Civil Society: History and Possibilities 0521633443, 9780521633444, 0521002907, 9780521002905

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‘Civil society’ is one of the most used - and abused - concepts in current political thinking. In this im portant collection of essays, the concept is subjected to rigorous analysis by an international team of contributors, all of whom seek to encourage the historical and comparative understanding o f political thought. The volume is divided into two parts: the first section analyses the meaning of civil society in different theoretical traditions of Western philosophy. In the second section, contributors consider the theoretical and practical contexts in which the notion of civil society has been invoked in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These essays dem onstrate how an influential Western idea like civil society is itself altered and innovatively modified by the specific contexts o f intellectual and practical life in the societies o f the South. suniPTA kavira ) isa Reader in Publics in the Department of Political Studies,School ol Oriental and African Studies. University of I ondon. I le is the author of The Unhappy Consciousness (wsfi) Jnd editor of Politics in India ( ujgtf). s u n i l KHiLNANi is a Reader in Politics in the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar fiance ( iyy.0 and The Idea ol India I tyyr). CONTRIBUTORS Keith Baker. Antony Black, Partha ( halteriee, lohn Dunn, Joseph K'tnia, lack C o o d v , Cieoffrey I L n v t h o rn , Rob jenkins . ( i a r c t h S t e d m a n lones, Luis ( ' a s t r o L e i v a , T h o m a s Metzger,

1ania Oz-Sal/berger. Anthony Pagden, Sami Zubaida

Cover design: opta

C a m b r id g e UNIVERSITY PRESS www.cambridge.org ISBN 0 -5 2 1 -0 0 2 9 0 -7

Civil Society History and Possibilities

Edited by

Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani

C a m b r id g e UNI VERSI TY PRESS

P UB LI SH E D BY THE PRESS S Y N DI C A TE OF THE U N I VE RS IT Y OF C A M B RI DG E

The Pitt Building, T rum pington Street, Cam bridge, U nited Kingdom C A M B R I D G E UNI VERS I TY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, C am bridge CB2 2R U , U K 40 W est 20th Street, New Y ork, N Y 10011 -4211, USA 10 Stam ford R oad, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, A ustralia Ruiz de A larcon 13,28014 M adrid, Spain Dock House, The W aterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://ww w.cam bridge.org © in this collection C am bridge University Press 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions o f relevant collective licensing agreem ents, no reproduction o f any part m ay take place w ithout the written perm ission o f Cam bridge University Press. First published 2001 Printed in the United K ingdom at the University Press, Cam bridge Typeset in Times 10/12pt

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A catalogue record fo r this book is available fro m the British Library Library o f Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Civil society: history and possibilities / edited by Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. i s b n 0 521 63344 3 - i s b n 0 521 00290 7 (pb.) 1. Civil society. I. Kaviraj, Sudipta. II. K hilnani, Sunil, 1960— JC 337.C 563 2001 3 0 1 -d c 2 1

0 0 -0 6 5 1 7 6

ISBN 0 521 63344 3 hardback ISBN 0 521 0 0 2 9 0 7 paperback

Civil Society History and Possibilities ‘Civil society’ is one of the most used - and abused - concepts in current political thinking. In this important collection of essays, the concept is subjected to rigorous analysis by an international team of contributors, all of whom seek to encourage the historical and comparative under­ standing of political thought. The volume is divided into two parts: the first section analyses the meaning of civil society in different theoretical traditions of Western philosophy. In the second section, contributors consider the theoretical and practical contexts in which the notion of civil society has been invoked in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These essays demonstrate how an influential Western idea like civil society is itself altered and innovatively modified by the specific contexts of intellectual and practical life in the societies of the South. k a v i r a j is Reader in the Department of Political Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of T h e U n h a p p y C o n scio u sn ess (1995) and editor of P o litic s in In d ia (1998).

su d ip ta

is Professor of Politics in the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include A rg u in g R e v o lu tio n : T h e In te lle c tu a l L e f t in P o stw a r F rance (1993) and T he Id e a o f In d ia (1997).

su n il k h iln an i

Luis Castro Leiva In memory

Contributors

A nthony P. M eyer Family Professor and D irector, Stanford H um anities C entre, Stanford University.

keith

m ichael

a n th o n y

baker,

Professor in the H istory o f Political Theory, U ni­

b lack ,

versity o f Dundee. Professor and D irector, C entre for Studies in Social Sciences, C alcutta, and Professor, D epartm ent o f A n th ro ­ pology, C olum bia University.

p a rth a

c h a tte rje e ,

Professor o f Political Theory, and Fellow o f K ing’s College, University o f Cam bridge.

john

dunn,

Joseph fem ia,

R eader in Political Theory, University o f Liverpool.

Em eritus Professor o f Social A nthropology, and Fellow o f St Jo h n ’s College, University o f Cambridge.

jack

goody,

Professor o f International Politics, and Fellow o f Clare Hall, U niversity o f Cam bridge.

G eoffrey h a w th o rn ,

Senior Lecturer in Politics, Birkbeck College, U ni­

ROBERT j e n k i n s ,

versity o f London. R eader in Politics, School o f O riental and A frican Studies, U niversity o f London.

sudipta

kav iraj,

sunil k h iln an i,

Professor o f Politics, Birkbeck College, University o f

London. was Professor at IID E A , C aracas, and held the E dw ard Larocque T inker C hair at the University o f Chicago until his death in 1999.

luis

c a s tro

thom as

a.

leiva,

m etzger,

Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford

University. fania o z-salzb erg er,

Lecturer in H istory, University o f Haifa. ix

x

List of contributors

a n th o n y

pagden,

Professor o f Political Theory, Johns H opkins

University. Professor o f Political Science, and Fellow of K ing’s College, University o f Cam bridge.

g a re th

ste d m a n jones,

sami z u b a id a ,

London.

R eader in Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of

Contents

List o f contributors Introduction: Ideas o f civil society P a rt I : Theoretical traditions in the W est 1

The developm ent o f civil society

page ix 1 9 11

SUNIL KHILNANI

2

C oncepts o f civil society in pre-m odern Europe

33

ANTONY BLACK

3

The contem porary political significance o f John Locke’s conception o f civil society

39

JOHN DUNN

4

Civil society in the Scottish Enlightenm ent

58

FANIA O Z -S A L Z B E R G E R

5

Enlightenm ent and the institution o f society: notes for a conceptual history

84

KEITH MICHAEL BAKER

6

Hegel and the economics o f civil society

105

GA R ET H STEDMAN JONES

7

Civil society and the M arxist tradition

131

J O S E P H F E MI A

P art II : Arguments in the South 8

Civil society in an extra-E uropean perspective jack

9

147 149

goody

On civil and political society in post-colonial democracies PARTHA CHATTERJEE

165

viii

10

Contents

Civil society and the fate o f the m odern republics o f Latin America

179

LUIS C A S TR O LEIVA a n d A N T H O N Y P A G D E N

11

The W estern concept o f civil society in the context o f Chinese history

204

T H O M A S A. M E T Z G E R

12

Civil society, com m unity, and dem ocracy in the M iddle East

232

SAMI Z U B A I D A

13

M istaking ‘governance’ for ‘politics’: foreign aid, democracy, and the construction o f civil society

250

ROB J E N K I N S

14

The prom ise o f ‘civil society’ in the South

269

GEOFFREY HA W THORN

15

In search o f civil society

287

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ

Index

324

Introduction: ideas of civil society

The idea o f civil society has m ade a dram atic return recently. In discussions about politics in the m ost diverse settings, analysts and theoretical thinkers speak about civil society - its lack, its decline, its prom ise and possibility. Yet such diverse popularity itself creates a problem o f indeterm inacy. Does the idea mean the same thing in all these different contexts? Are supporters o f ‘civil society’ in the W est, in the form er C om m unist societies, in the T hird W orld, all trying to achieve the same ideal? Secondly, exactly w hat sort o f thing is the idea o f civil society? Is it a descriptive term for a certain type o f social structure, m ode o f social behaviour, or political ideal? W hat does the ‘realization’ o f civil society imply in countries where it is set up as an ideal? W hat are the conditions o f its possibility and existence? Such questions are raised in this volume. The discussion to be found here is not m eant to take a partisan position in the debate for and against ‘civil society’ - it seeks, rather, to clarify. We started in an enquiring and agnostic spirit: it seemed th at the debate about ‘civil society’ was both fascinating and unclear. It was unclear because both individuals and distinguishable strands in the literature used the idea with substantially different meanings; at times, the am bi­ guity was not ju st th at there were several meanings, but that the m eaning was radically unclear. Yet w hat was arresting about this discussion was that despite such ambiguities and difficulties, serious political groups and scholars kept com ing back to it, and chose to express their specific political unhappiness or am bition through this phrase instead o f others. Both these reasons seemed to us to require an exercise in clarification - of the theoretical semantics and o f the historical contexts. There are at least three clearly identifiable strands in the contem porary discussions about civil society, or, m ore precisely, discussions in which the idea o f civil society figures significantly. In some theoretical contexts, as in intellectual debates about w hat the organization o f society and its relation to the state in post-C om m unist societies should be, the notion is used with great theoretical seriousness. C om m unist systems invariably 1

2

Introduction: ideas o f civil society

overextended the legal jurisdiction and effective control o f state institu­ tions, such as the bureaucracy, over nearly all spheres o f social life. After the collapse o f those kinds o f states, there was a need, it was argued, for encouraging the flourishing o f institutions o f ‘civil society’ outside the legal jurisdiction o f the state. T here are at least two strands o f current leftist political thought in the West which are also keen to revive the idea o f a civil society, for reasons which are only partially com parable. Some radical theorists, after the disillusionm ent with the ideas o f socialism and its distinct soiling by C om m unist experience, wish to radicalize the idea o f dem ocracy by re-invoking notions o f civil society. A t times, writers who are critical o f the retreat o f the welfare state through the years of neo-conservative reaction in the 1980s have concluded that while it is impossible for socialists to revive the older tradition of trade-union m ilitancy and statism., equally the conservative atom ization of society is unacceptable. Some within these strands o f thought have argued force­ fully, at times invoking the British pluralist tradition, that w hat is required is a revival o f the associative initiatives o f non-state organiza­ tions in civil society. Evidently, there is a similarity between the postC om m unist argum ent and the associational one; but the direction of critical enterprise is strikingly different. The first is directed at the excesses o f C om m unist statism , the second at those o f capitalist atom ization. A nother strand o f current thinking in the W est also concerns civil society: the argum ents about new social movements. Again, there is a strong affinity between the associational argum ent and the idea th a t the new social movem ents, which are quite distinct from classical workingclass m ovem ents in interest and form , are the carriers o f radical dem o­ cratic aspirations. The chapters collected here are n o t intended to com m ent on or gloss all three current discussions, but only one o f them: the contem porary discussion about the ‘T hird W orld’ or the ‘South’ and the invocation of civil society in that context. To clarify that debate, we decided to follow an unconventional strategy. We felt th at the theoretical difficulties arose because o f ambiguities on two sides. First, because the contexts in which civil society was invoked varied a great deal between various T hird W orld societies. In some cases, it m eant m odern form s o f sociability based on interest, which could be begun and ended w ithout em barrass­ m ent or further obligation. In some others, it simply emphasized the need for a secure, reliable, predictable legal order. In still other cases - for example, in India, where stable dem ocratic institutions have worked for half a century - authors som etimes expressed their dissatisfaction with the social consequences o f dem ocracy and the failures o f its party system by having recourse to the concepts o f civil society.

Introduction: ideas o f civil society

3

However, the contextual distinctions between political institutions and practices was not the only source o f confusion. The idea o f a civil society was not entirely singular in its connotations in the history o f W estern thought either. Some o f the am biguities in the contem porary T hird W orld discussions arose because o f the multiple m eanings o f the term in the W estern tradition itself. T hus, when faced with theoretical am biguity in the Third W orld debate, it was not enough simply to say th at those who used the idea did not look carefully at the W estern concept. There was no single or simple W estern concept to study and emulate. We therefore concluded th at greater clarity could be achieved if we looked at precisely w hat the idea sought to convey in distinct E uropean traditions. The structure o f this volume is organized around this contrast. If the E uropean tradition o f thinking about ‘civil society’ is disaggre­ gated, it reveals at least three different strands, with individual thinkers im parting subtle and distinctive inflexions to the theoretical use o f the concept. In this book, these traditions are analysed separately in essays dealing with the Scottish Enlightenm ent, French Enlightenm ent thought, and the G erm an strand running through M arx and Hegel. However, some individual thinkers seemed o f particular im portance in the W estern traditions, because they introduced either a specific form ulation o f the problem , or a special conceptual developm ent. There are thus specific analyses o f Locke’s thought because he turns the m ore traditional contractarian dichotom y between ‘the state o f nature’ and ‘civil society’ tow ards the new distinction between ‘civil society’ and the state (although in his w ork this dichotom y is not used explicitly). Hegel’s intervention in the discussions on civil society is considered crucial by m ost interpreters, because o f his new interpretation o f the idea as burgerliche Gesellschaft; accordingly, he is given separate analytical treatm ent here. It is widely accepted th at developm ent o f theoretical thinking on politics occurs within two types o f contexts. The first is an intellectual and cultural context o f received ‘languages’ through which individual writers think about their societies. Their perform ances are both enabled and constrained by the contents o f this received conceptual language, or intellectual tradition. Secondly, political theorizing happens under the pressure o f historically specific predicam ents, particularly intense pro b ­ lems faced by generations o f people who think their way through them by analysing them theoretically. Political theory is thus often produced under the pressure and dem ands o f political practice. It is this historical urgency and pressure that often elicits highly original uses o f received doctrine or conceptual resources. Political thinking is thus at times an act o f intellectual desperation, not o f calm and orderly intellectual introspec­ tion. It is not surprising, therefore, th at once the idea o f civil society gains

4

Introduction: ideas o f civil society

a certain currency, it would be pressed into service by authors desperately seeking solutions to their specific historical problem s in T hird W orld contexts. To purely academ ic tastes, their uses m ight look like m isappli­ cation; but this is inevitable; and, paradoxically, this precisely confirms the historicity o f political thinking. W hat is the connection between the E uropean discourses o f ‘civil society’ and its historical entry into non-W estern political discourse? First, it is essential to note that the idea o f a ‘civil society’ passed into the political literature o f E uropean colonies in the nineteenth century; it is w rong to think o f this concern as being expressed only in relatively recent times. The reasons for the first engagem ent with the ideas o f ‘civil society’ are also not difficult to gauge. E uropean political rule brought in institutions which had a certain type o f discursive field associated with them. If colonial political structures had to be visualized conceptually as a ‘state’, this immediately brought in an implicit distinction from civil society. The idea entered colonial discourses about politics in tw o rather obvious ways. C olonial adm inistrations themselves explicitly used it to justify their patterns o f intervention o r non-intervention in societies under their control, to claim sometimes that some m atters were those o f the ‘civil society’ and thus out o f the jurisdiction o f the colonial state. Secondly, m odern elites in colonies often absorbed W estern influences and em ulated form s o f behaviour based on these distinctions. The analysis o f the Indian and Chinese political traditions provides examples o f this kind o f absorption. But there was probably a m ore general reason as well. Introduction o f the m odern state everywhere disrupted and transform ed earlier distribu­ tions and arrangem ents o f social power. W ith the arrival o f European colonialism , the state became an undeniable, unavoidable part o f the business o f social living; and the institutional organization o f the m odern state invites a discourse in term s o f a state/civil society distinction. If the state is considered too powerful and invasive, people m ust search for a concept that gives a collective definition to the spheres that are or ought to be left out o f its control. E uropean cultural influence always delivered this discourse, with this conceptual distinction at its centre, to the colonial intelligentsia. Thus, it is hardly surprising that with the com ing o f the m odern state - with its enorm ous potentialities o f collective action and equally vast dangers - this conceptual language began to be used outside the West. The historical result has been a strange paradox - which political scientists analysing non-W estern societies cannot ignore. A ctual political processes in the T hird W orld are m ostly very different from political life in the West; yet strangely, the language used to describe, evaluate and

Introduction: ideas of civil society

5

express the experiences of politics are the same everywhere. F or historical reasons, nearly all societies o f the T hird W orld speak, as far as politics is concerned, a W estern language. It is a language which identifies states and civil societies, speaks o f bureaucracies, political parties, parliam ents, expresses political desires for the establishm ent o f liberal, C om m unist or socialist political forms, and evaluates political systems in term s o f dem ocracy and dictatorship. Y et it is com m on knowledge that these words do not denote objects which behave in the same way as in the West, where this language originated. The existence o f a bureaucracy does not m ean the untroubled operation o f W eberian rules o f rationaliza­ tion; operation o f dem ocracy does not necessarily m ean a secure under­ standing o f inviolable rights o f individuals or respect for minorities. Political institutions taken from the West are introduced into societies which have embedded form s o f sociability that are very different from the com m on individualistic form s o f the m odern West. The actual m anner of operation and historical effects o f those political institutions are som e­ times startlingly different. A nother compelling reason for the use o f this political language to describe a different kind o f social world lies in the nature o f intellectual traditions. M any non-W estern societies have intel­ lectual cultures o f great antiquity and sophistication. Often, however, these intellectual traditions did not have a pronounced attention to the sphere o f ‘politics’ in the m odern sense, and therefore do not have a highly developed vernacular tradition to draw upon and develop. As a result, their historical entanglem ent with the m odern state - the expres­ sion o f its entirely novel structure o f historical experience, dealing with its concentrated power, its ability to affect people’s lives on an unprecedentedly large scale - has to rely at least initially on the language th at comes from the West, the habitual, standard language o f conveying and reflecting on this experience. However, over the longer historical term , as these historical state trajectories and the hum an experiences associated with them come to diverge from W estern forms, inevitably new elements emerge. To pursue those themes is not the m ain purpose o f this volume, though this question lies at the heart o f most o f the chapters dealing with civil society in the South. Analysis o f politics and history o f ideas about societies o f the South therefore have to be com parative. But there is also an additional reason for such exercises. Analysis o f T hird W orld politics is carried out inescapably in the language o f present-day political science. If we accept, however, that these analytical languages are historically indexed and structured, this might suggest a subtle problem o f applicability. Third W orld societies face large historical processes as problem s which are much m ore similar to w hat W estern societies faced in the nineteenth

6

Introduction: ideas o f civil society

century - the re-organization o f social life around a m odern sovereign state, conflicts generated by early industrialization, contradictions arising out o f secularization o f state form s against resistance from universalistic claims o f traditional religion to control all aspects o f social life. These historical processes are no longer central facts o f m odern W estern life; and therefore contem porary W estern social thought is not directed tow ards intellectually grasping such processes. In the early m odern thought o f the West, however, these historical problem s are absolutely central. In the tradition o f thought stretching from Locke to M arx, these questions constitute the m ain objects o f analysis. C ontem porary engage­ ment with T hird W orld societies thus might have a great deal to gain from a careful, critical reading of early m odern W estern political thought. The idea o f a ‘civil society’ was in any case fashioned by this tradition in all its theoretical complexity. In this period o f intellectual globalization, such conceptual questions are becoming increasingly urgent for another reason. Parallel to indi­ genous reflection on the historical effects o f re-organizing societies around the power o f the m odern state, there is now a large and insistent discourse emerging from developm ent institutions and lobbies. Inter­ national donor agencies, W estern governm ents providing aid, non­ governm ental organizations (N G O s) w orking on developm ent issues, each has increasingly focused on the social conditions necessary for the successful functioning o f dem ocratic institutions. H istorical experience o f the last half century has shown th a t the dem ocratic impulse is irreversible, but uncertain in its consequences. In nearly all societies, authoritarian or repressive governm ents face challenges to their unrestricted power, but the popular desire for dem ocracy is not easy to translate into stable responsible governm ent. It is not simply a m atter o f the form al constitu­ tional or institutional form: these form s, introduced on a wide scale after de-colonization, crum ple and collapse with astonishing rapidity when faced with a recalcitrant sociology. It is widely acknowledged now that successful functioning o f dem ocracy requires m ore than legal artifice; it requires sociological and historical conditions to operate and to take root. But that leads to the further vexed question about w hether such structures o f m odem sociability can be fashioned by external pressure. These problem s are discussed in som e o f the chapters in part II. We hope, through the example o f this volume, to suggest th at much m ore research is required in the com parative history o f ideas - which would require bringing together, in a com parative frame, historical studies o f ideas from the West and the contem porary T hird W orld. If globalization is to produce benevolent results, it is essential to build bridges through the understanding o f such problems.

Introduction: ideas o f civil society

7

A cknow ledgem ents

In putting together this collection, we have received generous help from m any friends. We thank the contributors for their support and great patience through long delays. John D unn helped us at all stages o f the project, from its original conception to its final stages, by giving advice and encouragem ent. We are grateful for the support and advice we have received a t various stages from Geoffrey H aw thorn. He, with John D unn, also helped us organize a w orkshop at K ing’s College, Cam bridge. The Nuffield F oundation gave a grant for the w orkshop. The D ep art­ m ents o f Politics at the School o f O riental and A frican Studies (SOAS) and o f Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College have given us support through the seminars. The Research Com m ittee at SOAS and the D epartm ent o f Politics and Sociology gave us an initial grant, and the SOAS research office a small grant for final word-processing. R ichard Fisher at Cam bridge University Press has been much tried by the process o f assembling this book for publication and we are grateful to him for his understanding and patience. T hanks too are due to Jean Field, for her alert copy-editing. Sadly, during the course o f the project we lost one of our most vital and intellectually engaging colleagues, Luis C astro Leiva. We dedicate this volum e to his memory.

Theoretical traditions in the West

1

The development of civil society Sunil Khilnani

Fugitive in its senses, the idea o f civil society infiltrates all efforts to assess the possibilities and threats revealed by the glacial political shifts at the turn o f the century. In a period o f rising political anim osities and m istrust, it has come to express a political desire for greater civility in social relations.1 M ore am bitiously, in light o f the m ounting unintellig­ ibility o f the politically created w orld, it names a desire for analytically m ore appropriate categories o f understanding. Invoked at the same time as the diagnosis and as the cure fo r current ills, deployed by conserva­ tives, liberals, and radical Utopians alike, by oppositional movem ents and by international aid donors, civil society has become an ideological rendezvous for erstwhile antagonists. It is cham pioned across the globe as ‘the idea o f the late twentieth century’.2 In the West, disillusion with the given ‘boundaries’ o f politics and with the restrictions o f w hat are seen as the increasingly decrepit processes o f party politics, has provoked interest in civil society as a m eans of rejuvenating public life.3 In the East, the term has come more narrow ly to mean - besides political and civil liberties - simply private property rights and m arkets.4 In the South, the collapse o f the theoretical models that

1 2 3

4

This chapter seeks to sketch the broad param eters o f recent discussions o f civil society. As such, it draws freely on a host o f published studies, as well as on the papers and discussions o f the Civil Society sem inar held jointly by the School o f Oriental and African Studies and Birkbeck College, University o f London. I am especially grateful to Sudipta Kaviraj for his help in thinking about the subject, and to Em ma Rothschild fo r her initial suggestion th at I should tackle it. Cf. V. Havel, ‘Politics, M orality, and Civility’, Summ er Meditations (London: Faber, 1992). N ational H um anities Center, The Idea o f a Civil Society (H um anities Research Center, Research Triangle Park, N orth Carolina, 1992), p. 1. See C. M aier (ed.). The Changing Boundaries o f the Political (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1987); J. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988); J. C ohen and A. A rato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cam bridge, M ass.: M IT Press, 1992); and for a somewhat different use o f the idea o f civil society, see P. Hirst, Associative Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). See P. G. Lewis (ed.), Democracy and Civil Society in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: M acmillan); E. H ankiss, Eastern European Alternatives (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

II

12

Sunil Khilnani

dom inated post-Second W orld W ar understandings o f politics there has given new currency to the idea o f civil society: intellectuals in India and in Latin America, in the M iddle E ast and in C hina, Africa and South East Asia, are all infusing new and complex life into the category.5 Inter­ national agencies and lenders to o have turned their attention to this idea. In an effort to accelerate and increase the efficiency o f developm ent tasks, they now seek ways to by-pass the central state and to assist directly w hat they identify as the constituents o f civil society: private enterprises and organizations, church and denom inational associations, self-employed w orkers’ co-operatives and unions, and the vast field o f N G O s, all have attracted external interest. They have come to be seen as essential to the construction o f w hat are assum ed to be the social preconditions for m ore accountable, public, and representative form s o f political pow er.6 T o all who invoke it, civil society incarnates a desire to recover for society powers - economic, social, expressive - believed to have been illegiti­ mately usurped by states. A lthough central to classical W estern political theory, the concept o f civil society was largely m oribund during the days when m odels o f stateled m odernization dom inated both liberal and M arxist conceptions of social change and developm ent. It was recovered during the late 1970s and 1980s, as these models disintegrated. Civil society seemed to prom ise som ething better and available: it was dem ocracy and prosperity, au to n ­ omy and the means to exercise it. Yet, in those regions th a t have emerged from authoritarian rule o r from close political regulation o f the economy - that is, in regions which seemed to have created w hat were assumed to be the preconditions for the emergence o f a civil society - the picture has been much darker. The com m on pattern has been the appearance o f a m ultiplicity o f non-negotiable identities and colliding self-righteous

1990); C. K ukathas, D. W. Lovell, and W. M alay, Transition fro m Socialism (M elbourne: Longm an Chesire, 1991): R. Rose. ‘Eastern Europe’s Need for a Civil Econom y’ (unpublished MS, 1992). 5 See M. A G arreton, ‘Political D em ocratisation in Latin America and the Crisis o f Paradigm s’, in J. M anor (cd.), Rethinking Third World Politics (Harlow: Longm ans, 1991). See also, for the Indian case, the work o f Rajni K othari: State Against Democracy (Delhi: A janta Publications. 1988); for the M iddle East, see Z ubaida’s chapter in this volume; for a discussion o f the Southern African case, see T. Ranger, ‘Civil Society in Southern Africa’, paper presented to Civil Society seminar, Birkbeck College and SOAS, London; for Sub-Saharan Africa, see the Introduction and J.-F. Bayart, ‘Civil Society in A frica’, in P. Chabal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1986). 6 See G. H aw thorn, ‘Sub-Saharan A frica’, in D. Held (ed.), Prospects fo r Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 343 and 354: see also W orld Bank, The Social Dimensions o f Structural Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa (W ashington: W orld Bank, 1989), cited by H aw thorn, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’.

