Abstract
The last two decades has seen a revival of
the concept 'civil society' for both normative and analytical purposes,
notably in accounting for the collapse of communism in central Europe,
and for the rise of 'neo-nationalism' in the west. This paper reviews
the analytical usefulness of the concept, especially vis-à-vis
its comparative 'others' - state, market, and nation. By juxtaposing
civil society with state, market and nation, it argues that it is sufficiently
analytically distinct to operate in its own realm, and cannot be reduced
to any of these three spheres of social action. It retains considerable
analytical value in making sense of global and well as local social
change, and it helps to make sense of the 'social' vis-à-vis
the political (state), economic (market) and cultural (nation), thereby
confirming sociology as a discrete and unique social science. In
short, for both pragmatic and for analytical purposes, sociology as
a discipline requires to make more of 'civil society' than it has done
in the past fifty years. The paper is also critical of views
that 'globalisation' has led to the diminution of societal differences
- thus squeezing out 'civil society', still less to the 'narcissism
of small differences'. It argues that civil society helps to
provide a political and cultural frame through which global social
change is refracted.
RECOVERING CIVIL SOCIETY:
DOES SOCIOLOGY NEED
IT?
Holding the European Sociological Association annual conference in Scotland
provides the opportunity for revisiting a venerable, but also somewhat
contentious, concept with a long sociological pedigree, that of civil
society. It is venerable because in many ways it has its origins
here, in Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767),
providing the foundations for sociology as a discipline, or rather what
we might call proto-sociology (Eriksson, 1993). It is contentious
because there is an argument that it adds little to the tool-kit of the
discipline that is not covered by 'state', 'market' or even simply 'society'
itself. What adds piquancy to the debate is that 'civil society'
seems to have greater currency in Scotland than in the rest of the UK,
and not simply (or even) because Ferguson invented the concept here. The
debate over constitutional change over the last thirty years, for example,
has evoked the distinctiveness of Scottish civil society, and its capacity
to frame economic and political issues independent of (central) state
effects. In particular, I would argue that the assertion of 'nationalism'
in Scotland, of nation-ness, derives not from some elemental set of emotions
based on historic memories - ethnicity, if you prefer - but on the day-to-day
contemporary social associations of people, on patterns of sociability
structured by organisational life -in education, law, etc. - what we
might call 'civility' [1]. Civil
society, then, comes to refer to the relatively dense networks of organisations
and institutions resulting from, and in turn, framing day-to-day interactions
of people. Further, as Ernest Gellner (1995) observed, civil society
is a social space located between the tyranny of kin and the tyranny
of kings; in other words, between the intimacy of family life, and the
impersonal power of the state.
To some critics, this sounds too vague to be true. Krishan Kumar
commented: 'Civil society sounds good; it has a good feel to it; it has
the look of a fine old wine, full of depth and complexity. Who could
possibly object to it, who not wish for its fulfilment?' (1993:376). In
short, civil society could be everywhere and nowhere, nothing beyond
its reach, but specifying little. Kumar again: 'Civil society is,
no more than state power, a panacea. Its divisions and discontents
remain a source of inequality and instability' (1993:389). At least,
one might observe, something with such imputed negative consequences
must be 'real', at least in its consequences? Kumar's remarks were
written in context for a reply to Christopher Bryant's (1993) view that
in what used to be called 'state socialist' societies, civil society
was the repository for social and political opposition (notably the Catholic
church in Poland) which faced down the state until it collapsed under
the weight of contradictions. That phrase with its marxisant overtones
also evokes the contribution by Antonio Gramsci, 'the marxist de Tocqueville',
as Kumar calls him (1993:381): 'Civil society is the sphere of culture
in the broadest sense. It is concerned with the manners and mores
of society, with the way people live. It is where values and meanings
are established, where they are debated, contested and change' (op. cit.382-3). In
short, 'the concept of civil society that is most widespread today is
fundamentally Gramscian' (op. cit.389).
Let us explore where civil society begins and ends, if indeed one can
find that the dividing line. Mentioning Gramsci points us in the
direction of the state. He focused on the distinction between 'civil
society' - the arena of consent and direction - from 'political society'
- the arena of coercion and domination. Thus, the hegemony of the
ruling class was expressed via the 'organic relations' between the two
realms. As Kumar observes, setting civil society in contradistinction
to the state possibly over-estimates the power of the state, and implies
that civil society is anti-state. In his useful review of the concept,
Jonathan Hearn comments: 'Civil society is almost always defined in opposition
to the state, and yet much of what goes on in it is oriented precisely
toward affecting the state, is guaranteed by the state, and at least
two if its components - laws and markets - are substantially artefacts
of the state' (2001:342).
