March 2016

Understanding Civil Society Presentation by John Slifko, PhD

Civil society is one of the most enduring and confusing concepts in social science.

Classical Greece

✤ From the time of classical Greece, thinkers have returned to civil society as one way of generating new energy and ideas around old and familiar questions as the world has changed around them.

What is civil society?

✤ According to the United Nations website, “civil society is the ‘third sector’ of society, along with government and business. It comprises civil society organizations and nongovernmental organizations.”

Source: http://www.un.org/en/sections/resources/civil-society/index.html

✤ The UN recognizes the importance of partnering with civil society because it advances the Organization’s ideals, and helps support its work.

Source: http://www.un.org/en/sections/resources/civil-society/index.html

What does it include?

✤ “Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organizations.”

— (The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society, Ed. Michael Edwards, Oxford University Press, 2011)

However,

✤ As with most popular academic concepts, there is no universally accepted definition of either civil society or the related notions of a civic culture and social capital.

✤ The very idea of civil society touches on and embraces major themes of Western political tradition.

Emergence of Idea

✤ Much like today, the emergence of the idea of civil society in the later 17th and 18th centuries was the result of a crisis in social order and a breakdown of existing paradigms of the idea of order.

— The Idea of Civil Society, Adam B. Seligman, 1992, Princeton University Press

Importance of Communications

✤ From newspapers in the 1700s, magazines added in the 18th century, radio and television in the 20th century, and the Internet in the 21st century, communications has always been central in civil society.

17th Century: The General Crisis

✤ the commercialization of land, labor and capital, coupled with a wider crisis in the relations between an emerging civil society and the State,

… all brought into question the existing models of social order and authority.

18th Century: Realm of Social Mutuality

✤ By the 18th century, people began increasingly to turn inward, to the workings of society itself, to explain the existence of the social order.

19th Century

✤ In the nineteenth century, civil society expanded rapidly through a variety of print publications, such as: newspapers, books, pamphlets, declarations and handwritten letters.

Age of Enlightenment Image source: wikipedia.org

For example

✤ In the early 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the United States for two years.

✤ During this time, Tocqueville was surprised by the growing use of newspapers in expanding democracies.

New American Democracy

✤ One phenomenon that struck de Tocqueville was the propensity of Americans of all backgrounds and classes to form voluntary associations of a thousand kinds “religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.”

✤ For de Tocqueville, this creation of a civil society from the bottom up through communication was a mark of the new American democracy as much as any political theory.

Freemasons

✤ As Enlightenment spread from its first strongholds in France and Britain to most regions of Europe, a new intelligentsia emerged.

✤ Its members assembled in clubs and associations, which thus became pillars of the nascent civil society.

Civil Society Today

✤ Civil society remains a confusing concept because so many different definitions and understandings exist.

✤ The claims that are sometimes made for explanatory power never quite match up to the complexities and contingencies of real cultures and societies, especially when interpretations fashioned at one time or in one part of the world are transported to another.

Importance of Study in Civil Society

✤ Recently, the idea of civil society is being revived to provide an answer to the question of how individuals can pursue their own interests while preserving the greater good of society and, similarly how society can advance the interests of the individuals who comprise it.

Image source: www.africancentreforcities.net

About the Author: John Slifko, PhDJohn has dedicated his work to issues around the world for democratic civil society with major contributions to global efforts in improving the education of young women. He supports the study of the historic links between advancing women’s rights, education and democracy in the United States. For more information of topics in the civil

sphere, visit John Slifko’s website : civilsphere.net