can represent the general good gives
rise to its volunteerism, lack of limits, tendency to politicize
everything, indifference to the content of socialist democracy,
contempt for privacy, and suspicious disposition to crush, direct or
absorb democratic initiatives which originate in civil society.

This anti-statist skepticism about politics spread to Western
Europe and then to the United States, where it has now achieved
near-canonical status.  Marxism, we are assured, is an outmoded
ideology, socialism a dangerous fantasy, and the centrality of the
working class a remnant of a vanished "Fordist" past.  Authentic
democratic activity can be rooted only in informal networks,
voluntary associations, and local communities which constitute
civil society.

But Marx cannot be dismissed quite so easily, for his conception of
civil society is deeply rooted in liberal political economy and the
recent history of capitalir societies has made it more resilient
than expected.  His understanding of civil society has a distinguished
lineage which drew on the insights of both classical political
economy and Hegel's sweeping theory of the state.  Adam Smith first
articulated the classic bourgeois understanding that civil society
is a market-organized sphere of necessity which is driven by the
self-interested motion of individual proprietors, but this position
drew heavily on earlier views that civil society is constituted by
property, labor, exchange, and consumption.  Hegel built his
theory of the state and civil society on this understanding and
on his analysis of the French Revolution, and Marx's development of
Hegel continues to inform the thinking of much of the left.'