In truth, the line of demarcation between state and civil society these
days is fuzzy. Gianfranco Poggi commented that civil society 'may
need the state as ultimate guarantor, but their subsistence in a realm
separate from that where the state predominantly operates is intrinsic
to the very nature of the state, as a set of differentiated, specifically
political institutions complementary to that realm' (2001:145). In
truth, reifying 'state' and 'civil society' gives them a hardness which
they do not have, other than in theoretical, ideal-typical terms. Charles
Taylor observed that, juxtaposed to 'political society', 'civil society ... exists
over against the state, in partial independence from it. It includes
those dimensions of social life which cannot be confounded with, or swallowed
up in the state' (Taylor, 1990:95). Taylor argues that there are
five roots to western 'civil society': that society was not defined in
terms of its identification with its political organisation; that the
Church was a society independent of the state; that feudal relations
of authority involved quasi- contractual relationships of rights and
obligations; that civil society had its roots in the autonomous 'city
states' of western Europe, something Max Weber identified in his classic,
but usually misunderstood, essay The City; that the political
structure of medieval polities involved representation of the Estates
(Elliott and McCrone, 1982, ch.2). Out of those roots came the
autonomous social space we call 'civil society', 'not so much a sphere
outside political power; rather it penetrates deeply into this power,
fragments and decentralises it. Its components are truly
'amphibious'' (Taylor: op. cit., 117).
One might ask, of course, whether this distinction between civil and
political society is at all meaningful in the modern age. It is
noticeable that the concept 'civil society' has more currency in some
places than others. It also has a curious history. Associated
with the Scottish Enlightenment, most obviously with Adam Ferguson, but
also David Hume and Adam Smith, it disappeared from view as sociology
took a Comteian turn, emerging in Marx out of Hegel, and thence to Gramsci,
while de Tocqueville refined the state/society dichotomy to make sense
of associational life. In terms of actual social and political
change, 'civil society' emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to account for
the collapse of political communism in state socialist societies, notably
where it provided a robust and alternative platform to state power, as
in Poland where the Catholic Church had set up virtual parallel institutions. Anyone
doubting the importance of the absence/presence of civil society under
communist regimes should consider the contrasting experiences of Poland
and Czechoslovakia (Holy, 1996).
Closer to home, 'civil society' was vested with both normative and analytical
significance to explain the rise of neo-nationalism, challenges to the
British state (in Scotland and Wales), the Spanish state (in Catalonia
and Euzkadi), as well as in France, the bastion of the Jacobin state. Whether
one chose to call it 'nationalism' or 'regionalism', it became clear
that the more developed and autonomous associational structures were
in the territories in question, the greater the challenges to central
state legitimacy. Thus, Scotland - more so than Wales - had a bedrock
of autonomous institutions, of law, religion, social governance dating
from the Treaty of Union with England in 1707, and much developed subsequently. Since
that Union, Scotland has continued its separate system of law, jealously
guarded by its judges and legal establishment; also, of course, part
of 'the state', or perhaps the 'semi-state', that collection of government
and quasi-government departments in the Scottish Office, which was, at
least nominally, until 1999 governed by ministers from the ruling party
at Westminster. Nowadays, Scotland has a parliament and its own directly
elected ministers in control of the bureaucracy of state, if not a 'state'
in the UN sense of the term, enough to describe Scotland as a 'understated
nation', but a 'state' nonetheless in high degree. In other words, one
can have degrees of state-ness, and Scotland has more of it than it used
to have pre-1999, though not as much as most people (according to the
surveys) would like. Where 'state' and '(civil) society' begins
and ends is unclear, but there is little doubt that they are not the
same thing. Indeed, during the 1980s and 1990s, those in command
of social governance - the collection of middle class cadres who had
supported, usually implicitly, the ruling party at Westminster in exchange
for considerable autonomy at home -in the late 1990s turned against their
erstwhile rulers and in favour of Home Rule and a Scottish parliament. Voting
against 'devolution' in the referendum of 1979 by 40/60 Scotland's middle
classes switched their allegiance in 1997 to support a parliament in
Edinburgh by 70/30, largely because their social and institutional autonomy
had been seriously eroded by a centralising British government at Westminster
in the interim. What had been challenged by the central state was
what Taylor nicely called 'the skein of rights and duties' (1990:103)
which the plethora of social associations had with the overtly political
realm of the state [2].
