Civil Society Reader Civil Society Reader

392 Pages·2009·2.011 MB·English

by  Foley, Michael W.;Hodgkinson, Virginia

Political Science / History / Economics
Hodgkinson
and Foley
The “civil society” anthology for experts and students
t h e
Virginia Hodgkinson and Michael Foley have assembled a definitive collection of T
twenty-two readings from the writings of thinkers who have shaped the civil soci-
ety tradition in Western political thought through the ages. Their clear, intelligent h
introduction establishes a framework for understanding the complex and perennial
debate over conditions of citizenship and the character of the good society. The
e
text moves from the origins of the debate—a consideration of Aristotle’s vision of
political order, the polis—through the “civic republicanism” of Machiavelli and c i v i l
C
his English and American followers. Various chapters discuss Hobbes’s and Mon-
tesquieu’s conceptions of natural law and the social contract; Immanuel Kant and
i
Adam Ferguson and the emergence of the modern notion of civil society in the late
eighteenth century; and the thoughts and theories of Hegel, Marx, and Gramsci. v
Contemporary discussion of civil society in the United States started with
i
Berger, Newhaus, and others who addressed the role of intermediary institutions
and the political process. In the s, especially as the Cold War ended, writing l s o c i e t y
on civil society exploded. This anthology tracks the key works that have influ-

enced public dialogue during this era. Chapters by Walzer, Barber, Putnam, S
Almond and Verba, and Shils describe the role of association in civil society and in
o
democratic governance. As the concept of “civil society” grows ever more promi-
nent in academic and public considerations of politics and political organization,
citizen participation, political alienation, voluntary organizations, privatization, c
government deregulation, and “faith-based” charities, The Civil Society Reader is
r e a de r
the essential historical and theoretical text. i
e
Virginia A. Hodgkinson, Research Professor at Georgetown Public Policy Insti-
t
tute, is a board member and consultant to many nongovernmental and nonprofit
organizations worldwide. She is coauthor of Giving and Volunteering in the
y
United States () and the Nonprofit Almanac (–) and a coeditor of
Measuring the Impact of the Nonprofit Sector ()and Care and Community in
the Private Sector(). R
Michael W. Foleyis Director of Latin American and Latino Studies and Member e
of the Life Cycle Institute at Catholic University of America. He has published
a
widely on democracy, development, and grassroots politics in scholarly journals,
and is coeditor of Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate d
in Comparative Perspective (UPNE, ). Virginia A. Hodgkinson
e
Civil Society r and Michael W. Foley, editors
Tufts University
Published by University Press of New England