The development o f civil society

13

beliefs, not a plural representation o f malleable interests. Civil society rem ains as distant and precarious an am bition as ever. Is it a coherent and possible one? As com m only understood today, is it an idea that may usefully guide and influence strategies designed to accomplish ‘transitions’? In the burgeoning literature on transitions, two models dom inate: on the one hand, a ‘shock-therapy’ model, which advocates the sudden institution of, for example, free m arkets in goods and services, and on the other hand, a ‘gradualist’ model, which stresses the im portance o f m aintaining stable political structures and which emphasizes the unintended results o f actions.7 The very notion o f ‘transition’ has, however, itself lost much o f its coherence: it implies a determ inate end-state, yet at no time since the establishm ent o f the professional social sciences has there been a weaker and m ore indeterm i­ nate conception o f w hat exactly populations and their territories are changing to, or can reasonably hope for.8 Can the category o f ‘civil society’ serve - as R alf D ah ren d o rf claimed - as the conceptual and practical ‘key’ to such transitions?9 Do the disparate uses o f the term am ount to a determ inate norm ative ideal? M ore im portantly, are there resources within the concept’s history, which can, for current conditions, relevantly specify the causal agencies and capacities needed to achieve and m aintain this ideal? Finally, does ‘civil society’ nam e a systemic entity, an institutional package, or is it most appropriately used to describe a particular set of hum an capacities and modes o f conduct, always only contingently available (even in places where it does, at present, happen to exist)? In contem porary discussions, there is no agreem ent about the proper location o f the sources o f civil society, sources which ought to and actually can restrain and m oderate the state. One response, which for convenience might be called a ‘liberal’ position, sees the effective powers o f civil society as basically residing in the economy, in property rights and m arkets where such rights may be freely exchanged. A nother view, a ‘radical’ position, locates civil society in a ‘society’ independent o f the economic dom ain and the state, where ideas are publicly exchanged, 7 Both o f these models can be found in A dam Sm ith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes o f the Wealth o f Nations (1776). the classic analysis o f the processes o f transition from pre­ commercial to commercial society. 8 Despite exhortations such as F. Fukuyam a. The End o f History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press. 1991). 9 R. D ahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (London: C hatto. 1990). p. 93. Cf. also J. Cohen and A. A rato, Civil Society and Political Theory, p. 2: ‘if we are to understand the dram atic changes occurring in Latin America and Eastern Europe in particular, the concept o f civil society is indispensable [especially] if we are to understand the stakes o f these “ transitions to dem ocracy” as well as the self-understanding o f the relevant actors’.

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associations freely form ed, and interests discovered. Finally, a ‘conserva­ tive’ position prefers to see it as residing in a set o f cultural acquisitions, in historically inherited m anners o f civility which m oderate relations between groups and individuals: unlike the previous two positions, adherents o f this view do not see these acquisitions as being necessarily universally available.10 Each o f these dom ains - economy, society, culture - is portrayed by its respective advocates as a dom ain o f special authenticity and efficacy which ought to limit the state, and which can accomplish more effectively w hat states have tried, often with pathetic success, to do for themselves. H istorical pedigrees may be found for each o f these views concerning the developm ent o f civil society, yet each also betrays a historical partiality and thinness. The purpose o f this chapter is to sketch some of the general them es o f this book, which hope to caution against such thinness and partiality, and to urge a richer historical sense upon all current efforts directed at the developm ent o f civil societies. The first part briefly considers three decisive m om ents in the historical developm ent of the concept: John Locke, the Scottish theorists o f commercial society, and Hegel. Each had distinct (if in some respects overlapping) visions, and each had a causal account o f how their vision m ight be secured. Their assum ptions may today appear im plausible; but contem porary advocates o f the idea o f civil society m ust at the very least m atch these causal am bitions. The second p a rt o f the chapter considers the signifi­ cance o f the category o f civil society, both as an analytic tool and as a critical, regulative principle for the politics o f the South. T aken at its boldest, the idea o f civil society em bodies the epic o f W estern m odernity: as such, it raises questions ab o u t the significance of the historical experience o f W estern politics for societies th at possess their own cultural and historical logics, yet which have by no means rem ained untouched by the peculiar W estern saga. Is the com bination o f liberal dem ocracy and civil society a necessary fate for inhabitants o f the m odern W est, b u t of little or no relevance to the E ast o r the South?11 In w hat respects might the experience o f the West be relevant to these regions? The point is not one about the replicability o f institutions and practices, in the m anner that m odernization theory once assumed was possible, but about the possibility o f identifying a com m on set of goals and purposes, perhaps 10 Cf. F. M ount, Times Literary Supplement, 15 O ctober 1.993: ‘the gram m ar o f civility has been neglected . . . it is the absence o f this m oral conversation - and the habitual acceptance o f personal obligations arising out of it - which we lam ent in the exCom m unist states o f C entral and E astern Europe: the way we put it is th at “ they lack civil society*' \ 11 J. G ray, Post-Liberalism (London: Routledge, 1993), chs. 14 and 20; and see my review article, The Political Quarterly, 64, no. 4 (1993), pp. 481-4.

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best described by the idea of political accountability.12 A ttem pts to strengthen ‘dem ocratization’ and political accountability have assumed that this can be accomplished through the introduction o f constitutions, competitive political parties, and m arkets and property rights. These are taken to constitute a coherent and stable mix for securing autonom y and prosperity, the m odem liberty th a t Benjamin C onstant characterized as the liberty to live as one pleases.13 But the category ‘civil society’ can introduce a new complexity and sharpness to assessments o f the difficul­ ties facing dem ocracy in the South, both in establishing preconditions and dealing with consequences. I In the early post-Second W orld W ar decades, the concept o f civil society received no significant attention in the West. It played no structural role in the argum ents during the 1950s o f liberal political theorists like Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talm on, or K arl Popper, all o f whom were defenders of liberal values and o f individual liberty and all o f whom wished to specify the proper sphere and limits o f political authority. Berlin, for example, in his classic essay, ‘Two C oncepts o f Liberty’, insisted that ‘a frontier must be draw n between the area o f private life and that o f public au th o rity ’: likewise Talm on, in distinguishing the liberal from the totalitarian conception o f dem ocracy, claimed that the form er ‘recognizes a variety of levels o f personal and collective endeavour, which are altogether outside the sphere o f politics’.14 Both vividly portrayed the dangers o f ‘absolute politics’, and both sought to circum scribe the boundaries o f politics: yet neither felt any particular need to invoke the idea o f civil society. D uring the same period, critics o f the Left likewise found the term o f little interest. M arxists, both orthodox and dissident, used it negatively: it was identified with ‘bourgeois society’, a realm o f contradiction and mystifica­ tion sustained by relations o f power. Civil society, understood as bourgeois society, was seen as the sphere o f needs, inextricably linked to the productive base o f capitalist society, and in need o f constant police and regulation by the state. M em bers o f the F rankfurt School, influenced

12 See J. Lonsdale. ‘Political A ccountability in African H istory', in P. Chabal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1986). 13 See B. C onstant, T h e Liberty o f the Ancients Com pared with that o f the M oderns’, in Political Writings, trans. and ed. by B. F ontana (Cambridge: C am bridge University Press, 1988). 14 I. Berlin, T w o Concepts o f Liberty' (1958), in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 124: and cf. p. 127, J. Talm on, The Origins o f Totalitarian Democracy (1952) (London, 1972 edn), p. 1.

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by L ukacs’s interpretation o f Hegel, saw the concept as a prism through which the contradictions and conflicts o f capitalism were refracted. The term played no role in critiques o f Left totalitarianism which stressed the distortions produced by unbridled state power: H erbert M arcuse, for example, m ade no use o f the category in his influential study o f Soviet Marxism. A serious revival o f the term did, however, begin on the Left. In the late 1960s, it gained popularity am ong radicals disaffected with M arxism. The existing structures o f Left politics (dom inated by C om m unist Parties) were rejected, in favour o f ‘social m ovem ents’ - these were seen as m ore authentic em bodim ents o f social dem ands and interests. Equally, the recovery o f A ntonio G ram sci’s w ork was a vital spur: his modifica­ tion o f the arrangem ents o f M arx’s schema o f base and superstructure gave the concept o f civil society - applied to W estern E urope - a wholly novel centrality.15 The consequence o f G ram sci’s relocation of civil society, at the level o f the superstructure, along with the state, and his claim that it was the site o f decisive struggle for hegemony, provoked a reorientation tow ards cultural critique. The term finally went into orbit during the late 1970s and 1980s, after its adoption by groups and intellectuals agitating against the authoritarian states and regimes in Eastern Europe (especially Poland) and Latin America. M ost recently, the idea o f civil society has appealed to those who wish to sustain the project o f a ‘post-m odern utopianism ’, to reconcile socialism and dem oc­ racy. In these usages, ‘civil society’ is employed to designate a conception richer than ‘constitutional representative dem ocracy’: it is seen as a supplem ent - and not a substitute - to the perceived illegitimacies o f this system. Conversely, it is also seen as a means o f establishing a more integrated relationship between socialism and dem ocracy.16 From this perspective, civil society is understood as a term that identifies the sociological underpinnings o f m odern democracy. It follows that the historic inability o f socialism to find a dem ocratic form for itself has come implicitly to be explained as largely a consequence o f its theoretical ignorance o f and practical antagonism tow ards civil society. F or Left radicals, it has thus become a handy term which at once both helps them to acclimatize to liberal political theory, and allows them to revive doctrines o f popular sovereignty. 15 See N . Bobbio, ‘Gram sci and the C onception o f Civil Society’, in Which Socialism? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). 16 Cf. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society, Cohen and A rato, Civil Society and Political Theory, and C. M ouffe (ed.), Dimensions o f Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992), which claims that such categories as civil society and citizenship can produce ‘a radicalization o f the m odem dem ocratic tradition’ (p. 1).

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These rediscoveries o f the idea o f civil society obscure its historical depth. A typical example o f such oversight is manifest in Jean C ohen and A ndrew A rato ’s large volume on the subject, which gives barely seven pages (out o f nearly 800) to consideration o f the pre-Hegelian idioms which bear on the idea of civil society.17 However, as the following chapters m ake clear, the languages o f R om an law, classical republi­ canism, Pufendorf and the natural law tradition, Locke, M ontesquieu, the theorists o f commercial society, as well as Hegel and the nineteenthcentury traditions o f civil associations and guild socialism, are all essential com ponents o f any historically informed understanding o f the idea. These different historical strands often cut against one another rather than com bining into a single continuous conceptual history. R estrictions in historical perspective have often prom oted confusion in contem porary understanding, which instinctively tends to define civil society in opposition to the state, and to propose a misleading zero-sum relation between the two. Civil society is not a new, post-H egelian concept. It is a m uch older term , which entered into English usage via the Latin translation, societas civilis, o f A ristotle’s koinonia politike. In its original sense, it allowed no distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’ or between political and civil society: it simply m eant a com m unity, a collection o f hum an beings united within a legitimate political order, and was variously rendered as ‘society’ or ‘com m unity’.18 It was Hegel who first bifurcated the concept, but in a way whereby state and civil society functioned in his account as redescriptions o f one an o th er.19 If civil society is defined in opposition to the ‘state’ then, as N orberto Bobbio has noted, ‘it is difficult to provide a positive definition o f “ civil society” because it is a question o f listing everything that has been left over, after limiting the sphere o f the state’. But such attem pts to substantialize definitions o f civil society are unhelpful. Civil society is not best thought o f as the theoretical specification o f a substantive model, which actual societies m ust then strive to approxim ate. Historically, the term has been defined in opposition to several antonym s. In the AngloScottish and French idioms that surround the term , civil society (along with cognate terms) was generally opposed to the condition o f despotism and barbarism , or to natural society.20 In these traditions, the problem of 17 Cohen and A rato, Civil Society and Political Theory. 18 See A. Black, this volume; and N. Bobbio, ‘Civil Society’, in Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 19 Hegel himself ignored the pre-m odern and natural law history of the concept, as well as its place in A ristotle’s Politics: see M. Reidel ‘ “ State” and “ Civil Society” : Linguistic Context and Historical O rigin’, in Between Tradition and Revolution (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press. 1984), pp. 133-4. 20 Cf. J. Starobinski, ‘Le M ot C ivilisation', Le Remede dans le m al (Paris: G allim ard, 1989).

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the appropriate boundaries between political and civil authority, between public and private, has tended to be discussed in a num ber o f political languages: rights, constitutionalism , mixed governm ent, the rule o f law, m arkets, and the division o f labour (all of which may be taken to provide part o f the content o f civil society). In the G erm an tradition, on the other hand, civil society has generally been situated in opposition either to com m unity or to the state.21 Three m om ents in the historical developm ent o f the term have been of particular significance: the ideas o f John Locke, the Scottish theorists of commercial society, and Hegel. F o r Locke, the fundam ental contrast defining a civil society was the state o f nature: a predicam ent in which deeply held individual beliefs ab o u t how to act collided, and where there could be no authoritative answer to the question, ‘who will be judge?’. A civil society was one purged as effectively as possible o f this condition.22 Locke made no separation between civil society, and political society - in no sense was civil society conceived o f as distinct from an entity termed ‘the state’. R ather, a civil society was a term accorded to a benign state, a legitimate political order. Locke, in John D u n n ’s words, ‘distinguished sharply between true civil societies in which governm ental pow er derives in m ore or less determ inate ways from the consent o f their citizens, and political units which possess at least equivalent concentrations o f coercive power but in which there is neither the recognition nor the reality o f any dependence o f governm ental pow er upon popular consent’.23 The Lockean conception o f a legitimate political order, however, was vastly different from ou r own post-H obbesian conception o f the state as an im personal structure o f authority. C om m itted to a strongly individualist conception, Locke saw political legitimacy as founded upon unbroken chains o f personal trust. A legitimate political society was one in which the m odality o f hum an interaction was trust: trust was not a variably chosen strategy, contingent upon circum stances, but the very premise of such an order. Both rulers and ruled conceived o f governm ental pow er as a trust, and the psychic relation between ruled and rulers was governed by relations o f trust. As D unn has em phasized, w hat m ust strike us about Locke’s conception was his willingness to entangle two issues which m odern traditions of political understanding com m only treat as radically disparate: ‘the psychic and practical relations between individual citizens 21 Ferdinand Tonnies, Gemeinschaft unci Gesellschaji (Leipzig, 1887), is the classic statem ent o f this distinction. See J. Samples. ‘K ant, Tonnies and the Liberal Idea o f C om m unity in G erm an Sociology’, History o f Political Thought, vol. 8, no. 2 (1987), pp. 245-62. 22 J. D unn, this volume. 23 J. D unn, T ru s t and Political Agency’, in D. G am betta (ed.), Trust (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 83.

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across the space o f private life, and the structural relations between bureaucratic governm ents and the subjects over whom they rule’.24 He wished above all to resist the depersonalization and dem oralization of political authority which he saw as characteristic o f his times. In contrast to the state o f nature, Locke understood civil society as a condition where there exist know n standing laws, judges, and effective powers o f enforcem ent. Such a condition was necessarily a skilled and precarious political achievement: it did not in any way represent the truth of a developm ental process or a theoretical system. F or Locke, ‘a civilized society was not an essentially systemic entity: it was simply an aggre­ gation o f civilized hum an beings’, that is, a society o f hum an beings who had succeeded in disciplining their conduct.25 If there was to be any possibility o f securing a civilized society, certain minimal conditions were clearly necessary: these included a representative political order, a system of private property rights, and toleration of freedom o f worship (although this did not, for Locke, extend to freedom o f speech or to toleration o f atheism ).26 The creation o f such a civilized habitat could also, no doubt, in part be helped by processes of socialization, by the inculcation o f a ‘penal conception o f the self’.27 But such processes could never be com prehensive or entirely successful, for Locke ‘saw no reas­ suring array o f autom atic m echanism s, either within the individual hum an psyche, in a hum an society at large, or in the organization of people’s productive activities, th a t ensured the provisions o f such benefit’.28 Unlike m any later theorists, Locke gave no primacy to some special mechanism - for example, the m arket or the division o f labour which could engender and sustain a civilized society. Furtherm ore, such a society was not one where individuals were at liberty to live as they pleased: rather, it was a space where individuals could fulfil the injunc­ tions o f the C hristian G od. W hat ultim ately held hum an beings together

24 Ibid., pp. 8 3 -4 . 25 J. D unn, ‘ “ Bright Enough F o r All O u r Purposes” : John Locke’s Conception o f a Civilized Society’, Notes and Records o f the Royal Society, 43 (1980), pp. 133-53. 26 F o r a discussion o f what to us m ust appear as Locke’s restrictive conception of toleration, see J. D unn. ‘The Claim to Freedom o f Conscience: Freedom o f Speech. Freedom o f Thought, Freedom o f W orship?’, in O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 171-93: also J. Tully, ‘Locke’, in J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (eds.). The Cambridge H istory o f Political Thought 1450—1700 (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 649-52. 27 See the interpretation o f Locke in J. Tully, ‘Governing C onduct’, in E. Leites (ed.). Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: C am bridge University Press. 1988), pp. 1 2 -7 1 .' 28 D unn, ‘ “ Bright Enough F o r All O ur Purposes” . . . ’

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in the form o f a civil society, a com m unity, was this shared conviction of their terrestrial purposes. A m ore secular response to the problem o f civil society conceived o f as a m oral com m unity was proposed by the theorists o f commercial society. The language o f commercial society emerged during the eighteenth century, as an attem pt to resolve the m ounting difficulties confronting the C hristian answer to the problem o f com m unity.29 It claimed to show how those very processes w ithin m odern societies which critics of comm ercial society assum ed w ould underm ine the hope for a virtuous com m unity were in fact creating new solidarities, which enabled a new form o f society. This was a form o f hum an association held together by interdependencies o f need - the fundam ental m odality o f hum an inter­ action here was not trust, but need. The nature o f these interdependencies established the necessity o f society and the dynamics o f this process was now captured by the concept o f ‘civilization’, which described a progress­ ive developm ent o f hum an capacities and ‘m anners’. Crucial to the viability o f such a society was a com m itm ent to an effective system of justice, embodied in law and upheld by political authority. This governed the possibility o f effective m arkets, which both fulfilled existing needs while continually generating new ones, and whose dynam ism allowed a steady refinement of civility. However, as the early theorists o f this view were careful to insist, a commercial society was not held together simply by relations o f utility and rational self-interest. In fact it produced and sustained a realm of hum an interaction and relationship which precisely was not governed by necessitudo, need. This was the realm o f private friendship and free interpersonal connections, of m orals, affections, and sentiments. C on­ trary to later critics who bem oaned the destructive effects o f commerce and exchange upon ‘com m unity’, in the view o f the theorists o f com m er­ cial society hum an association was actually enriched by the introduction o f voluntariness and choice, which enabled persons to come together in an arena freed from the grip o f dependencies o f need. F o r A dam Smith, for example, in pre-com mercial societies all hum an social relations were pervaded by exchange relationships: it was only comm ercial societies that had successfully instituted a distinction between the realms o f m arket exchange and personal relations. A ccording to Smith, commercial soci­ eties at once circumscribed the realm o f need, consigning it to the m arket, and sim ultaneously created a sphere o f non-instrum ental hum an rela­ tions, governed by ‘natural sym pathy’, the m oral affections. Comm ercial 29 See I. H ont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping o f Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cam bridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1983).

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societies thus m ade possible a higher form o f hum an association, based not upon exclusive and non-voluntary relations (like fictitious kinship bonds or patron-client relations - both forms o f hum an relation typical o f pre-com mercial societies). In such trading societies, strangers were no longer im ponderable and threatening presences: instead, one found here ‘authentically indifferent co-citizens - the sort o f indifference that enables one to m ake contracts with all’. T he dispersed existence o f such ‘indiffer­ ent strangers’ defined the new m oral order as a generalized civil society and reinforced (rather than weakened) it, functioning in this way like the m arket in the econom y.30 The dissolution o f older, m ore intense and exclusive ties by the universalism o f sym pathy was vital to the m ovem ent from barbarity and rudeness to politeness and polish, and it was essential to the creation o f the new m oral sense required by the emergent commercial society.31 Comm ercial society was thus at once a social and economic order as well as a m oral order - both being the products o f the unintended collective outcom e o f private actions. This model o f universal sociability was able to generate an independent social self-cohesiveness and consistency, collectively beneficial and self-regulating, which could serve to replace the forms of governance associated with pre-com mercial social institutions. But it was vital to Sm ith’s purposes to stress that the practical achievement o f this m odel was an unintended outcom e o f hum an actions. The point has been well put by Allan Silver: [T]he moral order, like the wealth of nations, is continuously created by an indefinitely large number of acts as people encounter each other in a field defined not by institutions or tradition, but their own interactions. The causal texture of both branches of Smith’s theory, the economic and the social, is identical: desirable aggregate outcomes are the unintended result of an infinity of smallscale exchanges and interactions by ordinary persons. In both, the outcome is other and ‘better’ than those intended by ordinary persons. Self-interest in the market increases the wealth of all: sociability sustains a universal morality from which all benefit.32 F or the theorists o f commercial society, social practices and institutions from the intim ate connections o f m arriage and the family, to the wider web o f property, and governm ent - were to be understood not purely in term s o f utility, o f their social function, but o f the sentim ents which anim ated them. In place o f the C hristian conception o f a universal com m unity held together by fear of w hat the afterlife may bring, the eighteenth-century Scottish theorists substituted a wholly secular model 10 A. Silver, ‘Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and M odem Sociology’, American Journal o f Sociology, vol. 95, no. 6 (1990), pp. 1474-504, at pp. 1482-3. 31 Ibid., p. 1488. 32 Ibid., p. 1492.

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o f the m oral order, which saw it ‘as created by natural social interac­ tions’.33 Com m ercial society, by enabling the emergence o f this new type of relationship governed by natural sym pathy, integrated individuals into larger societies, and connected them successively to m ore inclusive groups. Only in such societies could friendship potentially become a universal relation that m ight connect all: im personal m arkets thus had the unintended but beneficial m oral effect o f allowing private social relations to be formed, free from the im peratives o f rational self-interest and utility.34 From this perspective the existence o f ‘strong’ and intense social ties as opposed to ‘w eak’ ones, which often appear in locations where the state is weak and ineffective (for example, am ong the con­ tem porary urban poor), m ight be viewed as a retreat tow ards exclusive and involuntary relations based on need: th at is to say, as relations characteristic o f pre-com mercial societies rather than o f a civil society. A distinct point, which follows from the conception o f social relations in commercial societies as possessed o f a voluntary dim ension, manifest in the bond o f friendship, is relevant here. The consequences o f the commercial society model for political loyalty and allegiance was seen early by M ontesquieu, in his discussion of the special character of individual liberty in E ngland.35 A ccording to M ontesquieu, the spirit of independence and individual liberty, characteristic o f commercial soci­ eties produced not isolation and social solipsism, but a new type o f public moeurs: it enabled a filigree o f relations between individuals to emerge, which endowed social relations with an independent consistency. This social self-cohesiveness could act as a restraining barrier on political power. It produced (and here M ontesquieu cited by way o f example the English structure o f party politics) a self-equilibrating system, which allowed no single party or branch o f governm ent to gain enduring dom inance. This system was founded on the idea o f the m utability of political loyalties: ‘as each individual, always independent, would largely follow his own caprices and fantasies, he would often change parties: he would abandon one and leave all his friends in order to bind him self to another in which he would find all his enemies: and often, in this nation, he could forget both the laws o f friendship and those o f h atred ’.36 This portrayal o f the agitation o f social interaction within a commercial society, and o f the regular reconfiguration o f political groups into diverse 33 Ibid., p. 1493. 34 Ibid., p. 1494. 35 M ontesquieu, Spirit o f the Laws (Cambridge: C am bridge University Press, 1989), bk. 19, ch. 27. See B. M anin, ‘The Typologies o f Civil Society’, paper presented to Civil Society seminar, SOAS and Birkbeck College, U niversity o f London. 36 M ontesquieu, Spirit o f the Laws, p. 326.