One might argue that Scotland was never actually 'stateless', having
had substantial devolved powers ab initio since 1707, and that
these have grown ever since, culminating (to date) in the creation of
the directly elected, but devolved, government [3]. Stretching
the point, one could even claim that the new state structures, government
and parliament, themselves belong to civil society, and that this was
laid down by the founding principles of sharing power, accountability,
openness and transparency, and equal opportunities. Unless one
takes the view, and some politicians do, that such principles were simply
expedient window-dressing, creatures of the moment, there is a sound
argument for saying that civil society created the parliament in the
long campaign of the 1990s, and sees it as their creation, an extension
of the democratic will of civil society, and not (simply) the property
of politicians. Indeed, after the election debacle of 1992 when
the Conservatives retained power at Westminster, and hence in Scotland,
it was left to churches, trade unions, voluntary associations and extra-parliamentary
groups to mobilise and push for constitutional change, as the political
vehicles, notably the Labour party, had been sidelined by electoral defeat. One
could take the view that such activity was 'political', albeit not party
political, but that is my point. This social platform allowed fundamental
- national - challenges to the legitimacy of the state which no 'regional'
territory could do. Thus, older, and more obtuse, arguments about
the state's legitimacy resting less on that of 'the crown' as at Westminster
(parliament as a 17th century king, as it were), and more on that of
'the people', that is, popular sovereignty, whatever the jurisprudential
basis of that claim might be.
It is unusual, of course, to forge a parliament in a western post-industrial
society at the end of the 20th century, but my argument would be that
whether they like it or not all legislatures are extensions of civil
society, witness Poggi's' comment above. Ironically, despite (maybe
because of) the receding tide of state involvement in direct provision
of public services, its historic social democratic role, one might say,
people come to expect more, not less, from the state which is inextricably
bound up with the commonweal. The 19th century view of the state
as being de haut rather than en bas, concerned with
grand imperial projects, and the property of the few not the many cannot
be recovered, whatever neo-liberals may say. And governments of
the right as well as the left have to march to the tune of civil society,
while endeavouring to do so to their own set of music. Be that
as it may, there is enough space between 'state' and 'civil society'
to allow us to distinguish one from the other, even though the boundaries
are fuzzy. As if to underscore that point, recent research shows
that Scotland and England are not marked by radically different social
and political attitudes - Scotland is not so much and inalienably further
to the 'left' than its southern neighbour [4] -
so much as by institutional differences, and party political support [5]. In
other words, it is the frame which matters, which interpolates shared
social, economic and cultural processes into 'Scottish' terms, and in
the process translates these into meaningful terms.
If civil society is not the state, what is it? Is it the market? Is
civil society simply the market writ social, but the creature of the
bourgeoisie nonetheless? There is, as Sunil Khilnani (2001) points
out, a distinction to be made between the 'liberal' position which argues
that the effective powers of civil society reside in the economy, in
property rights and the market, and the 'radical' position which locates
civil society in 'society', independent of both the economic domain and
the political apparatus of the state. In a Scottish context, the
latter certainly took precedence over the former in the struggle for
a parliament, for business and capital were at best lukewarm, and for
a long time downright hostile to any extension of self-government, whereas
churches, trades unions, voluntary associations and the like were its
champions. In many ways, civil society is the social hinge between
economic capital and the political apparatus of the state. As Craig
Calhoun observed: '... from the point of view of democracy, it is
essential to retain in the notion of civil society some idea of a social
realm which is neither dominated by state power nor simply responsive
to the systematic features of capitalism' (1993: 310-1). In other
words, people are neither determined by market relations and defined
as economic actors, nor simply by the rights and obligations conferred
by the state. We are neither 'consumers' (still less 'customers')
nor simply 'citizens' (of the state), which is why calling everyone from
students to train passengers as 'customers' is odd and inappropriate,
and not simply because both universities and railways are imperfect markets. And
while talking about citizens' rights, there are some interesting anomalies
which suggest that even the state does not consider everyone a 'citizen'. Thus,
you can vote in the Scottish parliament election if you are not a UK
citizen, but are a citizen of another EU country and resident here. Only
(UK) citizens get to vote for Westminster, which tells you something
about the status and power differences in constitutional hierarchies
in these islands.
The British imperial legacy has also produced a patchwork of rights
and responsibilities which are by no means tied to a simple notion of
citizenship. Thus, under the Patriality Act, people with at least
one grandparent born in the UK have a right of residence (which, given
the emigration routes of the last century is institutionally racist,
for it is much more likely to apply to white people from the dominions
and commonwealth than it is to black and brown people who settled here
from the late 1940s onwards). Sometimes referred to as 'sub-state'
or even more provocatively as 'sub-national' legislatures, devolved institutions
are deemed by the very meaning of the term devolution (I give you power
to carry out my wishes) to owe sovereignty to the putative centre [6]. That,
needless to say, is not how people in Scotland see it. They invest
far more trust and responsibility in the Scottish - national - institution
than they do in the notionally sovereign institution four hundred miles
away south of the border. The theory may say one thing; the practice
something other.