Hanover and London

www.upne.com
384 pp / 400 ppi = 1”
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pagei
The Civil Society Reader
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pageii
Civil Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Series Editors:
virginia hodgkinson
Public Policy Institute, Georgetown University
kent e. portney
Department of Political Science, Tufts University
john c. schneider
Department of History, Tufts University
brian o’connell
Civil Society: The Underpinnings ofAmerican Democracy
philip h. round
By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and
New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660
bob edwards, michael w. foley, and mario diani, eds.
Beyond Toqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate
in Comparative Perspective
ken thomson
From Neighborhood to Nation: The Democratic Foundations ofCivil Society
henry milner
Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work
virginia a. hodgkinson and michael w. foley, eds.
The Civil Society Reader
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pageiii
The Civil Society Reader
Edited by
Virginia A. Hodgkinson
and Michael W. Foley
Tufts University
Published by University Press of New England
Hanover and London
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pageiv
Tufts University
Published by University Press of New England,
37 Lafayette St., Lebanon, NH 03766
© 2003 by Trustees of Tufts University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The civil society reader / edited by Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Michael
W. Foley.
p. cm. — (Civil society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn1–58465–278–0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Civil society—History. 2. Political science—History.
I. Hodgkinson, Virginia Ann. II. Foley, Michael W. III. Series.
jc337 .c58 2002
300—dc21 2002014986
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the following:
Chapter one, The Politics,is excerpted from Barnes, Jonathan; THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ARIS-
TOTLE.Copyright © 1984 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Chapters two and three, “Ideas for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “Perpetual
Peace,” are from Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Copyright ©
Cambridge University Press 1970, 1991. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Chapter four, An Essay on the History of the Civil Society, is excerpted from Adam Ferguson, An
Essay on the History ofCivil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Satzberger. Copyright © 1995. Reprinted with the
permission of Cambridge University Press.
Chapter seven,Philosophy ofRight, is excerpted from G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy ofRight,translated
with notes by T. M. Knox (1942). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Chapter eight, “On the Jewish Question,” from THE MARX-ENGELS READER, SECOND EDI-
TIONby Robert C. Tucker. Copyright © 1978, 1972 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by per-
mission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Chapter nine, Democracy in America,is from DEMOCRACY IN AMERICAby Alexis DeTocque-
ville, translated by Henry Reeve, copyright 1945 and renewed 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Chapter ten, The Public and Its Problems,is excerpted from The Collected Works of John Dewey,
Later Works: Volume 2 “The Public and Its Problems” © 1984 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illi-
nois University, reprinted by permission.
(continues on page 363)
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pagev
Contents
Introduction, Michael W. Foley and Virginia A. Hodgkinson ix
1. Aristotle
from The Politics 1
2. Immanuel Kant
from “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” 19
3. Immanuel Kant
from “Perpetual Peace” 28
4. Adam Ferguson
from An Essay on the History of Civil Society 40
5. Thomas Paine
from Rights of Man 63
6. James Madison
The Federalist, No. 10 70
7. G.F.W.Hegel
from Philosophy of Right 76
8. Karl Marx
from “On the Jewish Question” 96
9. Alexis de Tocqueville
from Democracy in America 113
10. John Dewey
from The Public and Its Problems 133
11. David B.Truman
from The Governmental Process 154
12. Gabriel A.Almond and Sidney Verba
from The Civic Culture 173
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pagevi
vi • Contents
13. Antonio Gramsci
from Selections from the Prison Notebooks 190
14. Adam Michnik
“A New Evolutionism 1976” 203
15. Peter L.Berger and Richard John Neuhaus
from To Empower People 213
16. Benjamin R.Barber
from Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age 234
17. Sara M.Evans and Harry C.Boyte
from Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America 255
18. Jean L.Cohen and Andrew Arato
from Civil Society and Political Theory 270
19. Edward Shils
“The Virtue of Civil Society” 292
20. Michael Walzer
“A Better Vision: The Idea of Civil Society” 306
21. Robert D.Putnam
from Making Democracy Work 322
22. Robert N.Bellah,Richard Madsen,William M.Sullivan,
Ann Swidler,and Steven M.Tipton
from Habits of the Heart 328
Sources 349
Index 351
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pagevii
Michael W. Foley and Virginia A. Hodgkinson
Introduction
The notion of civil society is more than just the vague but often powerful slogan of
the last several years. The term has a distinguished pedigree in Western efforts to
grapple with fundamental problems in the shape and direction of modern soci-
eties. Yet thinkers over the last two hundred years have held competing visions of
what civil society is and what it means for our lives in common. This collection of
readings attempts to convey the richness of the civil society tradition and debate.
The following pages propose a framework for understanding the contending posi-
tions in the civil society debate.
In the broadest terms, the civil society debate is about the conditions of citizen-
ship and the character of the good society—about what shapes citizens and con-
tributes to civic virtue and civic engagement, about what role the ordinary occupa-
tions and preoccupations of citizens play in the public sphere and in building the
good society, about the function and place of the associations that make up mod-
ern societies in the polities that attempt to govern them. In that sense, the debate
can be traced back as far as Plato and Aristotle, with the latter arguing against his
mentor that the good society was one in which human nature reached its perfec-
tion through the practice of the arts of civic responsibility. The political order, the
polis,was the “association of associations” in Aristotle’s eyes, and only by shar-
ing in ruling and being ruled could human beings achieve genuinely human vir-
tue. Aristotle was as concerned with the nature of the best sort of political system,
and its relations to the elements of society that made it up, as with civic virtue. In-
deed, in his conception the two went hand in hand.
The authors assembled in this volume thus reflect varying sides of a debate that
stretches back through all of Western history. We start with some passages from
Aristotle’s Politics in recognition of his role even in contemporary discussions.
Nevertheless, if the larger questions reflected here are perennial, the civil society
debate poses them in the specific context of modernity, with its seemingly sharp
distinction between the modern, bureaucratic state and a complex society built on