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and transient m ajorities, carries an im portant contem porary lesson, o f special relevance to those countries o f the South where m ajoritarian conceptions o f democracy, based on perm anent and therefore indefeas­ ible m ajorities, threaten to underm ine the very point o f dem ocratic politics. Hegel is the pivotal figure in shaping contem porary understandings of the idea o f civil society. Hegel’s question, recognizably continuous with th at o f Locke and the theorists o f comm ercial society, concerned the possibility o f creating and sustaining a com m unity under m odem condi­ tions. It was in response to this problem that he introduced the distinction between the ‘state’ and ‘civil society’. His solution tried to integrate the individual freedom s specified by the natural law tradition (from H obbes to R ousseau and K ant) with a rich vision o f com m unity, existing under conditions o f m odern exchange. Influential interpreters such as M anfred Riedel have emphasized the novelty o f Hegel’s redefinition o f civil society: he no longer used it as a synonym for political society, but defined it on the one hand as distinct from the family, and on the other (and m ost crucially) from the state.37 Riedel has claimed th at for Hegel civil society was the realm o f instrum ental relations between atom ized and isolated individuals, an arena governed by utility. This was a realm devoid o f m oral qualities, which required m anagem ent by external principles: the corporations, and the ‘police’. Yet, as G areth Stedm an Jones argues, such an interpretation misses Hegel’s purposes.38 F or Hegel, civil society was not the object o f criticism and antagonism , nor was it one which required external m anagem ent. On the contrary, it embodied an intrinsically valuable acquisition: it was the space where the higher principle o f m odern subjectivity could emerge and flourish. But w hat was lacking, and w hat Hegel sought to provide, was an adequate conceptualization o f this sphere, one which was richer than th at found in the natural law tradition, which to Hegel gave too m uch prom inence to the instrum entalities em bodied in the contract. Hegel’s conception o f civil society derived from the attem pt to incorpo­ rate w hat he saw as valuable in m odern natural law - above all, the conception o f m odern liberal individual freedoms - with a vision of m oral and political life, the Sittlichkeit o f com m unity. He arrived at his conception by two means: a revaluation o f the concept o f labour, whereby he came to emphasize its expressive rather than instrum ental significance: and a revaluation o f individual subjectivity, which he came to see as based on the dynamics o f m utual recognition. C ontrary to the 37 See M. Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation o f Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1984). 38 G . Stedm an Jones, this volume.

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assertions o f natural law theorists, civil society was not the product o f the social institution o f natural drives and instincts (for H obbes, this was the instinct for self-preservation; fo r R ousseau it was natural inclination). F or Hegel, civil society was not merely the system o f needs, but equally the sphere o f recognition. It was a horizontally rather than a vertically organized model. It enabled the possibility o f identification between persons, and enabled connections o f m utuality, based on rights and duties: it em bodied rationally grounded norm s which determ ined conduct and which required active inculcation. The rational self that inhabited civil society was not, for Hegel, a natural given (as natural law theorists tended to assume), nor could it be engendered as a simple by­ product o f the instrum ental relations o f the m arket and contract. It could only emerge through institutionally m ediated cultural and historical processes o f interaction, through, above all, processes o f social recogni­ tion. It was com m unity itself th at was the source - and not the outcom e o f self-conscious rational being. The system o f possession, property, and exchange, universalized across civil society, was an instantiation o f this web o f recognition, and this universality was m ade explicit and itself recognized in the state. The state was thus not an externally imposed construct, but rather the ratification o f a pre-existing entity.39 In this way, Hegel proposed a solution to the C hristian problem o f comm unity: he claimed to have produced a political equivalent of the C hristian com m unity, united not by fear o f G od but by belief in the divinity o f the political com m unity itself (like Locke, Hegel too ruled out the possibility o f atheism: all had to profess som e belief). II From this brief and hasty preview o f some o f the argum ents to be found in this volume, some lines o f inquiry relevant to current efforts to develop civil societies suggest themselves. These may help to recognize what conditions or capacities are necessary to reduce the chances o f a complete breakdow n o f civility, a reversion to the state o f nature. First, civil society is not best thought o f as a substantive category, as em bodying a set o f determ inate institutions which exist distinct from o r in opposition to the state, and which m ight be supposed to possess causal independence from the state. An historical perspective should serve to w arn against all theoretical models which, for example, posit ‘civil society’ as a distinct entity th at throw s up ‘inputs’ o r ‘dem ands’ that the state m ust then service and accom m odate (failing which, a ‘crisis o f governability’ is said 39 Ibid.

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to occur).40 Second, a necessary association between civil society and a specific political form - for example, liberal dem ocracy - cannot be assumed. It may well be that a viable liberal dem ocratic political order is not possible in the absence o f a civil society; but, as the East Asian cases m ake clear, civil societies can live w ithout liberal dem ocracy.41 T hird, it follows that civil society is m ost usefully thought o f as identifying a set of hum an capacities, m oral and political. There is little reason to think that we can have a theoretical model which explains retrospectively and guides prospectively the ‘transition’ to a situation where hum an beings may have such capacities. U nderstood thus, civil society is not a determ inate end-state, nor can it ever be a secure acquisition for any group o f hum an beings. This provokes a fourth point, which concerns the notion o f unintendedness. F or the Scottish theorists o f the eighteenth century, the emergence o f com m ercial society could be explained as the unintended outcom e o f num erous individual actions, undertaken for different purposes.42 ‘Every step and every m ovem ent o f the m ultitude’, A dam Ferguson wrote, ‘even in w hat are termed enlightened ages, are m ade with equal blindness to the future: and nations stum ble upon establishm ents, which are indeed the result o f hum an actions, but not the creation o f hum an design’.43 F or any prospective inquiry which seeks to specify conditions and actions which could effectively produce a ‘tran ­ sition’ to a particular desired outcom e (elsewhere originally produced unintentionally), there is a difficulty here which may be logically insur­ m ountable. It is impossible to replicate the initial conditions o f action: we now know the outcom e desired, and we now act intentionally to bring it about. However, the consequence o f such present actions, intended tow ards a specific end, may in fact produce yet another unintended outcom e (alternatively, we may pretend to act unintentionally; but this too cannot replicate precisely the initial conditions).44 Nevertheless, are there certain preconditions or prerequisites relevant 40 For an account which brings out som ething o f the historical specificity o f this way o f conceiving the relations between state and society, see A. Silver, “ T r u s t” in Social and Political T heory', in G . D. Suttles and M. N . Zald (eds.), The Challenge o f Social Control (N orw ood, N.J.: Ablex, 1985), pp. 52-67. This perspective on state-society relations, characteristic o f ‘systems theory', is implicit in much of the political science literature on development: see, for example, A. Kohli, Democracy and Disorder: India's Crisis o f Governability (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1990). 41 Cf. J. G ray, Post-Liberalism (London: R outledge, 1993), p. 203: ‘Civil society m ay exist and flourish under a variety o f political regimes, o f which liberal dem ocracy is only one’; G ray, however, sustains this point with an argum ent different from mine. 42 See A. O. Hirschm an, ‘Rival Views o f M arket Society’, Rival Views o f M arket Society and Other Essays (New York: Viking, 1986). 43 A. Ferguson. An Essay on the H istory o f Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1768, 2nd edn), p. 187. 44 I am indebted for this form ulation o f the point to Sudipta Kaviraj.

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to the developm ent o f the hum an capacities associated with civil society? W hat follows is a tentative and provisional set o f considerations (m ade in awareness o f A lbert H irschm an’s w arning against the pitfalls o f trying to fasten on im m utable preconditions and prerequisites).45 First, civil society presupposes a concept o f ‘politics’: a conception which both specifies the territorial and constitutional scope o f politics, and recognizes an arena or set o f practices which is subject to regular and punctual publicity, which provides a terrain upon which com peting claims may be advanced and justified. T hat is, it presupposes a conception o f politics th at embodies a com m on sense o f its purposes, a sense o f w hat it is that individuals and groups are competing fo r , o f why they have associated and agreed to com pete and disagree. This need not exclusively take the form of, say, participation in the electoral practices o f representative democracy, premised on the expansion o f a conception o f the citizenry. It can involve different and ‘inform al’ ways o f entering and acting within the arena o f politics.46 In this respect, even in situations o f great social heterogeneity, politics can function not simply to entrench social division, but it can act as a cohesive practice.47 A conception o f politics held in com m on can encourage potential antagonists to become participants in a com m on ‘gam e’, and require them to justify their claims and demands: a point well dem onstrated by A. C. M ilner, who in his study o f politics in M alaysia has argued that ‘politics, perhaps quite unintentionally as far as its practitioners are concerned, m ay possibly be prom oting an elem ent of unity in a much divided society’.48 W here such conceptions are unavailable, or where there are deeply divided beliefs about the point o f politics, the possibility o f civil society is endangered. An example o f the first kind is sub-Saharan A frica.49 Here 45 See A. O. Hirschm an, ‘The Search for Paradigm s as a H indrance to U nderstanding’, World Politics 32 (April 1970), 329-43. 46 F o r interpretations which give centrality to the form ation and expansion o f a citizenry, through the incorporation o f larger and larger num bers into electoral practices, see for example E. M organ, Inventing the People: The Rise o f Popular Sovereignty in England and America (London: N orton, 1988): and the articles on E urope and Latin America in Quaderni storici, no. 69 (1988). F o r a quite different argum ent, which stresses the im portance o f ‘inform al' means, such as the expansion o f the press and proliferation of associations, in constituting a 'public sphere’, see H. Sabato, ‘Citizenship, Political Participation, and the Form ation o f the Public Sphere in Buenos Aires 1850s- 1880s’, Past and Present, no. 136 (1992), pp. 139-63. 47 F o r an illum inating theoretical discussion of this point, see A. Pizzom o, ‘On the Individualistic Theory o f Social O rd er’, in P. Bourdieu and J. Colem an (eds.), Social Theory fo r a Changing Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991) esp. p. 225. 48 A. C. M ilner, ‘Inventing Politics: T he Case o f M alaysia’, Past and Present, no. 132 (1991), pp. 104-29, at p. 104. 49 See J.-F. Bayart, ‘Civil Society in A frica’, in P. C habal (ed.), Political Domination in Africa (Cambridge: Cam bridge U niversity Press, 1986).

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states and their politics have been deeply unstable, and the people who live in these areas seem caught in cycles o f authoritarian and despotic rule. As interpreted by Jean-Frangois Bayart, the fundam ental explana­ tion o f this is the absence o f any ‘organization principle’ for a civil society. ‘There is’, B ayart notes, ‘no com m on cultural fram e o f reference between dom inant and dom inated, and sometimes not even am ong the dom inated’.50 In the absence o f such shared conceptual m aps (the lack o f which B ayart blames in part on the evasions o f A frican intellectuals), the possibility o f devising unitary political capabilities is precluded. But to some, the fact that there are indeed m any particular social actors peasantries and so on - who rem ain outside politics provides also a glimmer o f hope: it is precisely the local form s o f association, and the ‘cultures o f accountability’ which exist am ong such actors, which may provide possible sources for advance tow ards dem ocracy.51 Some have pointed to an analogous difficulty - the absence o f a com m on conceptual m ap - in the Indian case, though it has arisen by a very different process. Here the point is not that such a com m on fram e o f reference never existed; it is, rather, th a t rival conceptions have entered into lethal confrontation. T o construct and sustain such a com m on frame o f reference is evidently a constant and effortful task, and some have laid the blame for the abdication o f this task on the shoulders o f the N ehruvian elite which dom inated the Indian state during the decades immediately after independence.52 In the Indian case too, an intellectual and conceptual failure has been identified as explaining the breakdow n of dom estic civility. The consequences o f this conceptual neglect have become m ost apparent in recent decades. The rapid and large-scale entry o f agrarian groups into state and national-level politics during the 1980s has had a massive im pact on the conduct o f parliam entary politics in India.53 It has highlighted the chasm which exists between elite and vernacular universes o f discourse, and it questions the possibility o f creating an Indian civil society. An initial condition for a civil society, then, is the availability o f a shared conceptual m ap which describes a collectivity (constituted by, say, ‘citizens’) and provides them with com prehensible (and plausible) conceptual categories which they can use 50 Ibid., p. 117. 51 H aw thorn, ‘Sub-Saharan A frica’, esp. pp. 344-5. 52 Cf. S. K aviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’, in J. M anor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (Harlow: Longm an, 1991), pp. 9 0 -1 : ‘In retrospect, [the Nehruvian elites’] basic failure seems to have been the nearly total neglect o f the question o f the cultural reproduction o f society . . . it neglected the creation o f a com m on thicker weness (som ething that was a deeper sense o f com m unity than merely com m on opposition to the British) and the creation o f a single political language for the entire polity.’ 53 See A. Sen, ‘The T hreats to Secular India’, The New York Review o f Books, 8 April 1993.

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to shape their dealings with one another (‘rights’, 'duties’, ‘parties’, ‘interests’, ‘secularism ’, ‘law’, and so on). H ere one might adopt the distancing gaze o f Michel Foucault (although it does n ot follow th at one need share all his suspicions), and think o f civil society as a set of practices which renders hum an beings governable: th at is, as a technique o f governance.54 A second precondition that a civil society appears to require is the presence of a particular type o f self: one th at is m utable, able to conceive o f interests as transient, and able to change and to choose political loyalties and public affiliations. Such a self m ust possess the capacity of being open to discursive persuasion and deliberation, and be able to see his or her interests not as pre-given and pre-defined.55 It m ust, that is, be a corrigible self, one that can conceive o f a distinction or gap between its own identity and its interests. This is not necessarily a liberal conception o f the individual self (although it is obviously not unrelated to such a conception). In liberal conceptions, civil society seems to require the presence o f a particular type o f individual, a rational and interestmaximizing being, who possesses pre-given economic interests which await release and fulfilment. Y et this view o f a self or individual guided by rational self-interest is excessively reductive: it would be more useful to speak o f a self that is constituted and guided by ‘civilized self-interest’ - a conception which values restraint. The intim ate link between the idea o f civil society and individualism which liberal political theory insists upon rem ains in fact a profoundly unstable relation, since individualism is itself one o f the sources which can threaten and underm ine the possibility o f civil society. On the other hand, the loyalties o f traditional com m unities can also threaten and underm ine. In the non-liberal societies o f the South, where individualism is n o t developed and where family and com m unity struc­ ture have only rarely and interm ittently enabled the construction o f a private self, a central difficulty facing the possibility o f civil society is the presence o f identitarian solidarities o f a sub-national character: that is, solidarities whose prim ary purpose is to secure recognition o f identity, and whose claims are hence absolute and indivisible. Here the category o f citizenship is conventionally introduced, despite the fact th at m odern political theory and practice has repeatedly highlighted the incoherence and instability of this notion. On the one hand the supposed advantages and qualities o f citizenship are underm ined by individualism .56 Jean Leca 54 See M. Foucault, Resume des cours 1970-1982 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989), pp. 112-13. 55 See B. M anin, ‘On Legitimacy and Political D eliberation’, Political Theory 15 (1987), pp. 338-68. 56 Cf. A. Seligman, The Idea o f Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992), esp. chapter 3.

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has sum m arized the com m on account o f how this happens as follows: the individual, w hatever his or her origins, is recognized as o f value, and so citizenship is extended to all who live within a territory: as a claim to control, especially over the spheres o f private and cultural life, it prom pts the individual citizen to m ake m ore claims and so extends the scope o f citizenship. However, this widening o f scope, com bined with the develop­ ment o f im personal mechanisms and abstract trust systems like the m arket, money, large organizations, and bureaucracy, induces feelings o f im potence and encourages the decline o f public sense am ong citizens. U nable to understand collective m echanism s and w ithdrawing from civic participation, the individual citizen now gives priority to one dem and over all else and all others, and pursues satisfaction o f it: ‘from being a vision o f the destiny o f the city, the political becomes the system of m ediation o f the m ost divergent social dem ands, and the private takes preccdence over the public as the goal o f citizenship activity, as the public takes precedence over the private as a m ode o f resource allocation’.57 On the other hand, widening the scope o f citizenship can corrode the quality o f civility (distinct from ‘civic sense’), a quality vital in situations o f social heterogeneity. Civility allows a degree of m utual recognition between individuals o f different social groups. But as Leca puts it, ‘Civility, which is essential to citizenship, can, paradoxically, be better m aintained when citizenship itself does not exist’ - that is, when different com petitive logics exist. Take the case o f India, with its peculiar form o f social pluralism . Prior to the emergence of a unitary state, and the requirem ent that this be constituted by particular types o f individual, by ‘citizens’, society here was constituted by groups (defined by complex perm utations of religious belief, caste position, and so on). These were situated in positions o f adjacency to one another, pursuing different goals by different logics.58 This was a distinctive, non-liberal form o f pluralism. But the intensifying struggle for goods and resources which are dispensed by the state and are linked to citizenship (such as secure state em ploy­ ment, education, and so on), within a nation which has very differentiated social groupings and great econom ic disparities, can destroy civility, as it disaggregates existing groups and reconstitutes them as political agents. In such situations civility is m aintained either where groups retain their separate identities and the ability to pursue their own purposes by their own logics, or where ideological form s such as nationalism can create political com m unities that are culturally hom ogeneous (or at least elites who share a political im agination). 57 J. Leca, ‘Individualism and Citizenship’, in P. Bim baum and J. Leca (eds.). Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 161-2. 58 S. Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and D iscourse’.

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A third, equally problem atic, precondition is an institutionalized dispersal of social power. This is usually accomplished by m eans o f a legal structure o f property rights, and a system o f m arkets where such rights can be exchanged, as well as by legal recognition o f political associations and voluntary agencies. But there is a double exigency here, since in order to achieve such a dispersal o f power, a strong and effective state is also needed: one that has precisely the capacity neutrally to enforce law and to regulate social interaction. Indeed, such a Rechtstaat or legal-constitutional state m ight in some capacity wish - and need - to regulate the accum ulations o f social power which m arkets can also encourage. This range o f divergent requirem ents em bodies a dilem m a that faces all those states in both the East and the South which seek to negotiate ‘transitions’ to dem ocratic and m arket systems - which hope to establish both dem ocracy and capitalism . In the South, ‘civil society’ has come alm ost exclusively to mean all those forces and agencies which oppose the state and its efforts at regulation: it has been used to describe agents and practices which wish to ‘recapture’ areas o f life from the state. Yet, as the contributions to this volume m ake clear, this stark opposition between civil society and state is not the m ost helpful one. If conceived in this way, as nam ing a kind o f spontaneous order set ap art from the structures o f the state, then civil society drifts tow ards political indeterm inacy. It may, for example, be used to affirm a conception o f a liberal Rechtstaat which can act to restrain w hat are taken to be pernicious aspects and practices o f the state itself. But, besides this secular and liberal view, it can also be appropriated by those wishing to legitimate distinctly non­ liberal goals and practices. Indeed, in this m anner the appeal to civil society may be nothing less th an a dem and that the state be subordinated to a civil society which is proposed as a terrain o f authenticity and special intim acy, one uncontam inated by governm ent and located outside its regulation. As Sami Z ubaida shows in his discussion o f Egypt, for instance, two drastically opposed conceptions o f civil society circulate in critical intellectual discourse, a ‘secular-liberal’ and an ‘Islamic-comm unal’ one: and they do not stand in a symmetrical relation to dem o­ cratic politics.59 The first presses the case for legal recognition o f voluntary civil associations (political parties, unions, pressure groups). The second delimits as ‘civil society’ a space o f practices and activities unregulated by the ‘legal-constitutional’ state, but which conform s to interpretations o f Islamic tenets: it wishes to develop a rich system o f

59 See S. Zubaida, this volume.

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religious, com m unal, and business netw orks, an ‘Islamic sector’ o f the econom y and society. New states have had enorm ous dem ands placed on them simultaneously: to ensure their own security, to legitimate themselves through the practices o f m odern dem ocratic politics, and to tend to the welfare o f their citizens. In older states, such dem ands have been lodged sequen­ tially, not simultaneously. O n occasion, new states have been altogether extinguished by the weight o f these dem ands or, m ore usually, they have succumbed to despotic am bitions. States in the South are characterized by a political oddity: although they may be accorded all the trappings o f fully sovereign states, they are often unable to exercise control and com m and over their own populations and territories: domestically, they are deeply ineffective.60 To its original historical exponents, civil society represented a m oral com m unity, a legitim ate political order. In situations where m any states in the South are ‘quasi-states’, modelling relations between state and civil society in term s o f an opposition between the two can be misleading, obscuring the ways in which civil society, far from designating a world o f spontaneous arrangem ents, is in fact constitutively interm eshed with the state. In m any such locations, it is precisely the absence o f an effective state th a t leaves hum an beings in w hat are approxim ations to the state o f nature. In the South, it is certain capacities o f the state which sim ultaneously require both developm ent and m odera­ tion: they require developm ent precisely in ways which are self-m oder­ ating, self-limiting. The extent and kind o f civil society which one is likely to find in such areas - w hether religious and com m unal or secular, w hether constituted by groups seeking inclusion in or separation from the state - will as Geoffrey H aw thorn has argued, directly vary with and depend on the nature and success o f the state in question.61 To focus, for example, on ‘social m ovem ents’ which exist outside ‘high politics’ and the party system as the crucial agent for the creation o f a civil society and ‘dem ocratization’ yields an overly partial perspective. Political legitimacy under current conditions is usually accorded to states where the chance to exercise state powers is decided by periodic electoral com petition between political parties. M odern political parties, although they have generally shown little success in being able to m aintain themselves as durable structures o f trust, are a crucial point o f articula­ tion between civil society and the state. They have an am phibious status, existing on both terrains: they represent each to the other. Classical ideas 60 See R. H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third W orld(Cambridge: Cam bridge U niversity Press, 1990). 61 G. H aw thorn, this volume.

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o f civil society contained a conception o f how it was represented politically, and this m ust rem ain essential to any plausible modern versions o f the idea. C orporations, associations, political parties - all are units which aggregate individuals, which achieve unitary political form, and which possess unitary political capabilities. Y et recent advocates o f the idea o f civil society altogether eschew discussion o f political parties, in favour o f an exclusive focus on social m ovem ents.62 A lthough this is perhaps a perspective peculiar to American radicals, it is by no m eans restricted to them, and it avoids questions about the abilities o f social movements to secure both stable and durable institutional form and to em body self-limiting properties: if they are to govern, w hat governs them? C urrent understandings o f civil society invariably see it as essentially a category o f dom estic political space. The term is used to identify and privilege agencies - m arkets, social movem ents, cultures - whose effective political causality is heavily local. Yet every local and domestic space, every nation-state, is today rocked by causalities which escape its bounds and which condition the possibility o f its continuing viability as a habitat for civil hum an relations. In the task o f developing viable and durable dem ocratic politics in the South, the idea of civil society is hardly a selfsufficing one, let alone a fundam ental ‘key’. It is best thought o f as a com plicating term, one that em bodies a range o f historical idioms intended to establish a legitim ate political order. Recovering its rich and unshapely forms in the history o f W estern political thinking can help to clarify why the project o f constructing and sustaining dem ocracy today is so vexed, why it can never be merely a question o f introducing form s of competitive politics, or o f establishing m arkets. A ttention to the histor­ ical developm ent o f the concept o f civil society identifies a host o f requirem ents (not specified merely in institutional terms), precariously available at the best of times, which are necessary to develop and sustain civil hum an relations in developing societies. 62 See Cohen and A rato, Civil Society am i Political Theory.

2

Concepts of civil society in pre-modern Europe Antony Black

One m ust distinguish categorically between the term ‘civil society’ in pre­ modern or pre-Hegelian Europe and the mental and social phenom ena associated with the term ‘civil society’ today. The term societas civilis was derived by pre-m odern Europeans from C icero’s definition o f the state {civitas) as a partnership in law (societas) with equality o f legal status, but not o f money o r talent, am ong its m em bers.1 It became a generic term for a secular legal and political order, as distinct from a primitive society, or again from ecclesiastical society. There is evidence that w hat we understand by civil society - a nexus o f relatively free individuals and groups w ithout reference to the state - did exist in Europe from (at the very latest) the twelfth century, in people’s language, preferences and behaviour, especially in towns. It was an aspiration expressed in both popular consciousness and academic writing. W hen researching the guild m entality, I found to my surprise expressions o f civil society alongside this and in the same social milieux. In fact in learned writings civil society vastly predom inated, and collecti­ vist values were expressed only in a religious context. First there was the aspiration for personal security o r freedom from unlawful violence; next security of property, land, house, goods, from arbitrary seizure. Both depended on the value ascribed to law, lawful procedures, and lawful authority, as sustaining and prom oting justice - the prim ary virtue (Plato) and the divinely ordained m odel o f society (Augustine). Law was also C hristian society’s instrum ent for protecting the weak against the strong, and securing the personal rights o f the poor and defenceless. The most authoritative expression o f law was the R om an legal system, glossed with Stoic humanitas and appeals to natural reason. M uch o f its 1 ‘Q uare cum lex sit civilis societatis vinculum, ius autem legis aequale, quo iure societas civiutn tencri potest cum par non sit conditio civiutn? Si enim pecunias aequari non placet, si ingenia om nium paria esse non possunt, iura certe paria debent esse eorum inter se qui sunt cives in eadem republica. Quid enim est civitas nisi iuris societas?’: Cicero, De R epuhika I, xxxii, 49. F o r a full survey o f m eanings o f ‘civil society (burgerliche Geselischaft)\ see O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972-).