We are getting close here to the third concept in our trilogy - nation. If
we agree that civil society has an existence separate from state and
market, is it not coterminous with 'nation'? As in all these things,
it depends what we mean. This is not the place to launch into a
systematic account of the term 'nation'. Suffice it to say that
this 'imagined community', in Benedict Anderson's useful term, is not
the creature of some perfervid emotion attaching people to territory,
some complex set of historic feelings which can be whipped up as and
when required. Thirty years' writing on nations and nationalism
has taught me that. Being and feeling Scottish is not the result
of historic flights of fancy, of misplaced attachment to locality. Neither
is it the outcome of political or constitutional affiliation; you don't
feel Scottish because you vote for the SNP or support Independence, or
vice versa. Indeed, the relationship is far more complex than that [7]. National
identity is sustained by a complex set of social institutions and organisations
which rear us, educate us, keep us on the legal straight and narrow,
and govern us. It is, in Mick Billig's telling phrase, 'banal',
taken-for-granted and implicit - most of the time, except at moments
of heightened tension and conflict, which thankfully are rare. The
more widespread identity is - and in Scotland it is shared across classes,
ethnicities, genders, ages and so on - the more taken for granted it
is. Is 'nation' simply 'civil society', then? Not quite. If
anything, feeling and being 'national' is the outcome of the process
of civil societalisation, sustained by patterns of sociability which
teach us how to behave appropriately. The feeling of being a national,
of belonging to a community, is the result mainly of the channels and
mechanisms which shape us and make us feel that way.
There is the apparent curiosity that that civil society is, per se,
difficult to define, or rather, as Kaviraj observes: '... it is
a minor curiosity that 'civil society' appears to be an idea strangely
incapable of standing freely on its own: it always needs a distinctive
support (that is, support by being one half of a distinction) from a
contrary term' (2001:288). Thus, civil society is defined vis-à-vis,
in terms of what it is not, as much as what it is. Thus, in the
works of Adam Ferguson, civil society is contrasted with 'natural society',
that is, the state of nature. Secondly, civil society is defined vis-à-vis the
state, its counterweight as well as its complement. Kaviraj argues
that all civil society arguments stem from some deep disillusion with
the state and its mode of functioning: 'those calling for a re-assertion
of 'civil society' are basically calling for people to gather up all
resources of sociability to form their own collective projects against
the states' '(p.319). Thirdly, civil society is about sociability,
not in the sense of intimate gemeinschaft, the essence of community,
but as gesellschaft, the ordering of relations between people
not intimately connected, not of kin, but of sociability among strangers. Civil
society is also defined, as we have seen, vis-à-vis market
and nation, closely connected but not the same thing. Thus, civil
society is more than market relations; it is, if anything, the 'cause'
of national feeling, not its outcome.
Does this make civil society 'a good thing'? Can one ever have
too much of it? It is important to remember that the concept has
western roots, and thus is inherently ethnocentric. Khilnani and
Kaviraj (2001) point out that colonial societies did not follow the same
routes as their colonisers, that the relationships between state, society
and economy are quite different. They argue too that civil society
is best thought of not as a substantive category, a distinctive entity,
but as a set of enabling conditions. It is best to see it as a
set of human capacities, moral and political, and not a determinate end-state. One
cannot, for example, assume a necessary association between civil society
and a specific form of government such as liberal democracy. Just
as one can have too much state power vis-à-vis civil society (and
pre-1989 state socialism in some manifestations, in East Germany rather
than Poland, for example), so it is possible to have an overweening civil
society vis-à-vis the state, at least in terms of party politics. Thus,
for much of its history since 1921, the statelet of Northern Ireland
produced very predictable politics, each so-called 'community', whether
unionist or nationalist, generating all-too-familiar politics, thus squeezing
out opportunities for the political arena to have an independent life. Whenever
elections were held, so votes stacked up behind political parties which
were creatures of these communities rather than of the political space
within which negotiation could take place.