the division of labor and increasing acknowledgment of difference among its citi-
zens. The volume’s real engagement with the idea of civil society thus starts with
two thinkers of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant and Adam Ferguson, because
the modern notion of civil society was born in the late eighteenth century, at the
dawn of the modern condition.
Twobroadstrandsofthinkingabouttheconditionsofcitizenshipemergefrom
thepeculiarproblemsofmodernity.Ontheonehand,wefindthinkerswhocon-
cern themselves with the moral compass of citizenship in the modern context:
Whatarethevirtuesanddispositionsnecessarytosustainthemodernpolity,they
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pageviii
viii • Introduction
ask, and where do they come from? While many thinkers have acknowledged
thatthepoliticalsystemshapestheperson,modernityraisesinspecialwaysthe
question how and to what ends society itself shapes the political lives of citi-
zens. Do the division of labor and the competing interests that characterize
modern life undermine care for the whole, as Adam Ferguson and countless
thinkers since have worried? Or are the very associations in which citizens ex-
presstheirdifferences“schoolsofdemocracy,”asdeTocquevilleandhismany
followers have argued? How can citizens of diverse interests and experiences
cometogetherinthecommonprojectofcitizenship?Whatincentivesandwhat
sorts of virtues are available to enable modern citizens to pursue and protect
their private interests and at the same time maintain a healthy regard for the
commongood?
A second strand concerns itself with the conditions of participation in a mod-
ern polity or, more profoundly, the arenas available for meaningful and active citi-
zenship. Has the proliferation of interests and experiences that accompany mod-
ern society eroded the public sphere (as John Dewey feared, echoing a long
tradition) and thus undermined all attempts at forging a common purpose and
even a common language of politics? Or are these competing interests the very
stuff of modern politics, providing citizens of diverse outlooks and cares vehicles
for a level of participation and contestation they could not sustain by themselves
(as David Truman insisted)? Can we rebuild a public sphere by building alterna-
tive and autonomous spaces for citizen action (as Sarah Evans and Harry Boyte
have suggested)? Or is such a project dangerous to democracy, as the critics of
multiculturalism argue, and better designed for the overthrow of oppressive orders
along lines enunciated by Antonio Gramsci and, later, Vaclav Havel?
These questions run through this collection of readings, but some thinkers take
a broader and more systematic view than others. Kant and Ferguson, Hegel and
Marx were concerned with understanding the shape of the modern polity as a
whole, even as they differed in how they characterized it and where they looked
for solutions. Similarly, in the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci, Jean Cohen
and Andrew Arato, Edward Shils and Michael Walzer attempt to characterize the
situation in which we find ourselves in global terms, working out the kinds of citi-
zen action appropriate to that situation as part of a broader vision of how we might
achieve the good society. But differing readings of the modern condition and dif-
fering conceptions of the good society emerge from each of the selections in this
volume; and the reader should be attentive to such differences and to how they
shape each writer’s argument.
The following pages offer a brief history of the idea of civil society in its vari-
ous incarnations, with special emphasis on the contributions of the thinkers repre-
sented. A great many more writers than we have been able to present here have
contributed to the ongoing debates around the themes just set forth, particularly in
the last twenty years. We hope these excerpts will interest readers to read and in-
quire further.
Hodgkinson: The Civil Society Reader pageix
Introduction • ix
Origins
Although some authors have attempted to identify discussions of civil society in
all the major writers of the Western philosophical tradition, we confine ourselves
here to its distinctly modern usages, in part because contemporary uses of the
term virtually all stem from the fundamental rethinking of modern society that
emerged in the eighteenth century, and particularly from the extended essay by
Adam Ferguson, On the History of Civil Society.1
In the vague usage of Ferguson’s day, the term “civil society,” derived from
the Latin societatis civilis,referred to an ordered and peaceful society, one gov-
erned by law.2Ferguson’s problematic lay precisely in the contrast between mod-
ern versions of such a society, characterized by a growing division of labor and
“refined manners,” with the decidedly more unitary and warlike, but to his mind
more vigorous, societies that were the basis for the classical republican ideal.
What would be the effect on republican virtue and citizenship, Ferguson asked,
of the diversity of interests and peaceful inclinations of modern societies? Would
such societies fall prey to more warlike ones, or, equally troubling, to the emerg-
ing national state, with its bureaucratic apparatus and standing army? What
sources of unity and resistance might citizens have at their disposal, given the in-
herent divisions of civil society and the “softening” effects of a way of life that
gave ordinary citizens little practice in the arts of war? Ferguson gave no final an-
swer to these questions, but by sketching the problem of the increasing division
of labor in modern industrializing societies and its impact on citizenship and the
social order, he raised critical questions which subsequent scholars were anxious
to confront.3
The ancient roots of contemporary discussions, we noted already, can be found
in Aristotle’s interpretation of the ancient Greek polisas the “association of asso-
ciations,” founded on bonds of friendship and religious loyalty to the homeland
and oriented, by nature if not always in practice, toward the cultivation of virtue.
1. One example of the alternative approach is John Ehrenberg’s Civil Society: The Critical History
ofan Idea(New York: New York University Press, 1999).
2. The selection from Kant’s writings included here is an ample illustration of this usage, but
Locke uses the term in this way as well, conflating “civil society,” “political society,” and “the Com-
monwealth” in ways that later discussions find utterly confusing. See, for example, Locke’s Second
Treatise of Government,Book II, §87, in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government,rev. ed. (New
York: New American Library, 1965) p.367.
3. Adam Seligson claims to have found Ferguson’s answer in a Scottish theory of “moral senti-
ments” that sees the new source of unity in modern society in the sense of honor and shame that ac-
companies human beings’ concern for their “good reputation.” There is scant trace of such a stance in
Ferguson’s text, however; and Seligson’s interpretation seems to be based on a wholesale transfer of
Adam Smith’s argument from the Theory ofMoral Sentimentsto the work of his predecessor. Smith’s
theory does not, moreover, address the specific problems that Ferguson poses. Consequently, it seems
illegitimate to see it as part of a “Scottish” theory of civil society, as Seligson and others, following
him, including Ehrenberg, have done. See Adam Seligson, The Idea ofCivil Society(New York: The
Free Press, 1992).