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spirit and some o f its provisions entered into the law o f the church and of particular nations or states. Its values were driven by natural right, conceptually distinct from religious revelation and intended as a standard to which all hum an authorities should adhere. This applied to the security o f one’s own house, family life, and personal possessions. R om an law regulated relations between persons and in respect o f property in such a way as to make individual ownership secure and transferable by defined legal procedures, and so to m ake property relations in general predictable and property itself subject to rational exploitation. It suggested relatively free-floating relationships in which people were involved in buying, selling, contracting, m arrying, and entering partnerships.2 The legitimacy o f commerce and the opportunity to trade were inherent in the system. Similarly, papal legates could insist (1249) that those who obey the R om an church be granted ‘the liberty o f the sons of god: that is, be perm itted to buy any goods from any persons, and w hat they have bought to keep for themselves and pass to their legitimate heirs, that they may freely spend, give, buy and do whatever they wish with mobile property . . . freely contract m arriage w ith any legitimate persons’; in other w ords they should be given ‘complete personal liberty’.3 This idea o f a society based on exchange and reciprocity was justified by the division o f lab o u r which binds people together into a single society through the m utual exchange o f benefits. This was articu­ lated by A lthusius, writing in the early 1600s, using a com bination of A ristotle, Cicero, and C hristian thought. God has distributed his gifts in diverse ways among men . . . so that I should need what you have and you should need what I have. Thus arose the necessity of sharing what was needful and useful, and this intercourse (communicatio) could only take place in socio-political life . . . For if one person did not require another’s aid, what society, reverence, order, reason, humanity would there be? This was why villages and cities were built, academies founded and why many farmers, craftsmen . . . were joined together through their diversity in civil unity and society (imitate et societate civilf) as so many members of the same body.4 Civilian solidarity (C om m unicatio/ Consociatio civilis) is the result of commercia. The socio-political culture o f pre-m odern E urope was distinguished 2 A ntony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought fro m the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: M ethuen, 1984), p. 35. 3 Peace o f C hristburg in Philippi (ed.), Preussisches Urkundenbuch, vol. I, part 1 (Berlin, 1882), pp. 158-61. 4 J. Althusius, Politico (1603), edited by C. J. Friedrich (Cam bridge, M ass.: H arvard University Press, 1932), ch. 1.

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from G reco-R om an, Byzantine and Islamic culture in its adm iration for and articulation o f liberty. Free status was prized. Social m obility, or the prom ise o f it, attracted m any into the towns, and was saluted by the entrepreneurial renaissance: true nobility is not inherited but acquired through effort (Cicero). The corporate towns asserted and celebrated the free status o f their inhabitants. ‘If any m an has resided free for a year and a day in a tow n under tow n law, he will m ore easily retain liberty for him self and his kin. N o one can reduce him to servitude. All who dwell in a tow n are subject to one law o f the freed.’5 Here G erm anic, C hristian, and R om an values concurred. Cicero and St Paul conspired to make liberty a m ark o f virtue, civility, and grace. Liberty is necessary to virtue (John o f Salisbury); social m obility and career freedom are incentives necessary to civic virtue and political success (L eonardo Bruni).6 There is no need here to posit a spurious distinction between negative and positive liberty, for freedom from arbitrary or seigneurial coercion m eant pre­ cisely freedom to m arry, w ork, trade, join the clergy, and so on. One can hardly overestim ate the social im portance o f freedom to choose one’s own spouse. One may see some connection between individual liberty and the nuclear family, which developed precociously in Europe, since this increased the self-determ ination o f the individual householder and couple.7 Personal freedom was interdependent with the rule o f law and with equality o f persons, regardless o f status, before the law. This was made explicit both in G erm anic and in Renaissance discourse. Equality under the law was persistently upheld as a m ark o f good governm ent both in guild towns and in hum anist Florence. ‘Equality o f conditions’ was praised in m uch the same sense by Cicero, the jurist C hristophorus Porcius, Salam anio, and later by R ousseau and de Tocqueville.8 M achiavelli saw social equality as the key to a truly free polity.9 But medieval moeurs agreed precisely with Renaissance discourse in rejecting any extension o f equality into the economic sphere. Equality was, on the other hand, significantly extended by L uther when he applied it to all callings. There was a tension between civil ideas and w hat used to be called feudalism: the seigneur-vassal relationship, involving serfdom together with a view o f society as essentially hierarchical with, in practice, inherited status. It would be m ore helpful to contrast civil values with any 5 A. von Daniels and F. von G ruben (eds.), Sachsische Weichbildrecht (Berlin, 1858), p. 66. 6 Black, Guilds, pp. 41, 98-103. 7 Philippe Aries and G eorge D uby (eds.), A History o f Private Life, vol. II (H arvard University Press, 1988). 8 Black, Guilds, p. 37; A. Black, ‘Juristic Origins o f Social C ontract T heory’, H istory o f Political Thought 14 (1993), p. 74. 9 Opere (M ilan-N aples, n.d.), pp. 487-92.

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system o f patronage. This is a contrast between ideal types which, on the ground, alm ost always co-exist in a great variety o f proportions. Patronage is a personal relationship, a system o f inform al netw orks operating outside open legal systems, distributing - o r redistributing - power and resources as personal favours. As such it is the antithesis o f civil values and in particular o f equality before the law and the carriere ouverte aux talents. The contrast between feudalism and capitalism is particularly artificial, indeed obscuran­ tist, glossing over key issues such as the exploitation o f land lo r profit and the personal, often hereditary, powers o f barons o f com m erce.10 There was a perception o f civilitas, based upon respect for ins civile, and extending into urbanity and ‘culture’. Both scholastics and hum anists praised the way o f life they called civil, urbane, political. Egidio R om ano referred to ‘civil life (vita civilis)’ in which one ‘lives as a m an ’. Bruni’s highest praise for Florence was th a t her citizens were ‘industrious, liberal, . . . affable and above all u rbane’." The contrast to this whole nexus of values was seen as bestiality, barbarity, tyranny. It also precluded the redistribution o f property, com m unism , and millenniarism. The civil ideol­ ogy was facilitated by Latin C hristendom ’s official distinction between ecclesiastical and civil spheres or powers. There was also no suggestion o f ethnicity; rather civilitas was an internationalizing concept in so far as it was consciously related to qualities regarded as essentially hum an. This found expression in D ante’s perhaps unique statem ent o f umana civilta.12 It clearly shows the G reco-R om an genius present in European civilization. In contrast to the umma o f the Islamic M iddle East, there was an explicitly secular dim ension to the conccption o f society. Indeed secularization was perhaps implicit in Christianity. Freedom was claimed for groups as well as individuals; the rich tu rb u ­ lence o f associational life in E urope from the twelfth century onw ards was a clear m ark of the emergence o f w hat is now called civil society. W hole sets o f collective projects emerged, some independent o f the institutions of political and ecclesiastical authority, some subordinate, some in an unstruc­ tured relationship. D istinguishing (as law then did) between personal and territorial groups, we find, first, religious com m unities and craft guilds; 10 This is charm ingly illustrated by Jason de M aino (1435-1519) when he argues that a fief may change hands according to the rules o f buying and selling: 'Si princeps in concessione feudi reciperet pretium , licet uteretur verbis “ indulgem ur", tam en cum sit venditio . . . per consequens erit contractus irrevocabilis, et non habebit naturam feudi: immo non privabitur ex causis ex quibus alias vasalli privari solent’: In secundum Digest! veteris commentaria (Lyons, 1540), fol. 136r, nn. 12-14. Cf. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 11 Black. Guilds, pp. 37. 104-5. 12 Michael Wilks, The Problem o f Sovereignty in the luiter Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1963), pp. 103, 105.

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secondly, village and town com m unities. G uilds generally claimed the right to spontaneous corporate existence in pursuit o f economic rights, but were obliged to seek recognition from city authorities; this situation was recognized by jurists, but they insisted th at corporate legitimacy depended on fulfilling legal criteria rather than on the ruler’s w ill.13 The church, far from being a m onolithic com m unity, included a great variety o f religious com m unities which sprang up in response to p ar­ ticular needs or aspirations, especially in the towns. Such com m unities, lay and clerical, comprised an im portant category o f life choices for those who could not or would not ad o p t their parents’ profession and status. The law yer-pope Innocent IV, w riting in the m id-thirteenth century, gave the clearest possible statem ent o f the right to freedom o f association on behalf o f craft guilds.14 Towns claimed, or were granted, liberties and privileges as corporate bodies, entailing a range o f independence from economic rights to self-governm ent. Self-determ ination for the individual and the group were often two sides o f the same coin, especially in economic term s.15 In the universities, secular and ecclesiastical academic pursuits were conducted side by side. These too, provided they carried out the legal obligations indicated by the Digest, were collegia licita. Pre-m odern liberty did not contain any calculated move tow ards toleration in religious m atters. On the other hand, it was articulated w ithout explicit reference to religious adherence; and the universities, sometimes regarded as a third com ponent o f C hristendom alongside kingdom and priesthood, created a public space within which intellectual questions o f m ost kinds could be debated relatively openly, provided official doctrine was not directly denied and the populace was not directly approached. G overnm ent was an integral p art o f this civil ideology, which also prescribed the characteristics which a proper civil governm ent should have. The earliest statem ent o f the E uropean city-state was also a precise statem ent o f civil values: A city is called the liberty of citizens or the immunity of inhabitants . . . for that reason walls were built to provide help for the inhabitants . . . ‘City' means ‘you dwell safe from violence (Civitas, idest “ Ci(tra) vi(m) (habi)tas”)'. For residence is without violence, because the ruler of the city will protect the lowlier men lest they suffer injury from the more powerful. (John of Viterbo, c. 1250)16 Some went further and said that the only form o f governm ent ap p ro ­ priate to cities is the regimen politician, in which rulers’ powers are strictly 13 14 15 15

Black, Guilds, pp. 16-23. Super Decrelalibus (Turin, 1581). on x 5.31.14. A. H arding, 'Political Liberty in the M iddle Ages’, Speculum 55 (1980), pp. 423-33. Liber de Regimine Civitatum (c. 1250), ed. C. Salvemini, A. G audentius (ed.). Biblioiheca Juridica mediae aevi, vol. I ll (Bologna, 1901), c. 1, p. 2 17.

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delimited by law. In general, however, it was thought th at civil values could be upheld under oligarchy or m onarchy. The function o f govern­ m ent is to suppress violence and uphold law. Legal equality o f status may, perhaps should, extend to the relationship between ruler and ruled. These are ‘o f the same kind {eiusdem generis)'. Such governm ent ‘does not remove the subjects’ liberty’ (A quinas); the true king rules ‘as a m an over men as free over the free’ (E rasm us).17 All this was implicit in the concept o f societas (partnership), a relationship am ong equals. A logical outcom e was to say that governm ent, like a business partnership, was based upon and limited by c o n tra c t.18 Equal access to public office was a b urgher-artisan dem and as well as a Ciceronian topos. These civil values and practices belonged to a society which arose in a highly specific cultural milieu, com bining G erm anic, G reco-R om an, and Judeo-C hristian influences. This m ixture goes far tow ards explaining why the outcom e o f E uropean history was different from th at of other histories. W hat we have uncovered is a unique set o f values in a unique society. It is, therefore, unlikely th at civil society (in the m odem sense) can be used as an analytical tool for understanding other pre-m odern societies or their pasts. There were o f course elements o f civil society, free-floating individuals and groups, often with still less reference to the state, in other civiliza­ tions. But w hat gave pre-m odern E uropean civil society its peculiar attractiveness, force, and ideological basis - the religion-culture divide, the pluralism o f attitudes invited by the G reco-R om an heritage, and a belief, sanctioned by law, in associational freedom - was partly or wholly absent. There is no reason why, under certain conditions, other societies may not now acquire as m any features o f civil society as m odern Europe. But the evidence o f this chapter clearly indicates th a t this would need, as one o f its preconditions and perhaps the m ost difficult, the adoption of favourable cultural norm s. The actual prospects will be explored later in this volume. 17 Black, Guilds, pp. 79, 105. 18 Black, ‘Juristic O rigins’, pp. 57-76. As M ario Salam onio put it, w riting in 1512: ‘P(hilosophus): Inequalitas conditionum societatem d isru m p it. . . Si nihil aliud est civitas quam civilis quaedam societas, contrahiturne ulla societas sine pactionibus? . . . Estne societas antequam ineatur? . . . Inirene potest antequam socii de conditionibus conveniant? . . . Ad esse ergo civitatis leges sunt necessarie . . . Sicut pactum in societate negociali, ita lex in civili ordinatio est . . . Socius sociali negotiationi praepositus, num quid ob id quod praepositus est, desinit esse socius? (J)urista: Minime. P: Et socialibus legibus solutus? J: Absit. P: C ur non idem in civili societate dicendum ?’ (De Principatu, ed. M. D ’A ddio (M ilan, 1954), pp. 12, 2 8 -9 .

3

The contemporary political significance of John Locke’s conception of civil society John Dunn

W hat exactly is a civil society? This is not as easy a question to answer as one might trustingly suppose. Let me take two examples at random from a relatively recent issue o f the Financial Times. On the front page on Tuesday 27 Septem ber 1994 (‘C linton lifts US sanctions on H aiti’) no less an authority than President C linton assures us that the U nited States has ‘no desire to be the w orld’s policem an, but we will do w hat we can to help civil societies emerge from repression’. On page 6 o f the same issue (‘C ounting on the A m ericans’) the less reassuring figure o f M r G regory Mevs, one o f the m ost powerful businessmen in H aiti - whose family monopolized sugar trade and production, along with the m anufacture of shoes, plastics and detergents, and owned a huge petrol storage and port facility, gratefully utilized by the Am erican occupying force - explains carefully that Haiti will only be in a position to seize the economic opportunities furnished by its longstanding com parative advantage if ‘the institutions o f the state’ are ‘m ade com patible with civil society’. In the H aitian case, the institutions o f the state have a certain immediacy to them; and it is instructive to note which features o f their perform ance Mevs him self singles out as requiring adjustm ent. A civil service o f sinecures m ust be replaced with a functioning bureaucracy. The econom y m ust be secured to allow for a dem ocratization o f capital. ‘A dem ocratization o f capital’ sounds an impeccable objective, and one for which H aiti is palpably long overdue. But I take the point o f the form ula to indicate th at it is not to be seen in contrast to the protection o f the existing holdings o f the Mevs family. W hat we have here is R obert N ozick’s entitlem ent theory, shorn o f any trace o f the principle o f rectification.1 As a phrase, ‘civil society’ has travelled a long way since it left the senatorial pen o f M arcus Tullius Cicero. How far can it still hope The first draft o f this chapter was prepared for a conference in Jerusalem at the Israel Academy o f Sciences to celebrate the w ork o f the late Professor N ath an Rotenstreich. This version was published by the A cadem y in their volume M yth, M em ory and History (Jerusalem 1996) and in Iyyun ( The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly), 45 (July 1996). 1 R obert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974).

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to serve as a reliable instrum ent for understanding anything - let alone as a reliable instrum ent for understanding virtually everything o f im port­ ance in the domestic politics o f the modern world? We need not linger over the question o f how it might readily fail to provide reliable understanding. T o serve as an effective instrum ent for enhancing understanding a term needs principally clarity o f structure, and determ inacy and stability o f meaning. It is not difficult to use the term civil society so loosely and equivocally as to carry no meaning whatsoever. But the im portant question is whether, when used with sufficient care and precision, when used optim ally, it can in principle provide firm intellectual purchase on the dom ain o f m odern politics. This is w hat I wish to call into question. Over a relatively short span o f time, and through a readily intelligible sequence o f intellectual and political experience, the term itself has come to be used very widely indeed to analyse political possibility and to dem arcate pathological from norm ative conditions, both in politics and in the life o f a society at large. It is a term , as now used, o f extreme vagueness. The question I propose to press is whether, at least in relation to the understanding of politics, th a t vagueness m ay simply be irrem edi­ able. F or analysing political possibility or dem arcating benign from pathological conditions in polity or society, if there is one thing worse than term s o f extreme vagueness, it m ust be term s o f irremediable vagueness. To judge w hether the vagueness genuinely is beyond remedy, a prom ising approach is to look carefully at how the term has been used to express a powerful strategic analysis o f politics. At least two genuinely great political thinkers have used the term ‘civil society’ (or a term in another language standardly rendered into English by it) as a central device for expressing their understanding o f the nature and practical significance o f m odern politics: namely Locke and Hegel. Each o f these stood firmly within the E uropean natural law tradition, Locke m ore or less in the middle and Hegel relatively determ inedly at the end. Both, therefore, were profoundly concerned with the im plications of C hristianity (or at least o f the C hristianization of Europe) for an understanding of politics, in their own day, and in the future in so far as they could imagine it. A nd because they were so concerned they were also perforce, if perhaps slightly less self-awarely, concerned with the impli­ cations o f the religious experience o f the Jewish people for the under­ standing o f that politics. I propose to approach this taxing challenge to m odern political understanding by an analysis o f the role which the phrase and the theoretical conception for which it stands play in the political thinking o f John Locke. Locke was a theocentric thinker for whom the truth o f the C hristian

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religion (as he understood this) was an indispensable m ajor premise o f a scheme o f practical reason w ithin which m ost hum an beings had suffi­ cient m otivational grounds for behaving as (in his view) they ought.2 This judgem ent placed considerable strain upon his understanding of the political significance of the Law o f N ature. To locate these strains, we may consider two questions. Firstly: how did Locke think about the Law o f N ature, and about the grounds and character o f the rights which hum an beings hold and the duties to which they are subject under that Law? A nd secondly: how exactly did the way in which he thought about the Law o f N ature articulate with and inform the way in which he thought about politics - about the nature and scope o f legitimate political authority and about the political agency o f the hum an subjects or objects o f such authority, w hether legitimate or otherwise? Each o f those questions is quite difficult to answer. But they are particularly puzzling when taken together and in relation to one another.3 W hat can we say with some confidence in answer to these two questions? W hat rem ains com paratively obscure about them , and how far does this residual obscurity m atter? There are technical difficulties in answering either with 2 This is no longer seriously disputed by scholars who have taken the trouble to inquire carefully into the m atter: see, for example, John D unn, The Political Thought o f John Locke (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1969); John D unn, Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); John D unn, ‘ “ Bright Enough F o r All O ur Purposes": John Locke’s C onception o f a Civilized Society', Notes and Records o f the Royal Society, 43 (1989), pp. 133-53; John D unn, Interpreting Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) John D unn, ‘Freedom o f Conscience: Freedom o f Speech, Freedom o f Thought, Freedom o f W orship?', in O. P. Grell, Jo nathan Israel, and N icholas Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 171-93; Ian H arris, The M ind o f John Locke (Cam bridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1994); John M arshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1994); Jam es Tully, A Discourse on Property (Cambridge: C am bridge University Press, 1980); James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: John Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1993); David W ootton, John Locke: Writings on Politics (H arm ondsw orth: Penguin, 1993). 3 N ot all these difficulties can be fully resolved even in principle. There are real obscurities as to w hat Locke himself believed he was doing at different points in his intellectual life, some o f which are unlikely ever to be fully illuminated. We know immensely m ore about the developm ent o f his thinking th an we do about that o f virtually any other m ajor intellectual figure o f the seventeenth century (cf., for example, Thom as Hobbes, The Correspondence, ed. Noel M alcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: C larendon Press, 1994)). But knowing m ore does not always mean understanding better. It often m eans exchanging a distant and essentially historical bafflement at the innerness o f a dram atically alien cultural world for much m ore sharply dem arcated puzzles o f ultim ate understanding which we lack the cognitive resources to resolve even under the supposedly ideal visibility conditions o f our own day (cf. D unn, Political Thought and Locke), Following the researches o f the last half century, what we do not ultimately understand about the developm ent o f Locke's political, m oral, and epistemological thought is much the same in character (if naturally somewhat different in content) as what we do not ultim ately understand about the determ inants o f ultim ate imaginative com m itm ent or theoretical choice in our own case, or in those o f o ur m ost intim ate friends or cherished enemies.

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com plete confidence, deriving from two principal sources. In the first place, Locke thought and w rote about the status and content o f the Law o f N ature and its im plications fo r political action over a very long period o f time - nearly half a century from the late 1650s to the beginning o f the first decade o f the eighteenth century when he was w orking away at his last m ajor book, A Paraphrase and N otes on the Epistles o f S t Paul.4 N ot only did he think and write ab o u t each o f these topics over a very long period, he also changed his m ind quite elaborately about both in the course o f that period. Secondly, and I think quite distinctly, he also had strong grounds over m uch o f this time, both external incentives and purely personal motives, for expressing some aspects o f his views about each in public with considerable care and discretion; for presenting them with less than perfect frankness. T o take only the m ost spectacular example o f this second point, the two greatest works in which he expressed his views about each, the Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises o f Government, both published late in the year 1689, were issued by him with considerable care in a form in which one o f them could n o t readily be held against the other. The Essay bore his own nam e and social rank proudly on its title page and it carried a lengthy, and obviously pre-sanctioned, dedication to one o f E ngland’s leading noblem en. It was an eminently open and official publication: a fully public act. But the Two Treatises, by contrast, was issued anonym ously and alm ost surreptitiously; and Locke him self went to very considerable lengths in the decade and a half before his death to avoid acknowledging his authorship o f it on paper, even in private correspondence with his closest friends, and did not in fact formally acknowledge it anywhere, as far as we know, until his last will and testam ent. W hat m akes this careful (and clearly in this case politically m otivated) evasion o f analytical, and not merely biographical, im portance is the notorious fact that the epistem ological doctrines o f the Essay are not readily reconcilable with (and m ay even be flatly contradictory o f) the view of the em phatic presence and political force o f the Law o f N ature set out in the Two Treatises.5 T he second o f these difficulties, that posed by L ocke’s compulsive discretion in the expression o f some features o f his views, m ust just be negotiated as best we can. But the first, th at posed by 4 John Locke, A Paraphrase and N otes on the Epistles o f S t Paul, ed A. P. W ainwright, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 5 Cf. D unn. Political Thought; D unn, Locke-, D unn, “ Bright Enough for All O ur Purposes” ; M ichael Ayers, Locke, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1991); John C olm an, John L o cke’s M oral Theory (Edinburgh: E dinburgh University Press, 1983); A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory o f Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); W ootton, John Locke; Harris, The M ind o f John Locke.

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the timespan over which he considered both the Law o f N ature and the grounds for political action, and the degree to which he changed his mind over each o f these, needs to be faced explicitly at the outset. To underline the point, I shall simply list the m ajor texts which register his changing views on one or other issue over this tim espan, ignoring the huge range o f briefer or m ore inform al texts which also cast light on the evolution o f his thinking. At a m inim um , an adequate view of the developm ent o f Locke’s conception of the character and status o f the Law o f N ature and its im plications for politics would have to take in his youthful Two Tracts on Government, the extended explorations o f the Essays on the Law o f N ature, the successive prelim inary drafts o f the Essay concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises o f Government, the Letter on Toleration and its polemical successors, the Essay concerning Human Understanding itself and a num ber o f m ajor revisions in its successive editions, the Reasonableness o f Christianity, and a num ber o f crucial passages even in A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles.6 It was, however, the Two Treatises, and m ore especially the Second Treatise, which m ade Locke into a political thinker o f m ajor im port­ ance; and it is the view o f the practical presence o f the Law o f N ature within the hum an historical w orld, and o f the political im plications o f th at presence set out in the Second Treatise, which lies at the core o f his political thinking as a legacy to the generations that have followed him. The Second Treatise begins with the question o f how legitimate political pow er can be distinguished from effective coercion: from force and violence. There is no single chapter o f the Second Treatise devoted to the Law o f N ature as such; and its effective historical presence is assumed rather than argued for. But the single m ost illum inating chapter o f the entire book for an understanding o f how Locke conceived that historical presence is the second chapter o f the Second Treatise, which deals with the State o f N ature. The State o f N atu re is a jural field o f freedom and equality am ongst the m em bers o f a single species. It is not a counterfactual sociological hypothesis ab o u t how hum an beings would have behaved, or m ust have behaved, o r would behave in future, in the absence o f effective governm ental coercion, but a theoretical analysis of the fundam ental relations o f right and duty which obtain between hum an beings, relations which are logically prior to the particular historical 6 F o r an early sketch o f the pattern o f developm ent see D unn, Political Thought, and m ore briefly D unn, Locke; and for an im portant am endm ent see D unn, “ Bright Enough for All O ur Purposes” . F o r m ajor recent treatm ents see, in very different modes, Ayers, Locke; Simmons. The Lockean Theory o f Rights; H arris, The M ind o f John Locke; M arshall, John Locke; and, m ore informally, W ootton, John Locke.

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situations within which all actual hum an beings always in fact find themselves. It is the norm ative fram ework within which hum an history occurs, not some poorly lit and fantastical projection o f a prehistoric phase in hum an social evolution. W hat defines it as this com m on fram e­ w ork is the jo in t subjection o f all the members o f the hum an species to the overwhelming power and authoritative purposes o f their divine C reator. It is a condition, as Locke puts it,7 ‘o f perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose o f their possessions, and persons as they think fit, within the bounds o f the law o f nature, w ithout asking leave, or depending upon the will o f any other m an. A state also o f equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than an o th er.’ And, as he goes on: That law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.8 These two statem ents express, and express accurately, the fundam ental norm ative premises o f Locke’s understanding o f hum an politics. N ature as a whole is subject to G o d ’s power. But hum an beings are uniquely related to that power, in that, as well as being wholly under the effective control o f their C reator (like all other created entities) and rightfully subject to his pow er (again like all other aspects o f his C reation), they are also bound, as intelligent agents, to obey his com m ands, his Law: to act as th a t Law requires them to do. The Law o f N ature, for Locke as for T hom as A quinas, is the Law o f N atu re’s G od, as well as being the principle on which N ature operates when it operates as its G od intended it to do. As intelligent agents, hum an beings can in principle understand that Law: can ascertain w hat it requires, grasp why they are obliged to obey it, and choose accordingly to do so. But as real agents, uniquely am ongst natural creatures within this w orld, they can also fail to understand it: can misjudge w hat it requires, and fail too to recognize why they are obliged to obey it, and choose for these o r other reasons to act in direct and profound conflict with its requirem ents. As free and intelligent agents, they are, at least potentially, responsible for each and every deviation from the recognition and perform ance o f their natural duties. T o be a particular individual person - as Locke famously argued in the chapter on personal identity which he added to a later 7 John Locke, Two Treatises o f Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1988), II, para. 4. 8 Locke, Two Treatises o f Government, IT, para. 6 passim.