As Bernard Crick pointed out in his classic book In Defence of Politics (1982),
there has to be a public sphere for negotiation between political organisations
which are neither the hidebound creatures of the state nor of narrow
social interests. In a telling comment, Crick observes: 'Democracy
is one element in politics; if it seeks to be everything, it destroys
politics, turning 'harmony into mere unison', reducing 'a theme to a
single beat' (1992:73). One can, then, have an overweening civil
society, just as one can also have an overweening state. Civil
society presupposes a concept of 'politics' with an identifiable territorial
and constitutional scope, a distinctive set of practices. It also
requires, as Khilnani and Kaviraj observe, a particular type of 'self'
- mutable, able to see interests as transient, and with changing political
and public affiliations. This is not to reduce 'self' to a rational,
interest-maximising self, guided by simple economic self-interest, as
economic liberalism argues; nor to treat the 'civil' self as the 'citizen',
the recipient of rights and responsibilities simply conferred by the
state. Pushed to extremes, treating all rights as citizenship ones
would enhance the power of the state, not inevitably circumscribe it. Thus,
opposition to identity cards in the UK arises because it confers on the
state the power to license people's identities, to bestow it but also
to rescind it.
What of the argument that 'civil society' is simply a cloak for the
market, that it is premised on a model of society composed of free-thinking
and rationally autonomous individuals, what one might call the neo-liberal
view of civil society? As Erikkson has pointed out, it is 'sociality'
which underpins contractual relations, not contractual relations which
underpin sociality [8]. Despite
Adam Smith becoming an icon for the neo-liberal Right before, during
and after Mrs Thatcher, he had no doubt that fiduciary relations preceded
those of the market and could not be pre-empted by them. Should
relations of social trust fail, then so would market relations. On
the other - neo-conservative - side of the coin, a Herderian obligation
to suborn one's identity to that of 'the nation' would be just as threatening
to civil society. As Taylor comments: 'the most thoroughgoing destruction
of civil society has been carried out in the name of some of the variations
and successors of this idea in the 20th century, notably the nation and
the proletariat' (1990:113). Doubtless, Taylor is alluding to fascism
and communism, but he also points to a more insidious threat to freedom,
namely where the 'invisible hand' of the market is deemed to have superseded
the place of collective will and public decision-making, reflected of
course in a 'retreat' from politics. It is, paradoxically, the
Hegelian notion of the public sphere which conveys civil society rather
than an attenuated one reducing it to the marketplace.
It should be clear then that 'civil society' is related to, but not
a creature of: the state, the market and the nation. It cannot
be reduced to the level of the (state) political, to the (market) economic,
or the (nation) cultural. It stands in contradistinction to these
even though at any one point it might appear to be their creature. Still
less is civil society reducible to the 'private' sphere, and Hegel himself
distinguishes between state, civil society and family. Civil
society can also claim to precede rather than derive from the state and
political realm, can unmake political authority and refashion it. That
is why the concept was pressed into political service in Scotland (and
eastern Europe) in the 1980s and 1990s, and why doctrines of popular
sovereignty in the 'People's Claim of Right' were re-imagined. There
was a rhetorical moment in the 1990s at a public meeting of the Scottish
Constitutional Convention, when the convener - a clergyman - asked the
question: if Mrs Thatcher, de facto head of state [9],
said: I am the government, and I say no (to a Scottish parliament). We
are the people, he replied, and we say yes.
Why should 'civil society' be an important part of current Scottish
public discourse? As Krishan Kumar observed: 'If we wish to continue
to use the concept of civil society, we must situate it in some definite
tradition of use that gives it a place and a meaning' (1993: 390). In
late 20th century Scotland, it became plain that the political realm
was at some odds with the informal and quasi-formal networks of civil
society; in short, it was perceived to be unresponsive to its needs and
demands, across the socio-economic spectrum, from professional bodies,
voluntary groups, to trades unions. This was in large part because
of what became known as the 'democratic deficit', the fact that no matter
how people in Scotland voted at Westminster elections, they got a government
elected by people in England; not unreasonable, given that they represented
85% of the UK population. The task was not to overthrow the state,
but to fashion a state - parliament and government - more in keeping
with the wishes of the electorate. I have observed elsewhere: '... people
think of themselves as Scots - and they do, in increasing numbers, over
being British - because they have been educated, governed and embedded
in a Scottish way. It is a matter of government, not of sentiment;
and, if anything, the latter derives from the former' (McCrone, 2005:74).