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edition o f his Essay9 - was precisely to be capable o f a law, to be responsible for one’s own actions and their merits and faults, and to be so because one could always have acted differently. How then can hum an beings know their duties under the Law o f N ature? A nd how can they really be responsible, not just for deliberately flouting the requirem ents o f this Law when they correctly grasp its dem ands, but also for their own authentic and plainly unintentional misjudgements o f w hat these dem ands really are? Locke’s answers to both o f these questions are o f great im portance. But his answer to the first is decidedly m ore conventional, as well as m ore offhand and perfunctory, than his answer to the second. H um an beings can (and should) know their duties under the Law of N ature through the exercise o f their Reason. The Law o f N ature is a codification o f reason. Reason, which is that Law, teaches all m ankind who will but consult it, w hat the Law o f N ature requires. T o observe the Law o f N ature is to observe the conclusions o f valid (and pertinent) reasoning. T o flout the Law o f N atu re is to pursue your desires or interests, not within the limits prescribed by reason but through the exercise o f force, the way, as Locke expresses it, o f beasts: creatures who lack rational powers, cannot recognize their place within the created order o f N ature, cannot choose how to act in accordance with such recognition, and hence have no responsibility for the ways in which they do in fact behave. But Reason can (and does) teach only those am ongst m ankind who do consult it. And very few hum an beings consult it as painstakingly and honestly as they should. Locke’s official epistemological thesis in the Two Treatises, reiterated at the beginning of the Essay itself, is that Reason is sufficient for men to judge their duties under the Law o f N ature accurately. As he says in the Essay: ‘The candle which is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes.’10 Especially, it shines bright enough for all our practical purposes: ‘O ur business here is not to know all things, but those which concern o u r conduct.’11 The thesis that Reason gives sufficient guidance on hum an duties under the Law o f N ature is not merely Locke’s official thesis in his three great works o f 1689, it is also the position which he adopts in his longest single piece o f systematic analysis o f the character and accessibility o f that Law, the com paratively juvenile work, now called the Essays on the Law o f Nature, which he delivered as lectures at Christ Church, O xford, 9 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter N idditch (Oxford: C larendon Press, 1975), Bk II, xxvii, esp. pp. 9, 18, 26: 335, 341-2, 346. 10 Ibid., Bk I, 1, 5. 11 Ibid., B k l, 1,6.

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in the early 1660s.12 In that w ork he was at pains to reject a num ber of the conventional m id-seventeenth-century English views on how hum an beings can know the Law o f N ature; notably the theses th at they can have knowledge o f its content and obligatory force from the traditions o f the society to which they belong, or from the universal consent o f m ankind at large. He rejected the first because o f the variety o f hum an traditions and the lack o f any clear justification for believing anything to be true from the mere fact that other hum an beings had so believed it before you. He rejected the second, with greater asperity, because o f the very evident absence o f any such universal consent am ongst hum an societies over which acts are appropriately perm itted or forbidden, and over why they should in fact be so. The Essays on the Law o f N ature do, however, offer an explanation o f how hum an beings can and should know the content o f the Law o f N ature. They can and should do so, it argues, by exerting their reason on the m aterials provided by their own sensory experience: by rational inference from the data furnished by their senses. W hen Locke m ain­ tained in the Essay th at reason, the candle o f the L ord, shines bright enough for all our purposes, he plainly did not mean th a t reason was a sufficient endow m ent for every historical hum an individual in fact to apprehend both w hat the Law o f N ature required o f them and why they had sufficient reason to observe its requirem ents. He simply m eant that every historical hum an individual who satisfied the condition o f being a person, a responsible agent, at all, had counterfactually, if only they had chosen or now chose to exercise them , the natural cognitive powers to grasp how they ought to act within the natural world in which they lived. W hether they in fact elected to use those powers as they should was a historical and not a natural m atter: a question o f choice in time, not o f sheer transtem poral causal capability. The epistemic foundations o f the Law o f N ature, as Locke understood these, lay in natural theology: in the judgem ents about divine power and purpose which could, in his view, be validly inferred from the properties o f the natural world. In the Essays on the Law o f Nature in the early 1660s he treated this structure o f inference pretty cursorily. But with his increasing concern for, and increasing sophistication over, questions of epistemology from 1671 onw ards, it became steadily harder to sustain the view th at valid inferences from the properties o f the natural world to the content o f divine purposes and then back again to the term s o f G o d ’s law for his wilful natural creature M an, could in fact be carried through to a 12 John Locke, Essays on the Law o f Nature, ed. W olfgang Von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).

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clear and compelling conclusion. It is clear th at this imposed very severe strains on the fundam ental structure o f his m oral and political thinking. The best statem ent o f the dangers to which it exposed him comes in the lengthy draft o f a structure o f dem onstrative ethics which he w rote while com posing the Essay concerning Human Understanding, and which he probably intended to serve, in a m ore com plete form, as a conclusion to th at work: Law: The original and foundation of all Law is dependency. A dependent intelligent being is under the power and direction and dominion of him on whom he depends and must be for the ends appointed him by that superior being. If man were independent he could have no law but his own will no end but himself. He would be a god to himself and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions.13 Locke, then, considered as the fundam ental existential condition o f hum an beings just two possibilities. Either they are independent and gods to themselves, or they are dependent and under the direction o f the G od on whom they depend. He believed firmly that they are the second rather than the first: that their m ost fundam ental characteristic is that they are dependent intelligent beings. W hat he needed to dem onstrate epistemologically in his m ajor m ature works was th at they are both dependent, and capable through their own intelligence o f ascertaining exactly w hat G od has directed them to do. A fter the publication o f the Essay in 1689 a substantial num ber o f com m entators, both close friends (then or earlier) like Jam es Tyrrell and William M olyneux and bitter theological or political enemies, pressed him to show how his account o f hum an cognitive powers could explain ju st how hum an beings could in fact know w hat G o d ’s directives were (o r even that there actually was a G od concerned to direct hum an actions through the workings o f hum an intelligence at all). Locke never attem pted to meet this challenge in print; and we do not really know that he was ever confident that he could meet it. But w hat we do know is that he com posed and published a few years later, in the Reasonableness o f Christianity in 1695, an account o f how they could know His directives n ot by natural theological inference but by direct acquaintance with divine revelation itself, through the texts o f the C hristian gospels, validated by the historical miracles o f Jesus Christ. N ot only did Locke explain in this work how even very dim and undereducated hum an beings could know how G od wished them to behave; he also acknowledged th a t even in the m ost sophisticated episodes in hum an intellectual history, am ongst the great philosophers o f the ancient world and the scientific geniuses o f his own day, no hum an 13 Ethica B: Bodleian MS Locke C 28, p. 141: D unn, Political Thought, p. 1.

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being had ever in fact succeeded in developing a full dem onstrative account of the grounds and content o f the Law o f N ature on the basis of unaided natural reason (the task at which, it might be thought, Locke himself had tried so hard and so long but at which in the end he could not see how to succeed). W hat the C hristian revelation revealed was an authoritative law which showed firmly that all hum an beings are indeed dependent, and that they do have compelling reason to satisfy a will profoundly other than, and in m any respects often sharply at odds with, their own. Locke’ s conception o f w hat a law is was firmly in the voluntarist tradition o f medieval natural law thinking that goes back particularly to William o f Ockham : an authoritative com m and backed by an effective sanction. W ithout a cogent natural theology, and w ithout the direct assistance furnished by revelation, it was relatively easy for hum an beings to see rational grounds for co-operative m utual inhibition in the terms that Hobbes, for example, had indicated. But it was impossible for them to see any ultim ate reason for disciplining themselves to follow ends wholly external to their own will. N atural law w ithout divine sanctions could be a system atization o f hum an practical rationality. But it was quite unclear (to echo H obbes’s form ulation) how it could properly be called a Law at all,14 and equally unclear how it could confront any hum an agent with a genuinely external authority. It was the cognitive accessibility o f the structure o f effective sanctions required to lend real authority to the Law o f N ature which Locke could not see how to dem onstrate. And in his final w ork, the Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles o f St Paul, he at last openly acknowledged that key aspects of this structure o f sanctions not only were not known in historical fact but actually could not have been know n w ithout the specific aid o f revelation: that they lay simply beyond the reach o f m en’s natural cognitive pow ers:15 ‘it was by the positive law o f G od only that men knew that death was certainly annexed to sin as its certain and unavoidable punish­ m ent.’16 T hroughout the historical era which had preceded the C hristian revelation, therefore, men could not know G o d ’s positive law. A nd ‘w ithout a positive revelation o f god their Soverain they could not tell at w hat rate G od taxed their trespasses against the rule o f their nature, reason, which dictated to them w hat they ought to doe’.17 They could not know - and in fact did not even suspect - that the penalty for sin was to M Thom as Hobbes. Leviathan, ed. R ichard Tuck (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1991), pt I, ch. 16, p. 111. 15 D unn, “ Bright Enough for All O ur Purposes” . 16 Locke, A Paraphrase, vol. II, p. 524 n. 13. 17 Ibid., vol. II, p. 524 n. 13.

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be death itself. The Law o f N atu re and requirem ents o f reason were in fact secured as a law by the effective sanctions which enforced them. H um an beings could get a shrewd sense o f its content just by exercising their natural reason with a m odicum o f attention. W hat they could not know simply by exercising their natural cognitive powers was how strong and decisive were the sanctions by which G od enforced th at content. They could not know these merely by their reason because the sanctions could not, in Locke’s own ultim ate and explicit judgem ent, be validly inferred simply from the properties o f the natural world. W hat Locke called rectitude and pravity, right and w rong conduct, could by contrast in his view be validly inferred by the exercise o f reason from the practical relations between hum an beings - and m any aspects of them were quite effectively captured in the psychological and categorical structures of m utual hum an approval and disapproval (what he called, in the Essay, the law o f opinion, reputation, or fashion), as well as in the ancient philosophical theories o f the nature o f right conduct. But w hat m ade rectitude and pravity decisively im portant for hum an agents was not their rational co n to u rs18 but the pressing reasons for hum an agents to conform to rectitude and eschew pravity. W hat made these reasons stably and decisively sufficient to guide hum an conduct was in the end in Locke’s eyes just one thing: the punishm ents and rewards o f the Deity Himself. The taking away o f G od, as he said in the Letter concerning Toleration, though but even in thought, dissolves all.19 It disrupts, that is to say, the entire apparatus o f practical reason which he deployed to analyse all the m ajor issues o f political authority and political agency on which he attem pted to pronounce. In the field o f politics this potential fissure between the rational criteria for which hum an conduct was right and w rong and the criteria for w hat actions hum an beings can know merely by the light o f nature they have sufficient grounds to perform is o f overwhelming im portance. In deliber­ ating on their own personal lives, in choosing and living out a plan o f life, hum an beings could judge differently for themselves and still hope that the outcom es o f their judgem ents would not necessarily do grave harm merely because their judgem ents o f w hat sort o f life to live differed sharply from one another, because their tastes differed. But in politics such conflicts o f judgem ent led m ore or less immediately to conflicts o f 18 Cf. Thom as Scanlon, ‘Contractualism and U tilitarianism ’, in A m artya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press. 1982), pp. 103-28; T. Nagel, Equality and Impartiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 19 Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration, ed. J. Tully (Indianapolis: H ackett, 1983), p. 51; D unn. ‘Freedom o f Conscience’.

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will and hence to conflicts for pow er, to struggles over who was in the end to coerce whom. If we ask exactly how L ocke’s conception o f the Law o f N ature articulates with his conception o f politics, it is not hard to see the starkness o f the theoretical dilem m a that confronted him. On one horn of the dilemma, the practical im plications o f the Law o f N ature are indeed precepts o f terrestrial rationality: precepts which hum an beings have good reason to observe because o f the given features o f the world in which they live, and because o f w hat they themselves are actually like. But on this assum ption there is no occasion to ground the obligatory force o f the Law o f N ature on n atural theology and divine power: on the premise that hum an beings, like all other aspects o f the created order, are part o f G o d ’s w orkm anship. Indeed there is no reason to regard the existence o r will o f a deity as of the slightest intrinsic relevance; and the laws o f nature themselves, as H obbes pointed out, are simply convenient articles o f peace and not properly called laws at all. On the other horn of the dilemma, the horn which Locke him self in the end very plainly chose, the will and pow er o f a concerned Divine C reator were indispensable to establishing both the obligatory force and substantial parts o f the content o f the Law o f N ature; and neither o f these could be validly inferred merely from w hat the world and hum an beings are naturally like. This has sharp im plications for an understanding o f Locke’s politics, which balances intense m oral conviction with a high degree o f strictly political scepticism and shores up the m oral conviction in the end by the confident assurance th at it will be vindicated and protected in the last instance by overwhelming power, which is not merely non-hum an but actually extra-terrestrial both in origin and incidence: not natural but supernatural. The key question for the understanding o f politics, in Locke’s eyes, is the question o f who is to be judge, wherever hum an purposes and actions come into conflict. In the state o f nature, free and equal hum an beings, capable o f guiding their actions by the Law o f N ature, can and do come into sharp conflict with one another. Because they are all free and equal, and all subject to the Law o f N ature, each has both the right and the power to judge when the others breach that Law, and to do their utm ost to secure its just enforcem ent. Each, as Locke him self puts it, has the ‘executive pow er’ o f the Law o f N ature. They judge and punish each other as agents o f the divine creator to whom they all belong. But they are, o f course, fairly erratic agents o f divine purpose, since they are so far from being im partial in their assessm ents o f the rights and wrongs of conflicts between themselves and others. As hum an societies become richer and more densely populated, the occasions for conflict m utiply

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steadily, and the inconveniences o f the state o f nature which stem from hum an partiality and propensity to violence intensify sharply. Conflicts, in particular, over ow nership and use o f natural resources and over m onetized wealth become increasingly acute. By the time th at hum an history had reached late seventeenth-century England the inconveniences o f the state o f nature - a condition o f unm ediated potential conflict between the judgem ents o f free, equal, intensely partial, and potentially lethal hum an beings - have become prohibitively high. W hat is im pera­ tively required is an alternative to the state of nature; and that alternative is w hat Locke him self calls a ‘civil society’, or w hat we might call a legitimate political order, founded on the recognition o f the rights o f all its members. Please note w hat a civil society m eans for Locke, and the context in which the concept itself came to be invented. Civil society is the historical remedy for the inconveniences o f the state o f nature. W hat it provides is, in the first place, know n standing laws (in place o f the projective indeterm inacy o f a law o f nature open to the prom iscuous judgem ent and enforcem ent of all), in the second place, im partial judges (in place o f the necessarily partial judgem ent o f every adult hum an being), and, in the third place, at least in aspiration, effective powers of enforcem ent in place o f the highly undependable coercive capacities of offended individuals and their friends and relations. A civil society can in principle be an effective remedy for the state o f nature because its members alienate their own right and capacity to judge where the Law o f N ature has been violated, and their own executive power o f that law with which to enforce their judgem ents, to the legitimate political authority, which has a distinctly better chance o f acting im partially and an altogether m ore drastic capacity to enforce its judgem ents on the recalcitrant. But although a true civil society can be an effective remedy for the inconveniences o f the state o f nature, no actual existing state is ever guaranteed to provide such a rem edy in practice. Locke’s m ost im portant single conclusion about politics was that m ost existing hum an structures o f pow er were very far from meeting the criteria for being a civil society: th a t m ost states simply were not legitimate political orders at all. N otably, the absolute m onarchies of continental Europe, the French m onarchy in particular, were very far from being legitimate political orders. In fact, he claimed, rather specta­ cularly, that these often proud and powerful political units were ju st a continuation o f the state o f nature itself. N ow Locke him self had actually travelled in France for some four years before he wrote the Two Treatises, and it is w orth asking how he can possibly have thought that this was true. How can he have supposed, for example, th at France did not possess known standing laws, or th a t the ownership o f property within it

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was not in m ost instances rath er close in its degree o f security to that prevailing at the time in England? N o doubt, in fact, he imagined nothing o f the kind. W hat he argued (and what in a sense the experience o f the H uguenot population prom ptly confirmed in the years immediately following his w riting o f the Two Treatises), was not that there were no inconveniences o f the state o f nature for which the existing French state provided any kind o f a remedy, but rather that there were some inconveniences o f the state o f nature which it drastically aggravated and reinforced: in particular the inconvenience o f individual physical vulner­ ability in the face o f massively concerted external violence. In a state which was not a civil society, concentrated coercive power confronted individual subjects w ith an overwhelming danger. It did so, too, under conditions which gave them no effective m eans to restrain it or to hold it responsible. F urtherm ore, it did so with a degree o f ideological condescension and even contem pt which was profoundly hum anly offen­ sive (and which, Locke himself insisted, was even m ore offensive tow ards the deity to whom every hum an being truly belonged). In Locke’s eyes the claim to absolute power was quite directly and frontally incom patible with the precepts o f the Law o f N ature. It denied hum an equality and freedom openly and in the first instance. But w hat m ade Locke’s political theory o f enduring im portance was not so m uch the fact that he denied the legitimacy o f a wide range of hum an political authorities and endorsed the right o f their subjects to take revolutionary action against them. It was also that he gave a particularly careful and searching account o f why it was in principle so difficult to exclude either the need or the right to take such action even in the case o f governm ents which have at some point in their history enjoyed a genuinely legitimate title to rule. W hat m ade this so is in essence quite simple. A legitimate political authority can be an effective remedy for m any o f the inconveniences of the state o f nature. But it cannot, o f its very nature, hope to be a full and consistent remedy for all o f them. It cannot hope to be so, fundam entally, because it cannot consistently and fully eliminate aspects o f the state of nature from its own structures and procedures. A lthough it claims the title to judge m any m atters on its subjects’ behalf, it consists simply of fallible hum an beings whose judgem ent is every bit as liable to error as that o f the subjects over whom they exercise power and claim authority. W here that judgem ent is gravely abused, the claim to authority loses its validity; and where its subjects themselves judge it to have been gravely abused, they in turn no longer retain any clear grounds for respecting its interpretation o f the law o f nature and m ay, in extremis, even feel themselves entitled (and be wholly justified in so feeling) to resume their

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own alienated executive pow er o f the Law o f N ature and do their collectivc (and perhaps even their individual) best to punish their erring rulers. The key premise o f Locke’s analysis o f the right to revolution is the right o f the people at large to judge when their rulers have broken their trust. This right o f judgem ent, at some points in his text, is extended as a right (though it is certainly not recom m ended as a policy) even to single individual subjects. W hen the people do so judge and act upon their judgem ent, they m ake w hat Locke describes as an ‘Appeal to H eaven’. And H eaven is, quite literally, the T ribunal which m ust in the last instance adjudicate w hat the Law o f N ature dem ands o f hum an agents, and punish and rew ard them accordingly. Locke took the idea o f an avenging G od with the utm ost seriousness: ‘the H and o f the Allmighty visibly held up and prepared to take Vengeance’.20 It scarcely needs em phasizing that the political presence o f the Law o f N ature within the hum an w orld must be very m uch weaker if there is no Deity concerned to vindicate its dem ands and enforce them in the end with His overwhelming pow er.21 How does all this bear on the recent ideological history o f civil society as a category? W hen employed to dem arcate benign from pathological political or social conditions today, civil society is usually interpreted to signify a reality which is not merely (a) analytically distinguishable from the state (a necessary condition for its em ploym ent for this purpose to make any sense at all), but also (b) referentially discrete from the state. N ot infrequently, it is also used to signify a reality which (c) either is, or could and should be, causally independent from the state. In my view, the last possibility, causal independence, w hether norm a­ tive or factual, is an absurd assum ption, which has probably never been actualized anywhere where the category o f the state has been actualized. Even the second possibility, referential discreteness, is a pretty heroic presum ption, which implies not merely that it is possible to tell, within the natural history o f the universe, exactly where state starts and society or economy stop, but also that it is characteristically (or perhaps invariably) the case that each starts or stops at the same boundary lines: that they do not usually (or perhaps ever) overlap. I see no reason whatever to make this assum ption. 20 This structure o f understanding comes out with particular clarity in Locke’s discussion of the scope and limits o f the right to toleration (D unn, 'Freedom o f Conscience’) and of the claims o f prerogative power (D unn, Political Thought, ch. 11). 21 Cf. John D unn, 'T he Dilemma o f H um anitarian Intervention: The Executive Power of the Law o f N ature after G o d ’, Government and Opposition, 29 ( 1994), 248 -61.

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I f the category o f civil society is only analytically distinguishable from the state, and not either causally independent o f or referentially discrete from it, then it can be em ployed in a controlled m anner to analyse features o f the history o f the universe only ex-post fa cto and not ex-ante. This feature m akes it unsuitable in principle (that is, logically inapplic­ able) for purposes o f causal explanation. In the face o f these points it is unhelpful to proceed by offering an analysis either o f how the term civil society should be used or of how it m ost frequently is, since the history o f its usage is by now so messy that neither is likely to prove illum inating. Even for purposes o f norm ative political analysis, it is essential to establish a clear analytical distinction between the categories o f state and civil society before em ploying the latter term to express criteria o f political achievement which different territorial units, legal entities or assemblages o f hum an beings satisfy differentially. In norm ative political analysis at present (in my view, quite gratui­ tously) civil society is frequently employed to pick out a feature o f the history o f the universe which is presum ptively good (or at least com para­ tively trustw orthy) in contrast with a feature o f its history (the state) which is tendentially or necessarily bad (or a t least com paratively untrustw orthy). This is not a contrast with which any com petent political theorist could be content.22 The ideological purchase of the civil society/state couple is drastically different where civil society is thought o f as consisting essentially in the economy or essentially in the society. N either of these last two term s has any claim even in the loosest o f senses to referential determinacy. But it is certainly helpful to be able to distinguish one analytically from the other. W here the ideological claim is essentially th at civil society stands to state as good (or trustw orthy) stands to bad (or untrustw orthy), its political bearing is very different where the candidate proffered for trust is the economy from where it happens to be the society. The ideological source o f the power o f the claim is the presum ption that the favoured candidate is an instance o f free (and perhaps rational) choice, while the disfavoured is an instance o f external (and non-rational) subjection. It is possible to think about some features o f either econom y or society as consisting in free acts (in the form er case, sales and purchases: in the latter, the beliefs and sentim ents of hum an agents, and the acts which these lead them to carry out). But it is absurd in either case, whatever one’s norm ative political views, to think o f econom y or society as simply consisting o f freedom. Both in the econom y and in society, chosen acts 22 John D unn, ‘Political O bligation’, in David Held (ed.), Political Theory Todav (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 2 3-47.

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are free only in a massively contextually dependent m anner, pivoting, as M arxists insist, above all on the history o f effectively secured control o f the m eans o f production. No one could interpret a pattern o f ownership at time T as an instance o f free choice, even if they m ight welcome the chance to misdescribe its causal antecedents exclusively in such terms. (Recollect M r Mevs.) By the same token, not even the m ost aberrant o f psychopaths can literally choose their sentim ents or beliefs at time T, however skilful some o f us may become at massaging them into a more user-friendly condition as the years go by. It is also im portant to rem em ber th a t the greatest single theorist o f the state, T hom as H obbes,23 w rote out the fullest and m ost elegant version o f his account o f it as a defence o f the view that, clearly understood, the legitimate m onopolist under m ost circum stances o f the m eans o f coercion could be, should be, and rationally m ust be understood as a structure o f free choice on the part o f all its subjects. His argum ent is not wholly convincing.24 But there is no reason to see it as on balance any less convincing than m ore recent defences o f views that either economy or society can be felicitously understood as consisting at time T simply of free choice or agency. To return belatedly to Locke, it is im portant firstly to register clearly that in his usage civil society does not refer to a political or social substance that can be set over against an existent state. W hat it refers to in m odern term inology, if with a H obbesian turn o f phrase, is essentially the state liked: the non-pathological state. Secondly, it is im portant to register th at Locke’s conception o f politics was deeply hostile to the very idea o f the state in its m odern postH obbesian form 25 o f a coercively effective m onopoly claim ant to the power to coerce legitimately, which is to be understood not as a set o f particular hum an claim ants to th a t power, nor as a given territory subjected to it, nor as a determ inate set o f subjects o f that pow er (a populus or people), but as an integral structure of authority incorpor­ ating all three and, for as long as it lasts, analytically and norm atively prior to each one o f them. These first two points are essentially just m atters o f linguistic hygiene a rem inder th at the favourable overtones o f the phrase civil society in the language we now happen to speak m ay be drastically at odds with the ways we now custom arily use it - th at the presum ption (effectively now 23 Q uentin Skinner, T h e State’, in Terence Ball, Jam es F arr, and Russell H anson (eds.). Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1989), pp. 90-131. 24 D unn, “Political O bligation’. 25 Skinner, ‘The State’.

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within our very language) th at civil society is itself a site o f legitimate power may n ot be validly com binable with the presum ption th at it can in principle be empirically counterposed to a putatively empirical category o f the state. The third point is m ore constructive. In Locke’s understanding of politics, civil society (the state liked) is a precarious conjunctural achieve­ m ent, n ot ever a structural fact, and least o f all a structural fact securely and perm anently lodged in the order o f nature itself. It is an achievement actualized in only a limited num ber o f historical settings, if in some settings (England w ith its A ncient C onstitution26) presum ptively over a very long period o f time. W here it has been actualized relatively p ro tract­ edly, the prospects for resuscitating it when the conjuncture goes against it are relatively robust. Why? Well, essentially because the groupings o f hum an beings set over against the state misliked (the pathological degeneration o f civil society, the S tuart mimesis o f continental absolutism ) are in their existing solidarities, habits o f practical co-operation, traditions o f perception and sentim ent, and in some measure even their residual institutional facilities, potentially still a single coherent political body, a single coherent political agent, a potential civil society in waiting. On Locke’s understanding, it is logically true th at any set o f hum an beings could exhibit such a unitary political capacity - because all adult hum an beings are free individual agents. But it is em phatically not empirically the case th at m any o f them are at all likely to do so. The Bosnians, the Serbs, and the C roats could all agree tom orrow to lay down their arm s and smilingly recom pose the Federal R epublic o f Yugoslavia. But actually, they w on’t. W here there is no recent and relatively solid history o f unified political m em bership and institutionalized political co-operation, the presum ption that any particular set o f hum an beings will possess a unitary political capability was, in L ocke’s eyes, wholly gratuitous. This is im portant, I am afraid, because he happened to be right. The fourth point is m ore im portant and quite a lot harder to under­ stand. On Locke’s view the central political im plication o f the Law o f N ature issues from a very odd balance o f faith and scepticism. The faith was a C hristian faith, and the scepticism a political scepticism. It was the faith th at picked out every adult hum an individual not ju st as a contingent site o f potentially independent judgem ent (a view, after all, which had led H obbes precisely to invent the concept o f the state as its remedy), but also as a site o f immense and inelim inable individual norm ative significance. Seen in term s o f the political scepticism alone, this is no m ore encouraging 26 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1957).

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than Hobbes supposed it to be. It is precisely the irrepressible propensity o f hum an beings to view themselves as o f such individual norm ative significance th at m akes them, in H obbes’s eyes, such refractory m aterial for w hat they all also want: namely, com m odious living. But seen as Locke saw it, through both the faith and the scepticism sim ultaneously, it is at least still today of some im aginative use. How? Civil society for Locke is the state liked. W hat does the state have to be to be deservedly likeable? (To be undeservedly likeable, as Bosnia - and perhaps other places closer to hand - serve to remind us, it may simply need to be zestfully m urderous.) T o deserve liking, it has to be as effectively purged o f the state o f nature as it can be. This is never very effectively purged. The fundam ental character o f politics for Locke, the problem o f politics as such, is the juxtaposition o f individual self-right­ eous and partial judgem ents about w hat is to be done. T h at is the state o f nature; and it is still a state in which all men and women, and hence all groups, smaller or larger, o f men o r women, naturally find themselves. Civil society, in Locke’s usage, is the optim al remedy for the state o f nature. But it is a necessarily im perfect remedy: one which cannot in principle be m ade perfect. H istorical escape from the state o f nature can never be m ore than partial; and the putative political instrum ents for effecting that escape - call them , today, states, parties, political or even social movem ents - have such norm ative standing as they enjoy only in so far as they do genuinely provide such an escape: as they furnish for particular sets o f hum an beings fram ew orks within which to live which enhance their security and their opportunities to resolve in a relatively im partial m anner the endless conflict between their irretrievably partial personal judgem ents. Locke’s conceptualization o f civil society is a powerful critical instru­ m ent for appraising the pretensions o f m odern state authority, not least because that was the purpose for which it was initially devised. But where it draws its power from is the analytically prior and altogether less anodyne category o f the state o f nature. If we w ant to think accurately and powerfully about political possibility, and about how to dem arcate pathological from non-pathological social and political conditions, the category we shall need in the end is not Civil Society itself - however lexically specified. It is the conceptual foundation o f the category as Locke uses it, the fulcrum o f natural jurisprudential thinking, the State o f N atu re.27 27 John D unn, ‘C ontrattualism o1, Encyclopedia delle scienze sociali (Rome: Instituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1982), vol. II, pp. 404-17; and, for the general judgem ent, John D unn, The Cunning o f Unreason: M aking Sense o f Politics (London: H arperCollins, 2000.)

4

Civil society in the Scottish Enlightenment Fania Oz-Salzberger

I

The idea o f civil society m arks one o f the faultlines running across the Scottish Enlightenm ent, at times in the open but m ore often under­ ground. In the process o f form ing their political theories, eighteenthcentury Scottish thinkers were able to combine several theoretical trad i­ tions and m ake new uses o f established concepts. In the accessible, eclectic tenor o f the Enlightenm ent, their application o f term s previously used by theologians, philosophers, and jurists gave their writings fresh resonance. It was also burdened with new dissonances. This chapter deals with tw o m ajor Scottish treatm ents o f the concept o f civil society, both o f which based innovative argum ents on traditional theories. D avid Hum e and A dam Smith envisaged a civil society where economic and social transactions m attered as much as political institutions. A dam Ferguson insisted on the civic m ainstays o f m odern civil society. The tensions ensuing from these theoretical differences between close friends and interlocutors suggest th at the Scottish Enlightenm ent did not speak on civil society in one voice. The Scottish reworking o f the concept o f civil society was inspired by seventeenth-century C ontinental theorists o f natural law, notably Hugo G rotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, and by the innovative w ork o f John Locke. Beyond these influences, it was stam ped by the uniqueness o f the Scottish condition. From a tool o f legal theory and constitutional justification, the concepts o f natural law were transform ed into a science o f political econom y and a theory o f the m odern state. The polity envisioned by H um e and by Smith was no longer a body politic accom m odating a prince and his subjects, b ut a com m unity of individuals pursuing m ultiple private interests. The core o f this new The analytical fram ew ork for my discussion was introduced in J. G. A. Pocock’s seminal work, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), and further developed in Istvan H ont and M ichael Ignatieff (eds.). Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping o f Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cam bridge, 1983).

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understanding o f civil freedom was doubtless the legacy o f Locke and the G lorious Revolution. Yet the Scottish thinkers were far m ore concerned than Locke about the role o f m anufacture and commerce, on the one hand, and polite sociability, on the other hand, in shaping the profile o f m odern society. M oreover, they were m ore inclined than the natural lawyers to regard the historical processes leading to polite, commercial m odernity as the unintended outcom es o f num erous hum an actions, often m om entary and selfish, yet having the cum ulative effect o f pro ­ m oting public welfare. This happy state o f affairs could be accomplished by a system o f governing institutions, ripe with age and wisdom, that adm inistered justice and defence for a society o f private m anufacturers and traders. In Lockean terms, this was quite properly a societas civilis, yet with a new edge: things were happening outside the political sphere th at deeply affected com m unal well-being and social mores. They also shed new light on political issues par excellence, notably the desirable extent o f governm ent expenditure, the significance of public debt, and the necessity for a standing army. In effect, discussion o f civil society shifted from the conceptual w orld o f the ju rist to th at o f the political econom ist. A different, at times even rival, Scottish concept o f civil society evolved from the classical republican tradition. This A ristotelian and C iceronian legacy, powerfully modernized by N iccolo Machiavelli and his English disciples, stressed the necessity o f active virtuous citizenship. Instead o f a society set in m otion by natural or m an-m ade laws, republican thought insisted on diligent self-governm ent and self-defence by independent, m oral, and vigorous men. Eighteenth-century Scots resorted to this tradition on several im portant occasions. Andrew Fletcher o f Saltoun mobilized it to oppose the E nglish-Scottish union. H alf a century later, the republican concept o f civil society was revived by proponents o f a Scottish citizens’ militia, and powerfully restated by A dam Ferguson. Significantly, both cam paigns were doom ed to failure.1 It was the political econom ists’ civil society, n o t the classical republicans’ civil society, that prevailed. Ferguson’s Essay on the H istory o f Civil Society (1767) is the only m ajor Scottish w ork in which civil society plays a title role. This im portant book is central to our discussion, not only because o f its deliberate attem pt to redefine civil society in m odern civic (that is, republican) terms, but also because Ferguson conducted a subtle and prolonged debate with the idea o f civil society associated with Hum e and 1 See also J. G . A. Pocock’s ‘Cam bridge Paradigm s and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic H um anist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation o f Eighteenth-Century Social T hought’, and John R obertson, T h e Scottish Enlightenm ent at the Limits o f the Civic T radition’, both in H o n t and IgnatiefT (eds.), Wealth and Virtue.

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Smith. This debate is im portant in the Scottish context; yet, beyond Scotland the Essay was conducive to the re-emergence o f ‘civil society’ as p art o f m odern political discourse. The b ook’s French readers, from Baron d ’H olbach to V ictor C ousin and August Com te, and its G erm an adm irers, from G otthold E phraim Lessing through K arl M arx to W erner Som bart, m ade its E uropean significance a m ore interesting story than its British fam e.2 A generation later Ferguson’s disciple D ugald Stew art effectively transm itted some o f his ideas to several nineteenth-century thinkers, am ong them John S tuart Mill. Yet in Britain the Essay was soon all but forgotten, only to emerge in late nineteenth-century surveys as a quaint Scotch m em ento.3 N ot so in other E uropean cultures. In G erm any, France, and Italy F erguson’s name, his books, and his concept o f civil society far outlived their British fame. O f all eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers Ferguson’s ideas travelled best. His ‘civil society’ apparently inspired Friedrich Schiller and Benjamin C onstant, and clearly affected Hegel and M arx.4 N either H um e, no r Smith, n o r Ferguson can be credited with a theory o f civil society in the sense associated with Locke or Hegel. H um e and Smith did not m ake system atic use o f the term, and m ostly opted for ‘state’, ‘n atio n ’, and ‘com m unity’. Ferguson offered no com pact defini­ tion for the term, and often left the limits between civil and non-civil society uncharted. His lack o f theoretical rigour is offset by abundant m oral ardour. The Essay is n o t merely a history o f civil society (or a universal history o f m ankind, which am ounts to the same thing in his terms), but a forthright celebration o f it. Ferguson, who spent his early adulthood as a m ilitary chaplain, w rote in a tone far m ore excited, with a far m ore outspoken sense o f mission, than either Locke’s or Hegel’s prose would allow. ‘It is in conducting the affairs o f civil society,’ a fairly typical sentence goes, ‘that m ankind find the exercise o f their best talents, as well as the object o f their best affections’.5 W hat, then, was Ferguson celebrating, and w hat (or w hom ) was he up against? 2 Am ong Ferguson’s favourable British readers were Jam es Boswell and H orace W alpole, Lord Shelburne and L ord Bute. See H um e to Ferguson, 10.3.1767 and Baron d ’H olbach to Ferguson, 15.6.1767 both in The Correspondence o f Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo M erolle with an introduction by Jane Bush Fagg (London, 1995), vol. I, pp. 7 2 -4 , 7 7-8; see also Appendix D , ibid., vol. II, pp. 546-7. 3 Cf. Leslie Stephen, H istory o f English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (3rd edn. New Y ork, 1949), vol. II, p. 182. 4 See Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics o f Spirit 1770-1807 (Cambridge, 1987), N orbert W aszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel*s Account o f Civil Society (D ordrecht, Boston, and London, 1988), Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1995). 5 A dam Ferguson, An Essay on the H istory o f Civil Society (originally published Edinburgh,

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One key lies in David H um e’s response to Ferguson’s Essay. H um e, a generous friend who had previously secured Ferguson’s professorship for him and gladly reported other readers’ com plim ents, privately voiced a dislike o f the Essay's m oralizing tone and spirit. A careful reading o f the Essay can indeed reveal several direct assaults on H um e’s philosophy, as well as that o f Smith, but H um e’s dissatisfaction probably went deeper than that. He may have felt th at the tenor o f Ferguson’s book was leading away from his own project, retreating from the prom ises held by polite m odernity for its private, economically interacting denizens. H um e’s reaction, though private and restrained, was one o f keen disappointm ent.6 This ripple on the sm ooth surface o f enlightened politeness points tow ards the hidden polemical im port o f Ferguson’s Essay on the H istory o f Civil Society. If Ferguson’s Essay can be read as a last-ditch attem pt to preach antiquated m oral com m unity to a m odern commercial society, it can also be read otherwise. It can be understood as a pioneering w ork where new things were done with old language. Ferguson set out to dig better foundations for the civic idea o f the polity. He wished to m ake it acceptable to m odem men, those who were at ease with commerce, m aterial com fort, and political centralization. T o this end he claimed for the republican language a concept which had so far served m ainly in the language o f natural jurisprudence. T he term ‘civil society’ was a carefully chosen title-phrase for his book. He hoped to load it with fresh discursive energy and enlist it - perhaps for the first time in its history - in the service o f a m odern theory o f active citizenship. The very im port o f ‘civil society’ as a political concept was at stake. The disagreem ent between Hum e, Smith, and Ferguson, which never took off as a fully-fledged debate, was partly about the relevance o f this concept - in the sense that Ferguson gave it - to the m odern polity. The afterm ath is ironic, inasmuch as there is irony to be found in the history o f ideas: Ferguson’s ‘civil society’ travelled across linguistic and cultural borders, only to be transform ed, in G erm any, into som ething closer to the notions o f his opponents at home. Its immediate future was biirgerlich, not civic.

1767), edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cam bridge, 1995), 149. Subsequent references are based on this recent edition. I should like, however, to acknowledge an editorial and scholarly debt to D uncan F orbes’s valuable edition o f Ferguson’s Essay published by Edinburgh University Press in 1966. 6 Hum e to Hugh Blaire, 11.2.1766, The Letters o f David H um e, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg (Oxford, 1932), vol. II, pp. 11-12; cf. R ichard B. Sher, Church and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati o f Edinburgh (Princeton and Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 195-8.

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II

The eighteenth-century Scottish authors who m ade use o f the term ‘civil society’ were able to draw on a variety o f sources, not always sem anti­ cally on par. O f great im portance were D utch and G erm an theorists o f natural law, particularly Samuel von Pufendorf, m ediated by his French an n o tato r Jean Barbeyrac. T heir w ork was taken up by the Scottish jurist G ershom Carm ichael and the Scottish-Irish philosopher Francis H utch­ eson.7 An alm ost total synonym y o f civitas or societas civilis with the state is apparent in the w ritings o f the G erm an natural jurists. Pufend o rf’s early G erm an tran slato r clearly defined the ‘oft-occurring’ G erm an term burgerliche Gesellschaft as ‘nothing but . . . the union o f rulers and subjects which m ake a certain realm (Reich), republic and such like’.8 A similar approach can be seen in Johann Heinrich Alsted, G ottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Heineccius.9 W hen focusing their attention on the foundation o f civil or political society, and defining the profile o f its founding m em bers, the natural jurists resorted to the concepts o f familial rule and p ro p erty .10 This was a crucial legacy to the Scottish legal and political thinking. Carm ichael, who published an edition o f P u fen d o rf’s De Officio Hominis et Civis in 1724, described the historical and legal m om ent o f the creation o f governm ent as an agreem ent o r contract am ong heads o f households. Having previously enjoyed dom estic imperium, they prom ise to transfer it to a ruler or rulers em bodying imperium civile.11 Francis H utcheson, to whom we will return later, attem pted to m ake the jurisprudential system o f laws, rights, and duties reliant on a theory o f individual m oral sense, supporting a collective notion o f the com m on good, safeguarded by the goodness o f G od. This proposal triggered a powerful rejection from D avid H um e, who found no divine guarantee of hum an goodness, and did not wish to m ake political society reliant on m en’s m oral sense. As H um e fam ously argued in his Treatise o f Human Nature (1739-40), pre-political society existed happily until the accum u­ lation o f property dem anded institutional regulation o f justice: ‘The state 7 K nud H aakonssen, The Science o f a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence o f David Hume and Adam Sm ith (Cam bridge, 1981); Jam es M oore and Michael Silverthom e, ‘G ershom Carm ichael and the N atu ral Jurisprudence T radition in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in H ont and IgnatiefF(eds.), Wealth and Virtue, pp. 73-87. 8 M anfred Riedel, ‘Gesellschaft, burgerliche’, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Brunner, Conze and Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1972), vol. I, p. 738. If alternative seventeenth-century denotations o f burgerliche Gesellschaft m ay be deduced from the tran slato r’s disclaimer, they did not leave their m ark on jurisprudential discourse. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 741. 11 M oore and Silverthorne, ‘Gershom C arm ichael’, p. 85.

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o f society w ithout governm ent is one o f the m ost natural states o f men, and may subsist with the conjunction o f m any families, and long after the first generation. N othing but an encrease [s/c] o f riches and possessions cou’d oblige men to quit it.’12 Even quarrels about property were m ore likely to erupt not within a particular society but between m em bers o f different societies: hence ‘C am ps are the true m others o f cities’, and military authority precedes civil governm ent.13 The adjective ‘civil’ was thus opposed in H um e’s Treatise not only to ‘n atu ral’14 but also to ‘m ilitary’. Perhaps to avoid confusion in this conceptual setting, Hume did not norm ally refer to governed society as ‘civil society’. N o r did he use the term ‘state’. In his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1747), he opted for the m ore clear-cut ‘political society’.15 H um e was later to use the term ‘civil society’ typically in the context o f economic progress, as seen in An Enquiry concerning the Principles o f Morals (1751): F o r enjoym ents are given us from the open and liberal hand o f nature, b u t by art, lab o u r and industry, we can extract them in great abundance. H ence the ideas o f property becom e necessary in all civil society.16

The sem antic emphasis was thus tilted, if only by way o f association, tow ards the sphere o f property and production. But this shift was not a uniform or unilinear process. The traditional jurisprudential sense was still hard a t w ork in T hom as R eid’s lectures on practical ethics. Civil society here is opposed to the state o f nature, which is an ‘unsocial State’. It is synonym ous with ‘political society’, with ‘civil governm ent’, with the state, indeed with ‘hum an society’ in general. It begins with a political com pact am ong m asters o f families. It has an ‘infancy’, when hum an needs are simple and few. Then m oney is introduced, economic transac­ tions grow in volum e and complexity, and m aterial w ants multiply. Only in its advanced and polished state does society acquire the adjective ‘civilized’; by then the natural hum an desire for distinction and pre­ eminence is firmly focused on the pursuit o f wealth. Civilized m an is thus opposed to the ‘savage’, who is not the denizen o f the state o f nature but 12 David Hum e, A Treatise o f Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. N idditch (Oxford, 1978), p. 541. F o r an analysis o f the jurisprudential sources o f H um e’s political thought see D uncan Forbes, H um e’s Philosophical Politics (Cam bridge, 1975), pp. 27-32. 13 Treatise, pp. 539-41. 14 Treatise, p. 475, footnote 1. Hum e says that he also opposes ‘n atu ral’ to ‘m oral’, depending on context. 15 David Hum e, An Enquiry concerning H um an Understandings ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. N idditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 205. 16 David Hum e, An Enquiry concerning the Principles o f M orals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. N idditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 188.

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o f early civil society, and capable o f social virtues sometimes exceeding those o f his polished progeny. It is in civilized societies that the initial raison d ’etre o f the body politic, defence by m eans o f institutional justice, calls for utm ost intellectual and political attention: this was the onus o f R eid’s legal philosophy, as well as H um e’s and Sm ith’s .17 T o m ost o f the Scottish thinkers, even those who found no use for ‘civil society’, the adjectives ‘civil’ and ‘civilized’ were o f special im portance. They belonged to the Scottish E nlightenm ent’s explanation o f m odernity, which com bined political econom y and a theory o f social cohesion. ‘Civil’ served in two roles: the jurisprudential role o f explaining the sources, and hence the legitimacy, o f political governm ent; and (along with ‘civility’ and ‘civilized’) the ethical role o f supplying m oral ground­ w ork for the new homo economicus. The first role involved the idiom o f the n atural jurists - the state as dispensing justice to defend and regulate individual m en’s claims to life and property. The second relied on an adjacent discourse, launched by Joseph A ddison, which upheld polite­ ness, polish, civility and refinement as m ainstays o f m odern society. Politeness signalled the m oral dim ension o f a m odern world o f economic transactions between benignly self-interested individuals. H um e and Smith led the new Scottish belief in the civilizing powers o f commerce, to use Nicholas Phillipson’s apt phrase.18 A plethora o f selfinterested actions could am ount, in the sphere o f production and trade, to collective well-being. But while individual interest was best served by individual acts, justice was best acted out as state m onopoly. Hum e considered H utcheson’s individual m oral sense a potentially dangerous hum an tenet, favouring self and kin and kith at the expense o f society at large.19 Society was, at its best, a broad field o f exchange am ong welldisposed but self-seeking individual agents. The currencies o f exchange included money, language, and ideas. Justice was one o f the cum ulative products, and so were political institutions.20 A good political system, once achieved, was not a playground for civic intervention or utopian revolution. Individual virtue is im m aterial to it. The key to its upkeep is legislation; a jo b for inform ed professionals capable o f scientific ‘m odel­ ling’ o f governm ent.21 A dam Ferguson opposed this move. His Essay can be read as an 17 Thom as Reid, Practical Ethics. Being Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, SelfGovernment, Natural Jurisprudence, and the Law o f Nations, edited from the m anuscripts with an introduction and a com m entary by K nud H aakonssen (Princeton, 1990), pp. 132-5, 138-9, 160, 214, 233, 269, 285. 18 Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (L ondon, 1989), p. 32. 19 Hum e, Treatise, pp. 4 8 6 -9 ; 534 20 Hume, Enquiry, p. 306; Treatise, p. 490. 21 ‘T hat Politics m ay be reduced to a Science’, Essays, M oral Political and Literary (Oxford,

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argum ent against it. Ferguson aired and mobilized the term ‘civil society’ in order to halt the pillaging o f civic term inology in favour o f the new discourse o f political econom y.22 Ill By the second half o f the eighteenth century, ‘civil society’ may have become som ewhat blurred with use: it is significant th at Ferguson was the only British thinker in that period w ho deployed the term in the title o f a m ajor book. His bid to invest it w ith new rhetorical power, however, was supported by three near-contem poraries, H utcheson, M ontesquieu, and Rousseau. All three were read and quoted by Ferguson, the latter two with great relish. All three used ‘civil society’ in ways not openly divorced from its jurisprudential context, b ut nevertheless toyed with expanded or wayward m eanings o f the term. The thinkers singled out here as probable direct sources for Ferguson’s rew orking o f the term ‘civil society’ shared, broadly speaking, a com m on agenda. They all drew on the natural lawyers for their description o f the incipient m om ent o f governm ent o r political society, but they all wanted to say m ore about the m oral nature o f political membership. Francis H utcheson, whose effect on the Scottish Enlightenm ent can hardly be overestim ated, offered a variation on the natural ju rists’ ‘civil society’. He invested it with his path-breaking concept o f the m oral sense, a natural hum an faculty through which men reach their decisions about social and political arrangem ents. H utcheson opposed the dichotom y of ‘n atu ral’ and ‘civil’, arguing th at m an is ‘fitted by nature to civil society’, even if he did not always live in one. Civil society was founded when social groupings and the accum ulation o f property (itself also natural to m an) called for governm ent to prevent corruption. H utcheson thus followed the main jurisprudential narrative, but with a new em phasis on the m oral aspect o f the foundation o f civil society: ‘not only dread o f injuries, but em inent virtues and o u r natural high approbation o f them , have engaged men at first to form civil societies’. H aving subm itted to civil power, m en’s sagacity is naturally subjected to the superior wisdom o f the few who legislate and rule.23 Ferguson, who followed H utcheson closely as far as the naturalness of 1969); Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp. 229-30; Haakonssen, Science o f a Legislator. 22 Page num bers from the Essay (1995 edition) are given in brackets in the text. 23 The quotations are from H utcheson, A Short Introduction to M oral Philosophy, 2nd edn (Glasgow, 1753), pp. 2 6 6 -7 and passim. Cf. Forbes, Hum e's Philosophical Politics, pp. 32-8.