Why, one might ask, should 'civil society' have greater currency in
Scotland but not throughout the UK, especially in England? It certainly
seems to be so. Anthony Giddens, for example, makes nothing of
it in his copious writings, nor, pace references to Gramsci
(see, for example, John Scott and Gordon Marshall's Oxford Dictionary
of Sociology, 3rd edition, 2005) is it made to do much analytical
work in general texts. It is quite revealing that the entry on
civil society in Sociology: the key concepts (2006) has much
more to do with Robert Putnam's US specific study Bowling Alone than
anything indigenously 'British'. The answer to my question seems
to be that the concept 'civil society' is thought to explain very little. British
sociology, after all, emerged in the second half of the 20th century
out of a strong centralist and ameliorist tradition of social science,
influenced heavily by Fabianist centralism and welfare statism, as well
as assumptions that the UK was a homogenous 'nation-state' in which social
class was the key determinant of life chances. 'State' and 'economy'
rather than 'society' were the key dimensions. There is the oft-repeated
comment by Raymond Aron made in 1970 that 'The trouble is that British
sociology is essentially an attempt to make intellectual sense of the
political problems of the Labour Party' (Halsey, 2004:70). Granted
that this is somewhat - but only somewhat - unkind, it does reflect much
of the nature of British - or more accurately - Anglo-British sociology. In
a telling definition, Giddens once remarked that 'a nation, as I use
the term here, only exists when a state has a unified administrative
reach over the territory over which its sovereignty is claimed' (The
Nation-State and Violence, 1985:119). The nation, he commented,
is a 'bordered power-container'. There seems little room here either
for more cultural diversity or for a purely social, that is, societal
understanding, which may seem an odd thing for a sociologist to do. One
would never know, for example, that Britain is a complex multinational
(and a multicultural) state by reading British Sociology: seen from
Without and Within (eds. Halsey and Runciman) published for the
British Academy in 2005. It took a German sociologist, Wolf Lepenies,
to observe: 'English (British?) [10] Sociology
always remained curiously pallid and lacking in distinct identity' -
quoted by Dominique Schnapper (who is also Raymond Aron's daughter) (2005:110).
What gives added piquancy to this debate is that Britain can be defined,
at least historically, in terms not of its 'stateness' but the nature
of its civil society/ies. Thus, David Marquand comments that '... one
cannot speak of a 'British state' in the way that one speaks of a 'French
state' or, in modern times, of a 'German state'. The United Kingdom
is not a state in the continental sense. It is a bundle of lands (including
such exotica as the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which are not
even represented at Westminster), acquired at different times by the
English crown, and governed in different ways.' (1988:152). One
may cavil at the notion that the 'English crown' acquired Scotland, for
example, but the more important point Marquand is making here is that
there is no tradition of a uniformly strong and determining state in
these islands, at least in terms of 'home affairs' (overseas was another
matter as far as imperial power was concerned). Thus, the British
state was something of a 'nightwatchman state', and by the late 19th
century was being outflanked by more aggressively interventionist states
like Germany with explicit programmes of industrial modernisation (Hobsbawm,
1969). Indeed, it is not until the 20th century, and perhaps not
until its second half, that the British state develops an interventionist
infrastructure in social and economic terms, and it is possibly this
view of the state as a progressive vehicle for social change which sociology,
as a new university subject, attached itself to. It is then something
of an interesting paradox that sociologists in England have paid so little
attention to 'civil society' where it was pervasive and even hegemonic:
and possibly even because of that fact. British political thought has
been important for the development of ideas about civil society, namely,
from the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century through Locke and
Hobbes, Carlyle, Bentham and Mill. It is important to stress that
this was a British rather than simply an English intellectual
movement both in terms of its origins as well as its self-conception. As
David Marquand (1988) showed, both (New) Liberalism and Labourism took
these as an important part in their underpinning ideology [11].
Those of us inhabiting the territorial fringe of this state have little
doubt that we live, at least for the moment, in a multinational state,
as well as a multicultural one. One would never know from reading
mainstream British sociology that the UK was a multinational state. Variously
described as a 'state-nation' (first the state, then the nation), or
a 'union state' (forged, in Linda Colley's useful metaphor of religion
and war in the 18th century), Britain/Great Britain/United Kingdom etc
has no explicit name for its citizens - Ukanians? Brits? Britons sounds
too pretentious and/or archaic to be useful (echoes of 'Rule Britannia'
and empire: 'Britons never, never will be slaves' - written in fact by
a Scot, James Thomson, and set to music by Thomas Arne around 1740),
and in recent years, the 'nationals' of these islands have reverted back
to self-description as English, Scots or Welsh, to say nothing of the
highly politicised compendium of national terms in Northern Ireland where
a person's identity and politics can be conveyed by saying one is British
or Irish, but not both. It is a curious feature that people in
this island feel happier about using their 'national' rather than their
'state' descriptors when it comes to territorial identity. Thus,
when forced to choose their territorial identity, the percentage of people
in England calling themselves 'English' has risen from 31% in 1992 to
47% in 2006, whereas the percentage choosing to call themselves 'British'
has fallen in the same period from 63% to 39%. The comparable figures
for people in Scotland as regards being 'Scottish' remains more or less
constant over the same period (72% to 78%), but a fall from 25% to 14%
preferring 'British' (British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys). The
point remains, however, that 4 out of 10 Scots describe themselves as
'British' on a multiple choice question, and 7 out of 10 English people
do likewise if so allowed. At any rate, one would have thought
that these substantial shifts and curious accounts might have figured
in accounts of 'British' sociology over the last decade or so as something
important to be studied and explained.
Maybe, however, there is something more fundamental going on. Should
sociology bother about the term 'civil society' or even the term 'society'
at all? I am reminded of the comment by Alain Touraine made over
25 years ago: 'The abstract idea of society cannot be separated
from the concrete reality of a national society, since this idea is defined
as a network of institutions, controls and education. This necessarily
refers us back to a government, to a territory, to a political collectivity. The
idea of society was and still is the ideology of nations in the making'
(1981:5, my translation).
Other sociologists have suggested that 'society' is far too problematic
a term and should be jettisoned. Michael Mann went as far as to
say: 'It may seem an odd position for a sociologist to adopt; but if
I could, I would abolish the concept 'society' altogether' (1986:2). Using
the term society, he said, brings two problems. On the one hand,
as we have seen, most accounts simply equate polities or states with
'societies'. As a result, Mann comments: 'the enormous covert influence
of the nation-state of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
on the human sciences means that a nation-state model dominates sociology
and history alike' (ibid:2). On the other hand, the term 'society'
implies a unitary social system, but, he says 'we can never find a single
bounded society in geographical or social space' (1986:1). In other
words, even nation-states are not 'bounded totalities'.
How then are we to treat 'society'? Mann argues that society should
be treated not so much as a unitary concept implying internal homogeneity,
but a 'loose confederation', as 'overlapping networks of social interaction'. Hence,
a society is a unit within whose boundaries social interaction is relatively
dense and stable, and while interactions will take place across these
boundaries, those taking place within it are the most significant and
consistent. Others have argued that sociology should jettison the
concept 'society' altogether. John Urry, for example, in his challenging
book Sociology beyond Societies (2000) accepts that it has been
too easy to elide state and society certainly in these islands,
and comes to the aid of Mrs Thatcher and her famous statement: 'there
is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families'. Urry
argues that sociology must abandon its original practice of studying
society as a set of bounded institutions the study of structures,
and instead focus on mobility, on movements. At a time of global change,
process and networks, sociology seems to be cast adrift once it leaves
the relatively safe boundaries of functionally integrated and bounded
societies bequeathed to it by its founders, notably Durkheim. Urry
commends '...sociology may be able to develop a new agenda, an agenda
for a discipline that is losing its central concept of human 'society'.
It is a discipline organised around networks, mobility and horizontal
fluidities' (2000:3). In other words, we must seek a sociology
of mobilities which disrupts a 'sociology of the social as societies'
(p.4). This seems to me to resonate an old issue of studying structure
and change. Unless one wants to hold on to the jigsaw puzzle of free-standing
societies, then societies can be treated as semi-bounded, partial, overlapping
systems and networks.
Theoretically, conceptually, as well as professionally, sociologists
should be centrally concerned, for if nothing else, 'society'/civil society
is 'our' concept; it is what distinguishes what we study from political
scientists (the state) and social anthropologists (who, I would venture,
have the better cultural toolkit to make sense of 'nation'). Sociologists
may think they have a better handle on 'the market' than, for example,
economists, but it would be a false conceit to think that is what we
do. Leaving aside professional divisions of labour, the world we
inhabit is, I wager, a much more complex place than our inherited models
would have us believe. After all, we live in a global world where
ostensibly 'local' differences matter less (Freud's 'narcissism of small
differences' are invoked to explain why minimal differences seem to generate
much heat and interest).
We might think that 'civil society' somehow corresponds with 'the national'
dimension (however drawn), but scholars are now talking about 'global
civil society', no respecter of national boundaries. We have grown
used to loose political talk about the 'threat' of globalisation, and
the alleged failure of those who resist economic and social change to
'move with the times'. The assumption is that there is antithesis
between the global and the local/national. The authors of the Centre
for the Study of Global Governance at the LSE observed that: 'The 'market',
the 'state', and in recent years even 'civil society' have to varying
degrees become such 'conceptual islands' that we use in everyday language
as well as for policy purposes and in social science analysis' (Anheier,
Glasius and Kaldor: 2001:3). While 'global civil society' has no such
clarity, they argue that it has become 'thicker' with the rapid development
of INGOs - international non-governmental organisations, and popular
alliances and networks running across societies and states such as Fair
Trade alliances, and anti-poverty and debt relief campaigns. Describing
global civil society as a neologism of the 1990s, John Keane comments
that the term refers to
'a vast, sprawling non-governmental constellation of many institutionalised
structures, associations and networks within which individual and group
actors are interrelated and functionally interdependent. As a society
of societies, it is 'bigger' and 'weightier' than any individual actor
or organisation or combined sum of its thousands of constituent parts
- most of whom, paradoxically, neither 'know' each other nor have any
chance of ever meeting each other face-to-face' (2003:11).