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all social situations was concerned, abandoned him when it came to the divine guarantee o f m an ’s m oral sense. H um e’s rem oval o f the theological prop had underm ined H utcheson’s psychology. A new and persuasive analysis o f hum an nature was required to provide an alternative explana­ tion to m en’s capacity to exercise political virtue. This was one of Ferguson’s main challenges. M ontesquieu, Ferguson’s best-loved m entor, showed him the political fram ew ork for a viable civil society, w ithout saying m uch about ‘civil society’ itself. In Book I o f The Spirit o f the Laws M ontesquieu did make a passing distinction between the ‘body politic’ (T E ta t Politique), ‘the united strength o f all individuals’, and the ‘civil state’ (I’E tat Civil), ‘the conjunction o f [the] wills’ o f those individuals. He credited these defini­ tions to the Italian jurist G iovanni Vincenzo G ravina.24 The distinction then echoes twice m ore in the sam e section, but not throughout the book. M ontesquieu speaks o f ‘the political and civil laws o f each n atio n ’, the form er constituting its governm ent and the latter supporting it. However, M ontesquieu then tells us th a t his topic does not require a separation of ‘the political from the civil institutions, as I do not pretend to treat of laws, but o f their spirit’. While G rav in a’s distinction m ay be taken as an interesting predecessor o f the later divorce o f ‘civil society’ from the State,25 there is no reason to suppose th a t either M ontesquieu or his Scottish readers m ade significant use o f it. W hat Ferguson did draw upon was M ontesquieu’s typology o f governm ents and his clear advocating o f those allowing political freedom: M ontesquieu singled out to this end two form s o f ‘m oderate’ governm ent, the mixed m onarchy and the mixed republic. Ferguson was happy w ith either o f these, but - despite o u t­ spoken tributes to M ontesquieu (pp. 66-70) - his book was not essen­ tially about the constitutional lineam ents o f political freedom , but about the historical conditions allowing an ever-active citizenry. This brings us to the one thinker who m ay well have supplied the im m ediate trigger to the w riting o f Ferguson’s book.26 The whole first section o f the Essay, and som e o f the b ook’s other climaxes, were evidently conceived as a direct response to R ousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations o f Inequality among Men (1755). Like m any 24 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede, Baron de M ontesquieu, De I'Esprit des Lois (1748), book I, ch. 3. A different distinction between the usages o f ‘civil’ and ‘political’ is th at between ‘civil slavery’ and ‘political servitude’, book XV, ch. 1. 25 Cf. Riedel. ‘Gesellschaft, biirgerliche’, p. 746. 26 R ousseau’s Discours sur I’inegalite parm i les hommes (1755) was cited twice in the Essay (pp. 11, 115-16), and paraphrased w ithout acknowledgem ent a t least once m ore (p. 119). Ferguson later returned to attack the Discours in his Principles o f M oral and Political Science: Being Chiefly a Retrospect o f Lectures Delivered in the College o f Edinburgh, 2 vols. (London, 1792), vol. I, p. 55.

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other readers o f this w ork, Ferguson was as angry about it as he was impressed. W herever Ferguson is a t his m ost m em orable, R ousseau is not far from the surface o f the text. R ousseau’s piece fam ously depicted ‘n atu ral’ hum an beings as solitary strollers. ‘Civil society’ began with the first claim ant of a plot o f land; we will shortly return to this sem inal statem ent. In R ousseau’s narrative, property bred conflict, law and governm ent became requisite, and a political system was thus entered upon: Such was, o r m ay have been, the origin o f civil society and laws, which gave new fetters to the poor, and new pow ers to the rich; which destroyed n atu ral liberty for ever, fixed for all time the law o f p ro p erty and inequality, transform ed shrewd u surpation into settled right, an d to benefit a few am bitious persons, subjected the whole o f the hum an race thenceforth to labour, servitude and w retchedness.27

To Ferguson, this conjectured state o f nature was nonsensical. Em piric­ ally it was unfounded, and m orally it was an affront: R ousseau’s ‘n atu ral’ m an, lacking reason and language, is a mere brute. In the dashing opening o f the Essay Ferguson made clear th a t ‘M ankind are to be taken in groupes, as they have always subsisted’ (p. 10) and th at they were always ‘a distinct and superior race’ (p. 11). The anim al lover in him, always ready to put in a w ord for dogs and horses, added elsewhere that such ‘brutes’ are in fact finer creatures than the hum an beings dream ed up by R ousseau, witless, unsociable and m ute.28 Ferguson ought to have been m ade happier by R ousseau’s modified view o f civil society in The Social Contract (1762), where it is depicted in considerably kinder terms. There, ‘although in civil society m an surren­ ders some o f the advantages th at belong to the state o f nature, he gains in return far greater ones’, intellectual and m oral grow th and political and m oral freedom .29 Yet the fact rem ains th at Ferguson did not refer to The Social Contract either in the Essay or in his later works. This may seem unfair to Rousseau, one m ore instance o f the im patient hostility and selective reading practised by m any o f his contem poraries. There is, however, another possibility. A careful reading o f the Essay reveals th at R ousseau’s views in the Discourse on Inequality, and not those in The Social Contract, deeply affected Ferguson in a positive way, cropping up to support his best insights, and helping to blend the particular Fergusonian shade o f his concept o f civil society. The first o f these insights is Ferguson’s idea o f m anly exertion. 27 Rousseau, Discours sur I'inegalite, in Oeuvres completes, Pleiade edition (Paris, 1959-65), vol. Ill, p. 178. The English translation o f this passage is by M aurice Cranston. 28 Ferguson, Principles, vol. I, p. 55. Jo n ath an Swift’s Y ahoos are sum m oned for support. 29 Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated and introduced by M aurice C ranston (H arm ondsw orth, 1968), pp. 64 -5 .

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Ferguson thought that only an active life, in the sense o f physical effort as well as political participation, can do justice to m an’s nature. We achieve our greatest feats - Ferguson invariably referred solely to men in adverse conditions: ‘It is in the least favourable situ atio n s’, says M r R ousseau, ‘th at arts have flourished the m ost. I could show them in Egypt, as they spread w ith the overflowing o f the Nile; and in A frica, as they m ounted u p to the clouds, from a rocky soil an d from barren sands; while on the fertile banks o f the E u ro tas, they were n o t able to fasten their ro o ts.’

This passage, freely adapted from R ousseau’s Discourse on In­ equality , 30 was a perfect m otto fo r one o f Ferguson’s m ost seminal ideas. M ore than any other Scottish w riter o f his day Ferguson equated ‘m ankind’ with ‘m en’, and ‘society’ with active civic life. Polities owe their existence and well-being to the exercise o f certain natural traits, which are essentially and exclusively masculine, such as play, pursuit and conflict. In ‘rude’ societies m an is the hunter, gamester, w arrior; in the ancient polities he was the soldier and statesm an; in m odern states he ought to m aintain a rounded civic personality, a non-specialized political skill, and m ilitary prowess. M ale nature and m anly virtue form the crux o f Ferguson’s m oral philosophy, defined as ‘the study o f w hat men ought to be, and o f w hat they ought to wish, for themselves and for their country.’31 His psychology focused on the ‘disposition to action’ and the love o f adversity which ‘every boy knows at his play’.32 His idea o f cognition and m oral grow th was political, and hence strictly limited to the strong sex (‘The reason and the heart o f m an are best cultivated in the exercise of social duties, and in the conduct o f public affairs’33). At the bottom o f this great chain o f masculine exertion are ‘[m an’s] associates, the dog and the horse’, and other ‘noble’ anim als who share his love o f play and fight;34 at the to p are the loftiest hum an goals, political freedom and individual integrity, which m ust be supported by constant action and fruitful civic strife. ‘The rivalship o f separate com m unities, and the agitations o f a free people, are the principles o f political life, and the school o f m en’, in the words o f the E ssay?5 This endorsem ent o f healthy conflict was not abandoned in the later, and politically som ewhat m itigated, Principles-. ‘T he trials o f ability, which men m utually afford to 30 Ferguson, Essay, pp. 115-16. ‘A frica’, alas, is Ferguson’s m isquote o f R ousseau’s ‘A ttica’. 31 Ferguson, Institutes o f M oral Philosophy. For the Use o f Students in the College o f Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1769), p. 84. 32 Essay, pp. 4 4 -8 . 33 Institutes, p. 291. 34 Essay, pp. 4 7 -8 ; cf. Principles, vol. I, pp. 14-15. 35 Essay, pp. 62 -3 .

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one another in the collisions o f free society, are the lessons o f a school which Providence has opened for m ankind.’36 Com peting boys, pugna­ cious savages and playful anim als were all part o f Ferguson’s obstinate defence of the active role o f individual citizens in a contingent, openended, and not necessarily progressive history o f civil society. Ferguson’s second significant use o f R ousseau comes in an unacknow ­ ledged paraphrase of the fam ous sentence opening the second part o f the Discourse on Inequality. The original text, in English translation, reads: T he first m an w ho, after fencing o ff a piece o f land, took it upon him self to say ‘this belongs to m e’ and found people sim ple-m inded enough to believe him , was the true founder o f civil society.37

Ferguson, in the chapter entitled ‘The H istory o f S ubordination’, echoes R ousseau thus: He w ho first said, ‘I will ap p ro p riate this field: I will leave it to my heirs;’ did not perceive, th at he was laying the fo u n d atio n o f civil laws and political establish­ m ents. He w ho first ranged him self un d er a leader, did no t perceive, th a t he was setting the exam ple o f a perm anent su b o rd in atio n , under the pretence o f which, the rapacious were to seize his possessions, and the a rro g a n t to lay claim to his service.

This paraphrase am ounts to a subtle deconstruction o f R ousseau’s concept o f civil society. By his own lights, Ferguson could not speak of the founding m om ent of civil society: as he had previously shown, civil society existed as far back as our knowledge can reach. The invention o f property can thus only be credited with the foundation o f ‘civil laws and political establishm ents’. Society, in a non-institutional but still political sense, was there prior to property. However, R ousseau’s resonant phrase serves Ferguson to w ork out his other great theme, the theory of unintended consequences in history. Im mediately following the unac­ knowledged paraphrase of Rousseau, comes one o f Ferguson’s own most m em orable passages: Like the winds, th a t com e we know no t whence, and blow w hithersoever they list, the form s o f society are derived from a n obscure and d istan t origin; they arise, long before the date o f philosophy, from the instincts, no t from the speculations, o f men. The croud [s/'r] o f m ankind, are directed in their establishm ents and m easures, by the circum stances in w hich they are placed; an d seldom are turned from their way, to follow the plan o f any single projector. Every step and every m ovem ent o f the m ultitude, even in w hat are term ed enlightened ages, are m ade w ith equal blindness to the future; and nations

36 Principles, vol. II, pp. 508-9. 37 Rousseau, Discours sur I'inegalite, Pleiade edn, vol. Ill, p. 164. T ranslated by M aurice Cranston.

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stum ble upon establishm ents, which are indeed the result o f hum an action, but not the execution o f any hum an design, (p. 119)

Ferguson’s civil society is the cum ulative product o f hum an actions that brought about complex, unintended, and unforeseen results. N o w riter since Bernard M andeville’s Fable o f the Bees had phrased the idea so m em orably. And no one, least o f all M andeville, m ade such an effort at accom m odating the unintentional elements o f hum an existence with active, conscious civic virtue.38 It thus turns out that R ousseau was the godfather-by-provocation o f the two great themes underlying Ferguson’s ‘civil society’: its dependence on m en’s active nature, and its gradual, unprojected, unforeseeable growth. Both these ideas clearly had other sources: the ethics o f civic active life is as old as A ristotle and Cicero, and M andeville’s theory o f unintended consequences was taken up by several thinkers o f the Scottish Enlightenm ent. But the unique com bination o f these ideas and their application to civil society - in direct defiance o f its im m ediate source o f inspiration, R ousseau’s use o f the concept - was Ferguson’s doing. IV

Ferguson had no use for the term ‘civil society’ in the two com pilations o f his university lectures, the Institutes o f M oral Philosophy and the Principles o f M oral and Political Science. The Essay, however, was a different sort o f book, intended for a m ore general public and written with rhetorical verve. Despite his decision to include ‘civil society’ in the book’s title, Ferguson m ade no attem pt at a com pact definition o f the term. He avoided any clear-cut distinction between ‘society’ and ‘civil society’, and declined to explain how o r why the adjective ‘civil’, which he used often enough, was grafted onto ‘society’. N o m om ent in the discussion, and no m om ent in the history o f m ankind, were singled out to this end. A nd yet ‘civil society’ emerged from Ferguson’s Essay endowed with a new coherence and energy, up and away from its stale jurispruden­ tial context and its blurry civic connotation. The occurrences o f ‘civil society’ in the text - eighteen in all, along with m any m ore instances o f ‘civil’ and its derivatives - repay attentive reading. The Essay is a historical analysis o f the merits o f active political participation by a broad citizenry. It was alm ost the last in a series o f attem pts to bring M achiavelli’s m odern republicanism into British poli­ 38 Bernard M andeville, The Fable o f the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), which argued that individual greed unintentionally enhanced public well-being. Ferguson attacked M andeville’s denial o f ‘the reality o f m oral distinctions’ in the Essay, pp. 36 -7 .

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tical thinking.39 It also drew on M ontesquieu’s concepts o f republican virtue and o f m oderate (or ‘m ixed’) regimes in The Spirit o f the Laws. Ferguson, however, treated the passage o f time w ith m ore respect than either M achiavelli or M ontesquieu: the Essay epitomizes an approach which Ferguson’s pupil D ugald Stew art later called ‘conjectural history’, an account which involves a careful balancing o f available evidence and philosophical conjecture. Ferguson was not averse to m eta-historical speculation about progress and regress, but his history is pitched against the two extremes o f unbreakable cycles and unilinear progressivism. The Essay teems with tension between these matrices, along with their fashionable eighteenth-century derivatives, and Ferguson’s own case for voluntary hum an agency. The unintended dynamics o f economic advance bang against the ever-present risk o f m oral decline, the virtues o f the ‘rude’ nations confront the vices o f the ‘polite’, the sweeping course of events is subtly channelled by wilful hum an intervention. These distinctions were crucial to com bat the facile reliance on the grand processes o f m odernity, which Ferguson spotted in Mandeville, H um e, and Smith. The £ ^ a > '’s best m om ents are those where the language o f fatalism is deconstructed in the service o f individual political responsibility: ‘M en o f real fortitude, integrity, and ability, are well placed in every scene; . . . while they are destined to live, the states they com pose are likewise doom ed by the fates to survive, and to prosper’ (p. 264). This was a fight about language, precisely because Ferguson engaged with recently published ideas. His polemics risked looking oldfashioned if it did not go on a linguistic offensive. Its two targets were the ‘A ddisonian’ vocabulary o f politeness, polish, civility, and refinement, as well as the jurisprudential language o f laws, rights, civil liberty, and finally ‘civil society’ in the jurists’ sense. One way o f dealing with these term s was an outright attack, ridiculing, say, ‘the grimace o f politeness’ (p. 43). A second way was to expose a misuse, as in ‘the boasted refinements . . . o f a polished age’ (p. 242). But Ferguson’s main strategy was to claim (or reclaim) such term inology as part o f his civic vocabulary: The term polished, if we may judge from its etym ology, originally referred to the state o f nations in respect to their laws and governm ent [and m en civilized were m en practiced in the duty o f citizens]. In its later applications, it refers no less to their proficiency in the liberal and m echanical arts, in literature, and in com m erce [and men civilized are scholars, m en o f fashion and traders].40 (p. 195)

This was the crux o f the m atter: m odern society has messed up several 39 Cf. Pocock, Machiavellian M oment, pp. 499ff. 40 The square brackets provide additions inserted into the text in the third (1768) edition.

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basic concepts which merit etym ological clarification, as a first step tow ards recollecting their ancient political significance. N ot that Fer­ guson was eager to set back the clock o f English o r Scottish history so that professors, beaux, and bankers would vanish with a shriek: rather, he wished to remind his ‘civilized’ friends that they were, by original definition at least, citizens first and forem ost. The same bid to intercept and mobilize non-republican m odern term inology was applied to ‘civil society’ itself. The term appears for the first time in the fam ous opening debut o f the Essay, where Ferguson demolishes, on a cue from H utcheson, R ousseau’s hypothetical state of nature where solitary creatures stroll. Yet Fergusonian sociability is from the start associated with war: [M an] has one set o f dispositions w hich refer to his anim al preservation, and to the continuance o f his race; an o th er w hich lead to society, and by inlisting him on the side o f one tribe or com m unity, frequently engage him in w ar and contention with the rest o f m ankind . . . He is form ed no t only to know , bu t likewise to adm ire and to contem n; and these proceedings o f his m ind have a principal reference to his own character, and to th at o f his fellow -creatures, as being the subjects on which he is chiefly concerned to distinguish w hat is right from w hat is w rong, (p. 16)

Sociability is an ‘instinctive propensity’, Ferguson argues, even though m an can analytically be seen ‘either as an individual apart, or as a member o f civil society’ (p. 16). The dichotom y in this context is clear enough: Ferguson has no use for a ‘social’ state o f nature, or for any alleged pre-political society. ‘Civil society’ is in this usage any society within which m an’s intellectual-m oral faculty has context and, hence, relevance. And when he turns to discuss the ultim ate goal o f moral activity, happiness, ‘civil society’ and ‘individual’ are again poised in dichotom ous (but not opposing) interplay: ‘if the public good be the principal object with individuals, it is likewise true, that the happiness of individuals is the great end o f civil society: for in w hat sense can a public enjoy any good, if its members, considered apart, be unhappy?’ (p. 59). W as there ever, for Ferguson, a society that is not ‘civil’? N ot, I think, in any political sense. There are o f course societies such as the family, which did not interest Ferguson very m uch, and polite social intercourse, which he considered dangerous if divorced from citizenship. A defining adjective was therefore requisite. To begin with, ‘civil’ works in the text w ithout reference to any process o f civilization or any built-in notion of refinement. W hat we are left with is simply the ‘n ation’, namely the state: rude or polished, free or corrupted. The alternative to civil society is simply universal violence (p. 17). Even within this broadest o f senses, civil society has some nuts and

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bolts: laws (p. 17), ‘dignities’, institutions, and ‘offices’, which, if not timeless, are at least very ancient (p. 79). There is even in some sense a ‘form al convention’ which represents a ‘national concert’. Such conven­ tion stems from ‘the necessity o f a public defence’, which ‘has given rise to m any departm ents o f state’ (p. 28). Ferguson’s point, however, was n o t to set up a contractual justification o f the state, but rather to clear up one o f the key assertions o f the Essay: that rivalry between nations is conducive, indeed indispensable, for social bonding and civic well-being. T rade, he tells his economically minded friends, is not the hinge o f civil society: it could be conducted even w ithout national bonding and war. Yet civil society itself could not be m aintained w ithout the belligerency which brings about national cohe­ sion (p. 28). This context shows how em phatically non-juristic was Ferguson’s use o f the term ‘civil society’. He was interested neither in a ‘m om ent’ o f its emergence, nor in the state o f nature as its legal opposite, but in the gradual appearance of its essential features, a range o f political institu­ tions and social transactions held together by the non-legal substance he called ‘bonds’ or ‘bands’. Ferguson was certainly not concerned, at least in the Essay, with the legal basis o f property: he constantly lam ented the failure o f m odern societies to separate wealth from virtue and to establish social position on the latter alone. The fact that ‘law has a principal reference to property’ (p. 156) is but a sad rem inder o f hum an weakness. F o r Ferguson, m odern laws ‘secure the estate, and the person o f the subject. We live in societies, where men m ust be rich, in order to be great’ (pp. 161-2). But he adm itted th a t the order was tall indeed: o f all nations, Sparta alone m anaged to engineer a social scale independent o f property ownership (pp. 158-60). In Ferguson’s usage ‘civil’ is no longer contrasted with ‘n atu ral’, as in the natural law tradition and particularly in Hume. It is sometimes the rhetorical counterpart o f ‘rude’, although ‘rude nations’ were not expelled from the history o f ‘civil society’. By m aking both ‘civil’ and ‘rude’ into m orally am biguous terms, Ferguson fully dispensed with the concept o f civil society as a solution for a juristic problem . The polity becomes a natural phenom enon: it is as natural for the members o f civil society to run their political affairs as it is natural for them , savages and m odern Britons alike, to fight, hunt, or play. The arts, too, are natural. So is the cum ulative process o f specialization in various crafts and professions: ‘Knowledge is im portant in every departm ent o f civil society, and requisite to the practice o f every a rt’ (p. 168). Even poetry is subject to the beneficent effects o f specialization. There was nothing wrong, for Ferguson, with the division o f labour as

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long as it does not overrun into the political and military sphere. Public affairs, as opposed to private enterprises, m ust always be m anually operated by keen am ateurs: by large num bers, as large as possible, o f alert citizens, who have retained the ancient skills o f politics and fighting. As the Essay rolls tow ards its climax, ‘civil society’ is gradually m ade m ore civic. It moves from signifying any social situation to signifying a state ruled by laws, and then on to signifying a polity o f active citizens. The strategy o f removing ‘civil society’ from its jurisprudential connota­ tion is completed by im bedding it in Ferguson’s civic language: alm ost all its occurrences are flanked by words which were highly significant in Ferguson’s political idiom, a m odern version o f classical republicanism. Civil society is about ‘spirit’, ‘excitem ent’, ‘business’, and ‘ard o u r’ (p. 204). It is also about conflict and the joys o f using force: W ithout the rivalship o f nations, and the practice o f w ar, civil society itself could scarcely have found an object, o r a form . . . T o overawe, o r intim idate, or, when we can n o t persuade with reason, to resist with fortitude, are the occupations which give its m ost anim ating exercise, an d its greatest trium phs, to a vigorous m ind; and he w ho has never struggled w ith his fellow -creatures, is a stranger to h alf the sentim ents o f m ankind, (p. 28)

This was strong stuff by eighteenth-century standards. T o Ferguson’s contem poraries his insistence o n rivalry was tasteless or quaint; to his posterity, such as the early central-E uropean sociologists, it was fresh and pioneering.41 W hatever else we can m ake o f it, Ferguson’s point is lucid enough: there is no civil society w ithout internal and external strife. Civil society began to acquire new features in zones where geography allowed free and spirited nations, facing one another with energizing rivalry, as in ancient Greece, to develop ‘the genius o f political wisdom and civil arts’ (p. 106). Its institutions and laws were unplanned and developed gradually, since ‘no constitution is followed by concert, no governm ent copied from a plan’ (p. 123). One crucial ingredient was the form ation o f ‘habits’, the acquisition o f discipline, and the regulation of public affairs. Ferguson, a retired military chaplain who had seen com bat and loved it, derived this insight from m ilitary reason. He regarded the timely acceptance o f m artial law as one o f the strengths o f civil society: ‘he who has not learned to give an implicit obedience, where the state has given him a m ilitary leader, and to resign his personal freedom in the field, from the same m agnanim ity with which he m aintains it in the political deliberations o f his country, has yet to learn the m ost im portant lesson o f civil society’ (p. 143, cf. p. 93). W ar has a beauty o f its very own, 41 Ferguson’s position as a founding father o f sociology, prim arily based on his treatm ent o f group conflict, dates from Ludvik Gumplowicz, Die socioligische Staatsidee (G raz, 1892), pp. 67 70. See Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment, p. 90.

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not just as a corollary to civil society but as one o f its finest arts. ‘It is in being grafted on the advantages o f civil society, that the art o f w ar is brought to perfection; that the resources o f armies, and the com plicated springs to be touched in their conduct, are best understood. The most celebrated w arriors were also citizens’, those o f Greece and Rom e (p. 149). W hen no wars are fought, the m ilitary spirit m ust languish, and, by im plication, the civic spirit is at risk (p. 202). This, to a late tw entieth-century gaze, is perhaps the rem otest and darkest part o f Ferguson’s intellectual orbit. It m ust also be noted th at the term ‘civil society’ appears m ore often in a m ilitary context than in any other environm ent in Ferguson’s book. But leaving him there would be selling him short, for, ‘happily fo r civil society’, m en’s objects are not all belligerent. H ad they been so, they would always have opted for m onarchy. Yet in the political arena, as opposed to the m ilitary one, ‘a national force is best formed, where num bers o f men are inured to equality; and where the meanest citizen m ay consider himself, upon occasion, as destined to com m and as well as to obey’ (p. 144). Liberty, posed by Ferguson in opposition to m onarchical governm ent, is about ‘the com m unication o f virtue itself to many; and such a distribution o f functions in civil society, as gives to num bers the exercises and occupa­ tions which pertain to their nature’ (p. 255). Civil society therefore ideally has a strong egalitarian and pluralist basis. Ferguson’s republicanism was based on a large, and potentially growing, constituency of active partici­ pants. By this stage ‘civil society’ is no longer simply the state, but the good state. There comes a point in the book where ‘the history o f civil society’ leads us to concentrate exclusively on the ‘happy nations’, those kept in lively pursuit and strife by their climate, situation, and above all their stam ina (pp. 117-18). A re m oribund and slow-witted nations not civil societies? A lthough Ferguson never abandons the basic identification of state and civil society, his linguistic choices repeatedly suggest that ‘civil society’ refers mostly to polities with active citizenry, or at least to those with courageous rem nants blowing on their republican embers, as in early imperial Rome. Ferguson employs the term for his highly idealized accounts o f ancient republics, but also for his positive (if qualified) view o f the m odern Britons, a people represented in the governm ent and able to ‘avail themselves of the wealth they acquired, and o f the sense o f their personal im portance’, which in turn helped them to limit the m onarchy and mix it with republican ingredients (p. 132). While states or societies can become corrupted and bad, ‘civil society’ itself never appears in the text with a negative qualification, and rarely as a m orally neutral term. ‘Pure’ m onarchy is never referred to as civil

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society: it is in fact a type o f corruption, though n ot the worst (pp. 250-1), and it is intended ‘for a people n ot fit to govern them ­ selves’.42 Significantly, the single occurrence o f ‘civil society’ in Fergu­ son’s college textbook, the Institutes o f M oral Philosophy, is in an egalitarian statem ent: ‘Those are the m ost salutary laws which distribute the benefits and the burdens o f civil society in the m ost equal m anner to all its m em bers.’43 ‘Civil society’ is thus a m isnom er for anything but a broad-based republic or a ‘m ixed’ governm ent with republican com ­ ponents. A good form o f governm ent is, however, merely a necessary condition for the m aintenance o f a good ‘spirit’: Ferguson shared this conviction with his m entor, M ontesquieu. Civil societies in the narrow sense are prosperous societies with ‘a spirit o f progress’. Yet progress, for F er­ guson, was not merely a gradual advance in the ‘civil and commercial arts’, but also a political sphere kept alive by non-professionals and non­ artists. The dichotom y between lively politics and tranquil subjection is linked to the early m odern distinction between negotium and otium: good civil societies are constantly in business, unfailingly in a state o f negotium. Decaying polities, ripe for a single ruler, fall into a state o f otium. As Q uentin Skinner has shown, in English and Scottish discourse o f the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the dichotom y o f otium and negotium neatly fitted the political categories o f m onarchy, where the subject is peaceful and protected, and republic, where the citizen m ust actively defend the com m on weal.44 A striving for otium, for a state o f immobile bliss, is the kind o f m ental m istake or bad omen which Ferguson m ight have called (had the term been available to him) a collective death wish. ‘M ay the business o f civil society be accomplished, and m ay the occasion o f farther exertion be removed?’, he asks (p. 204). N o t, he responds, unless societies degenerate and die like individual men. A nd do they? Ferguson him self argued that ‘m any o f the boasted im provem ents o f civil society, will be mere devices to lay the political spirit at rest, and will chain up the active virtues more than the restless disorders o f m en’ (p. 210). Refinem ent, politeness, and comm erce - those keynotes o f civil society tuned to an A ddisonian lethargy - can be its undoing. The Essay's table o f contents sums the story up: an ‘advance42 Ferguson, Institutes, p. 298. 43 Ibid., p. 289. This is part o f the chapter ‘O f Political Law ’, where Ferguson’s legalistic exposition o f civil society often reveals his extra-legalistic ethics o f political activism. Cf. the Essay, especially pp. 161-7 ,2 6 3 ,2 7 0 . 44 Q uentin Skinner, ‘Sir Thom as M ore’s U topia and the Language o f Renaissance H um anism ’, in A nthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages o f Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 123-57.