My colleagues at Edinburgh have been involved in putting empirical flesh
on theoretical bones. Jan Webb's work on the Fair Trade Coffee
movement shows how
'Initiatives such as Fair Trade Labelling have enabled 'quasi-organised
consumers', acting as part of a largely imagined group of like-minded,
but unknown others, to use economic capital to express cultural common
cause. What Granovetter identified as the 'strength of weak ties'
serves as a reminder of the connections between any given person and
a member of a voluntary group, charity, local council, trade union or
religious organisation, and in turn to social movements concerned for
fair trade' (Webb, 2007:para. 5.13).
Hugo Gorringe and Michael Rosie's study of the 'Make Poverty History'
march in Edinburgh 2005 alonside the G8 summit is a nice example of the
interactions of virtual and actual place in mobilising social and political
networks (Gorringe and Rosie, 2006). The under-specified nature
of the concept 'global civil society' has been criticised (Anderson and
Rieff, 'Global Civil Society: a sceptical view', in Global Civil
Society 2004/5, London: Sage, 2004), but there is little doubt that
it does not set up false dichotomies between 'global' and 'national/local'
levels, even - or especially - where these do not correspond with existing
states. As John Keane observes: 'The terms 'world civil society'
and 'international society' still have their champions, but their state-centredness
is deeply problematic.' ('Global Civil Society?', in GCS 2001,
p26). That, I think, is the point. Existing states, often
under the rubric of the 'nation-state', seem to find it harder to come
to terms with the way the world is going, than do 'understated' nations.
Conclusion
Where does this leave my argument? Removing
'civil society' from the sociological lexicon, or not reinstating it,
makes our task much more difficult. 'Civil society' is not only
deeply embedded in our discipline's DNA, going back to Ferguson's eponymous
essay 240 years ago, but it is a vital analytical tool in our armoury
in the 21st century precisely because the correspondence between states,
economies, nations and societies is much looser than for a century at
least. It provides
'social' weight to the economic, political and cultural. Its neglect
in sociology in these islands reflects far more the implicitly statist
assumptions and the curious intellectual history of sociology. In
the 21st century when the British state is a more complex, rich but more
problematic entity, it behoves sociology to recover its heritage.
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Notes
[return to reference in text, 1] That 'civil society'
is a concept in use in Scotland is reflected in the fact that Scottish
Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) edits and publishes a
quarterly journal called View: Policy Insights from Scottish Civil
Society
[2] A cursory glance
at the Edinburgh (or Glasgow) telephone directory shows large numbers
of public organisations with the prefix 'Scottish' including: Scottish
Accident Council, Scottish Arts Council, Scottish Associations for
the Deaf, the Blind, Young Farmers, Mental Health, Scottish Chamber
of Commerce, Scottish Council for Development and Industry, Scottish
Fishermen's Federation, Scottish Natural Heritage, Scottish Qualifications
Authority, and so on. Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations
[3] See Lindsay Paterson's
essay on social capital in Baron et al. (eds.) 2000. For a fuller
account of society and politics in Scotland, see his book, The
Autonomy of Modern Scotland, 1994.
[4] See M. Rosie and
R. Bond (2007)
[5] At the last British
general election in 2005, the centre-right Conservative party received
less than half the support in Scotland (16%) that it got in England
[6] In a television
interview prior to the Labour Party Conference in September 2007,
the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, whose remit includes constitutional
affairs, commented: 'Scottish devolution was voted on overwhelmingly
by English Members of Parliament. It is power devolved. It is not
power, ultimately, given away. It's devolved from Westminster'. (The
Herald, 24th September 2007)
[7] Thus, 40% of those
who identify with the Scottish National Party (SNP) claim not to
want Independence, and only 36% of supporters of Independence vote
SNP; 27% of people who say they are Scottish, not British support
SNP, but 34% support Labour (Scottish Social Attitudes survey, 2005).
[8] 'Sociality' as a
term seems to me to have the edge over 'sociability' here in that
the English use of the latter term carries too much emotional baggage
('being sociable') to convey what is implied. Sociality conveys
more of the sense of social interaction without emotion.
[9] The head of the
British state, de jure, is the monarch. The Prime
Minister is the de facto head of state, just as parliament
(the House of Commons) is effectively 'the crown'.
[10] The question in
parenthesis is his, not mine.
[11] I am indebted
to Lindsay Paterson for making this point.
(Published Online: 26 October 2007)
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