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m ent o f civil and commercial arts’ involves the ‘separation o f arts and professions’, social ‘subordination’, and the emergence of complex ‘m anners o f polished and comm ercial nations’. A strong causal thread leads from the heights o f com m ercial m odernity to the two concluding parts, ‘O f the decline o f nations’ and ‘O f corruption and political slavery’. W as the cycle, as in A ristotle or Polybius, viciously breakproof? If Ferguson thought so in his heart o f hearts, he kept it to himself. He repeatedly dismissed the analogy between the history o f nations and individual life cycles. Societies indeed decay and die, but their death - this is the Essay's bottom line - may be indefinitely postponed if m any men act as citizens should. Civic wakefulness is thus the best option for the m odern commercial state. There was no obscurantist retreat from the econom ists’ m odernity in Ferguson’s thought, but neither did he suggest that we float blissfully into a society inhabited by private gain-seekers and run by professional politicians within a highly technical legal fram ework. The closest Ferguson came to challenging his econom ist friends directly was in his appeal to those ‘ablest w riters’ who deal with ‘commerce and wealth . . . not to consider these articles as m aking the sum o f national felicity, or the principal object o f any state’ (p. 140). 45 While com plaining o f a lack o f public spirit, he continued (with his Scottish interlocutors clearly in m ind), we provide the public with reasoning that is worse than having no political views at all: [W]e would have nations, like a com p an y o f m erchants, think o f nothing bu t the increase o f their stock; assem ble to deliberate on profit and loss; and, like them too, intrust their protection to a force which they do not possess in themselves. (P- 140)

Here was Ferguson’s case against Hum e and Smith. To this end he had uprooted the judicial term ‘civil society’ and replanted it in republican soil: D uring the existence o f any free co n stitu tio n . . . the m em bers o f every com m u n ­ ity were to one an o th er objects o f consideration and respect; every point to be carried in civil society, required the exercise o f talents, o f w isdom , persuasion, and vigour, as well as o f pow er. But it is the highest refinement o f a despotical governm ent, to rule by simple com m ands, and to exclude every art b u t th a t o f com pulsion, (p. 260)

Such refined despotism lurks wherever the polished and polite lose sight o f the polis, wherever the civil are no longer citizens (pp. 190, 195). 45 A footnote added to the 1773 edition o f Ferguson's Essay notified the readers o f Adam Sm ith’s forthcom ing ‘theory o f national econom y, equal to w hat has ever appeared on any subject o f science whatever'.

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Men who forget the etymology o f the words they use will erase their deep m oral logic, and eventually de-civilize their society. V

Ferguson’s civic use o f the term ‘civil society’, and the other discursive battles I have attem pted to m ap, m ade his republican stance alm ost untranslatable. This loss is especially notew orthy in the case o f his G erm an readers and adm irers. Ferguson left several distinct fingerprints in G erm an intellectual and literary texts written during his lifetime. The fundam ental argum ent o f his Essay on the History o f Civil Society, the call for a modernized civic virtue, was not am ong them. This is particularly striking, because Ferguson’s Essay was instru­ m ental in the renewed circulation o f the term ‘civil society’ in later eighteenth-century Europe. The book was translated into several E uro­ pean languages. Its first translation, into G erm an in 1769, proved the m ost significant. G otthold Ephraim Lessing read him w ith great atten­ tion, Moses M endelssohn paid tribute to him, and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi brought him into one o f his philosophical novels. Ferguson’s writings enthralled the young Friedrich Schiller and com forted the grieving Novalis. Im m anuel K ant m ade use of him, and so did Johann G eorg H am ann and Johann G ottfried von H erder. N or did Ferguson’s reputation wane in the nineteenth century: Hegel praised him, and so did M arx. To this array o f G erm an readers Ferguson supplied a mixed bag o f satisfactions. And, while his ‘civil society’ was dem onstrably woven into a new G erm an fabric o f biirgerliche Gesellschaft, a great deal o f its substance was lost on the way. Ferguson, in his G erm an recension, owed his fame not to the Essay on the H istory o f Civil Society, b ut to his second volume, the university textbook Institutes o f M oral and Political Science. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, it was the Institutes with its com m on-sense theory o f knowledge and its gentle ethics o f m oral perfectibility, beautifully translated by C hristian G arve, which spoke to the hearts o f H am ann, Schiller, and Novalis. Yet readers with a taste for history and politics were draw n to the Essay. The new Staatswissenschaftler in G ottingen hailed his staunch historical empiricism, his rejection o f a non-social state of nature. The Swiss historian Isaak Iselin adm ired his analysis o f history from a republican vantage point. Ferguson’s narrative o f hum an history in term s o f personal grow th, his attem pt to graft the process o f m oral developm ent onto the history o f m aterial advance, provided a precious insight for the historical works o f Lessing, Schiller, and Hegel. Schiller, in particular, may well have taken F erguson’s idea o f play - the epitom e o f

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freedom in hum an interaction w ith society and with nature - and expanded it into the key concept o f his Aesthetic Education o f Man (1795). Yet the G erm an attem pts at w riting a universal history in the late eighteenth century, however m uch they were inspired by Ferguson’s Essay, were far more teleological than his own work. They led to a perfect future, in term s o f the hum an condition, which went against the grain o f the Scottish analyses o f m odernity. Their w ork was in deep conflict with Ferguson’s open-ended historiography, his acceptance o f m odern commercial society as a datum , and his refusal to escape to speculated A rcadias or states o f future bliss. Significantly, the republican element in Ferguson’s thought was all but lost in the G erm an reception. His insistence on civic alertness and individual political participation were in m ost cases m arginalized or flatly ignored. Burgerliche Gesellschaft became the standard rendering o f societas civilis in the early eighteenth century. The translator o f P ufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium into G erm an felt obliged to clarify it, thus supplying us with a representative discussion o f the concept: This nam e expresses the a u th o r’s L atin w ord Civitas. [T]he w ords burgerliche Gesellschaft frequently occurring [in the translation] should not be understood to m ean anything o th er than the au th o rities and subjects, bound together in obligation, which constitute a certain Reich, republic and the likes o f them .46

It has been argued, especially by those considering the m odem idea o f civil society retrospectively from H egel’s use o f the term, that the crucial feature of this ‘classical’ concept o f civil society was a negative one, its alleged lack o f distinction between the ‘State’ as an institution and ‘Society’ as a bond between citizens or subjects. A ccording to this account, only when political econom y redefined civil society as a sphere o f free, self-interested individual econom ic agents, did ‘society’ become detached from the state, and, especially in G erm an philosophy, even contrasted with it 47 This is a contested analysis, not least because it tends to describe the absence o f Hegel’s future distinction as a conceptual flaw in earlier accounts o f civil society, a reasoning that smacks o f a fallacy.48 M ore significant, in the present context, is the fact th at pre-Hegelian

46 Samuel von Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium , G erm an translation, vol. II (F rankfurt am M ain, 1711), quoted by Riedel, ‘Gesellschaft, burgerliche’, p. 739. 47 Riedel, ibid., p. 721. 48 Ibid., p. 739. In 1807 Joachim Heinrich C am pe’s Worterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (2 vols., Braunschweig, 1807-8), a dictionary sensitive to recent shifts o f meanings, explained burgerliche Gesellschaft as ‘die Gesellschaft, welche den Staat bildet’ (vol. I, p. 652). Elsewhere Cam pe equated it with menschliche Gesellschaft'. vol. II, p. 338.

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concepts o f civil society were n o t m ade o f one skin, not even where the Scottish Enlightenm ent was concerned. G erm an writers o f the eighteenth century still norm ally understood civitas, or burgerliche Gesellschaft, as denoting all political ties which form any kind o f governm ent, ‘sive sit dynastia, sive baronia, sive com itatus, sive principatus’, as Alsted put it in the early seventeenth century.49 G ottfried Wilhelm Leibniz defined it as a ‘natural com m unity (GemeinschaftY whose m em bers ‘live together either in a city or in a country (im Land)', their goal is tem poral well-being’.50 This definition could cover a m onarchy as well as a feudal system o f personal dependen­ cies, as T hom asius indeed understood it. The notion o f burgerliche Gesellschaft did not contain a strong space for the citizen, or, in his problem atic G erm an form , the Burger. As late as 1807 Joachim Heinrich C am pe’s G erm an dictionary still treated ‘B urger’ first as ‘a resident o f a tow n’, then as ‘a m em ber o f the third estate’, and only then, growing out o f the second definition, ‘also as a citizen o f a state [Staatsburger\ .sx But Staatsburger was a late eighteenth-century solution, and initially a very superficial one. Ferguson’s term ‘citizen’ was translated as Burger.52 N either the concept o f Burger no r th at of burgerliche Gesellschaft implied any participation of citizens as such in governm ent, any channel o f influence between the ruled and the rulers, or, indeed, any specific relation between rulers and ruled except for their being in the same political entity. In his Philosophisches Lexicon the Jena theologian Johann G eorg W alch defined < ' Burger\ am ong other non­ political meanings, as either a ‘subject’, or ‘such person as is to be found in a burgerliche Gesellschaft, and has subjected him self to an au th o rity ’s pow er’. This contractarian definition proceeds, following P ufendorf’s De officio, with a distinction between this state and the state o f nature, or of sovereigns with respect to one another.53 Thus the essential character­ istic o f burgerliche Gesellschaft in W alch’s definition was that its m em bers were subjected to political authority. Furtherm ore, the total separation between subjects and rulers was especially underlined. W alch defined ‘republic’, this time following P ufendorf’s De jure, as ‘a civil society which [is] composed of rulers (Regenten) and subjects, who have united with one another for the preservation and prom otion o f the 49 50 51 52

Q uoted by Riedel, ‘Gesellschaft, burgerliche’, p. 739. Q uoted ibid. Cam pe, Worterbuch, vol. I, p. 652 (in the definition for burgerlich). F o r example, in C hristian Friedrich Junger’s translation o f Ferguson’s Essay, Versuch iiber die Geschichte der burgerlichen Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1768), 90, and in Adam Ferguson, ‘Von Staatsgesetzen’, Hannoverisches M agazin (Novem ber, 1771), 1498. 53 Johann G eorg W alch, Philosophisches Lexicon (Leipzig, ‘improved edition’, 1733), p. 333.

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com m on well-being (gemeine W ohlfahrt).' The definition readily included princes . K ant brought this sharp separation between rulers and ruled to its logical conclusion. ‘The Civil U n io n ’, he w rote in his Philosophy o f Law , ‘cannot, in the strict sense, be called a Society; for there is no sociality in com m on between the R uler and the Subject under a Civil C onstitution. They are not co-ordinated as Associates in a Society with each other, but the one is subordinated to the o th er.’55 This distinction, and K an t’s further distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens, would not be possible in Ferguson’s view o f civil society.56 K ant, however, did not altogether dispose o f the concept o f civil society. He stipulated its future perfection by m eans o f his concept of Right. It is ‘the greatest problem for m ankind’, he wrote, to accomplish ‘a civil society adm inistrating justice universally’ (‘eine allgemeine das Recht verwaltende biirgerliche G esellschaft’).57 Justice, not civic partici­ pation; perfection and harm ony, not civic interaction and turbulence: there was nothing Fergusonian ab o u t K an t’s conceptualization o f the term. The G erm an use o f the concept o f civil society can thus be seen as a reworking o f it within the early m odern jurisprudential paradigm , and not within its eighteenth-century republican paradigm . But som ething novel was happening: State and Society were decisively moving ap art in late eighteenth-century G erm an discourse. C am pe’s dictionary, often sensitive to recent shifts o f m eaning, defined biirgerliche Gesellschaft in 1807 as ‘the society which com poses the state’.58 By that time Hegel had engaged with the sphere o f individual economic transactions which was to become his ‘civil society’, distinct from the state by the very essence of the hum an intercourse taking place within it. Hegel’s Scottish m entors are o f crucial im portance here: Ferguson may have furnished Hum e with an acute sense o f the distance between the classical polity and the m odern comm ercial society. But it was H um e and Smith, with their analysis of the private sphere o f exchange, w ho worked their way m ore easily into the new biirgerliche Gesellschaft. All th at was needed was to ignore the civic aspects o f H um e’s political essays, and the irreducible element of 54 Ibid., p. 2156. 55 Im m anuel K ant, Grundlegung der M etaphysik der Sitten (1791), translated by W. Hastie as The Philosophy o f Law (Edinburgh, 1887), vol. I, iii, p. 41. K ant continues: ‘Those who may be co-ordinated with one another m ust consider themselves as m utually equal, in so far as they stand under com m on Laws. T he Civil U nion may therefore be regarded no t so m uch as beings but rather as m aking a Society.’ 56 Ibid., vol. I, ii, p. 44. 57 Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht (1784), Fifth clause. 58 Cam pe, Worterbuch, vol. I, p. 652.

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civil responsibility spelled o ut in the fifth book o f Sm ith’s Wealth o f N ations.59 T he G erm an rejection o f the Scottish republican understanding o f civil society was a complex process. N o intelligent reader o f Ferguson’s Essay in Jiinger’s translation could fail to see th at the Burger described by Ferguson was no mere Untertan, th a t he was an active participant in political life. The translator himself, at one point, intelligently corrects Ferguson’s text when the au thor, som ewhat surprisingly, fails to m ake the obvious distinction between the two terms. Ferguson writes ‘the subjects o f m onarchy, like those o f republics . . .’, and Jiinger, with untypical boldness, renders it into 'die Unterthanen einer Monarchic, gleich den Bur gem freyer Staaten . . .’60 There was no crude m istransla­ tion or m isunderstanding here. R ather, the original civic, activist, m eaning inherent in the English term s ‘civil society’ and ‘citizen’ were lost in the translation, thus rem oving some crucial connotations available to British readers. The result was th a t the jurisprudential vocabulary took over the key concept o f ‘civil society’ and precluded a full view o f its republican application. G erm an thinkers who did com e to term s with the republican challenge often did so with a civilized sneer or with an elegiac resignation. Reviewers blam ed Ferguson for embellishing the barbarism s o f ancient Sparta and Rom e. They dismissed him as a quaint British A ristotelian. The sophisticated C hristian G arve, who translated A ristotle and Cicero as well as Ferguson, shrewdly com m ented th at it was impossible to translate the English term ‘public spirit’ into G erm an: ‘N o virtue, no characteristic, is in fact rarer am ong us.’61 In the writings o f H erder, C hristoph M artin W ieland, and G eorg Schlosser, the civic tradition was seen as a thing o f the past, a long-lost element o f classical o r G erm anic antiquity. As some o f his G erm an readers recognized, Ferguson’s ‘civil society’ was British through and through. H um e and Smith m ight argue against the viability o f full-fledged classical republicanism in the m odern state, but they would n ot consider it m oribund or irrelevant. They m ight regard the active citizen-soldier as an anachronism , but they would not dismiss him as an academic invention or a rom antic forgery. Quite different was the situation o f their G erm an contem poraries. In their political culture 59 F o r detailed discussions, and alternative interpretations, o f Hegel and his Scottish m entors see Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment, and Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics o f Spirit 1770-1807 (Cam bridge, 1987). 60 Essay, p. 71; Versuch, p. 105. 61 C. G arve, ‘A nm erkungen’, in his translation o f Ferguson’s Institutes: Adam Fergusons Grundsatze der Moralphilosophie (Leipzig, 1772), p. 331.

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there were no embers to blow upon, no rhetoric to fuel and no vocabulary to snatch from the natural lawyers’ texts. The bid to reclaim politics from politeness, and citizenship from civility, would have been a useless exercise even had it survived the challenge o f translation. This was best understood by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who examined the Scottish ideas o f civil society in his Sturm und Drang novel Woldemar (begun as a fragm ent in 1779). As his young protagonists, m odern G erm an men and women, stroll in the garden and discuss Ferguson’s idea o f a civil society, one o f them rem arks that civic virtue was long dead in the Holy R om an Empire. Citizenship, he says with great em otion, is extinct. Armies are m ade up o f forced recruits: T hus, lacking feelings o f fatherland a n d freedom , lacking all interests o f the heart, lacking courage and lacking love, em ploying prisoners for o u r guard and protection the thousand-year Reich is upon us, and we proclaim it w ith a new kind o f enthusiasm , with the strange enthusiasm o f m aterialism , w ith the rap tu re o f cold blood.62

Jacobi did not live to see it, b u t a future did lie ahead. It came with G erm an national revival during the w ar o f liberation, and with its nineteenth-century experiments w ith liberalism, nationalism and unifica­ tion. A nd it rested on a theory o f civil society that rew orked the private and the public, the m eaning o f civil freedom, the role o f history and the scope for ultim ate perfection, in a way profoundly different from the Scottish ideas so avidly read by Jaco b i’s young idealists. 62 F. H. Jacobi, Werke, ed. F. R oth and F. K oppen, vol. V (Leipzig, 1823), pp. 166-7.

5

Enlightenment and the institution of society: notes for a conceptual history Keith Michael Baker

‘Je dis social, et je me sers d ’un m ot dangereux dans la discussion, par la multiplicity des idees vagues q u ’on s’est formees a son occasion.’ So warned M irabeau in the Essai sur le despotisme} A nd rightly so. Few w ords can have been m ore generously invoked in the course o f the eighteenth century; none seem now m ore difficult for the historian to pin down. Yet, by the same token, none was m ore central to the philosophy o f the Enlightenm ent. ‘Progress’, ‘civilization’, ‘toleration’, ‘utility’: such keywords o f enlightened philosophy are unthinkable w ithout ‘society’ as their implied referent; they all assum e its logical priority and m oral value as the essential fram e o f collective hum an existence. ‘Society’ and ‘E nlightenm ent’ belong together. The Encyclopedic o f D iderot and d ’A lem bert suggested as m uch when it declared ‘social’ to be a ‘m ot nouvellement introduit dans la langue, pour designer les qualites qui rendent un hom m e utile dans la societe, propre au commerce des hom ines’.2 It made the point even m ore explicit when it announced, in its definition o f the ‘philosophe’, th a t ‘la societe civile est, pour ainsi dire, une divinite pour lui sur la terre’.3 The Enlightenm ent invented society as the symbolic representation o f collective hum an existence and instituted it as the essential dom ain o f hum an practice. This chapter (first published in William M elding and W yger Velema (eds.), Main Trends in Cultural H istory (R odopi, 1994); reprinted with permission) draw s on research for an article on 4societe* in the Handhuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820, edited by R olf Reichardt and Hans-Jiirgen Llisebrink. I wish to thank R olf R eichardt for providing research m aterials relating to the project. I have also learned m uch about this topic from discussion and shared research with Daniel G ordon, whose help I am most grateful to acknowledge here. Finally I would like to thank Francois Furet, M ona O zouf and the participants in their sem inar at the Ecole des H autes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, as well as the participants in the 1991 summ er school o f the Dutch G raduate School for C ultural History, and my colleagues C arolyn Lougee, Paul Robinson and Jam es Sheehan, for their generous critical responses to earlier versions o f this chapter. 1 Honore-Gabriel de Riqueti, comte de M irabeau, Essai sur le despotisme (London, 1775), p. 57. 2 Denis D iderot and Jean le R ond d ’Alem bert (eds.). Encyclopedic ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, par une societe des gens de lettres, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751-61), vol. XV, p. 251. 3 Encyclopedic, vol. X II, p. 510.

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If we can m ap the sem antic field o f societe and its cognates in eightcenth-century discourse, then, we can reasonably hope to learn som ething about the Enlightenm ent in the process. And not only about the Enlightenm ent. F or us, too, ‘social’ has the kind o f multiplicity o f vague connotations to which M irabeau referred. F o r us, too, civil society is, as it were, a divinity on earth. Society is our G od, the ontological fram e o f our hum an existence. The social (as anyone who presumes to question its priority is rem inded) is our name for the ‘really real’. It secures the existential ground beneath our feet, presenting a bedrock o f reality beneath the shifting sands o f discourse. Such a m ap seems far from realization and would certainly be im pos­ sible to draw in the space o f the few pages that follow. I aim only to prom pt discussion by offering some prelim inary notes on an investigation in progress. T h e evidence o f th e d ictio n aries

T o claim, as the Encyclopedic did, that the term social was newly introduced in the middle o f the eighteenth century was, strictly speaking, erroneous. But it is indisputable that, with its sister terms, it assum ed a new centrality in French discourse during this period. The IN L F /A R T F L database o f French language texts suggests a surge o f occurrences o f societe and its cognates in the last decades o f the seventeenth century, particularly the 1670s and 1680s, followed by a steady increase in usage o f the term s in the course of the eighteenth century.4 French writers were 4 Searching the A R T F L database for occurrences o f societe(s), social(e)(es)-(-aux)> sociable(s), and sociabilite during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Daniel G ordon has arrived at the following calculations. I wish to thank him for allowing me to use here a table now published in his Citizens without Sovereignty. Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton, N .J., 1994). The table presents the num ber o f occurrences o f any o f these four words per decade and the frequency o f these occurrences per thousand words in the database. D ate

N o.

Per 1,000

D ate

No.

Per 1,000

1601-10 1611-20 1621-30 1631-40 1641-50 1651-60 1661-70 1671-80 1681-90 1691-1700

40 27 12 13 12 93 16 136 197 98

0.0189 0.0385 0.0043 0.0156 0.0126 0.0527 0.0297 0.0669 0.1164 0.0530

1701-10 1711-20 1721-30 1731-40 1741-50 1751-60 1761-70 1771-80 1781-90 1791-1800

74 87 105 553 357 1102 1746 1811 1047 1396

0.0880 0.0750 0.1156 0.1246 0.1735 0.2450 0.3728 0.4528 0.2445 0.6265

The database (now much larger) then contained approxim ately 300 works from the

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talking m ore frequently about societe. N o less im portant, they were talking about it in new ways. A t the beginning o f the seventeenth century, societe carried a range of essentially voluntaristic m eanings, clustered around two poles: associ­ ation or partnership for a com m on purpose, on the one hand; friendship, com radeship, com panionability, on the other. Thus one finds societe defined by R obert Estienne’s Dictionnaire frangois-latin (1549) as societas (partnership or association for a com m on purpose), consortium (a com m unity o f life or possessions), or contuhernium (literally, the com ra­ deship implied in the sharing o f a tent; hence a fellowship, band or brotherhood; cohabitation or concubinage). Estienne’s definitions are followed exactly by Henri H ornkens’s Receuil de dictionaires francoys, espaignolz et latins (1599) and Jean N icot’s Thresor de la langue francoyse (1606), and closely by R andle C otgrave’s Dictionarie o f the French and English Tongues (1611), which defines societe as ‘societie, fellowship, consort, com panie’. (C otgrave also gives sociable in the sense o f ‘sociable, com paniable, fam iliar, courteous, gentle, friendlie’.) The voluntaristic connotations o f the term are m ade even clearer in Pierre Richelet’s Dictionnaire fra n fo is, published in 1680. There societe is defined in its strictest sense as a ‘contrat de bonne foi par lequel on met en com m un quelque chose p o u r en profiter honnetm ent’ (examples: ‘E ntrer en societe avec quelqu’u n ’; ‘R om pre le contrat de societe q u ’on avoit fait avec une personne’), while its m ore figural sense is given as ‘am itie’ or ‘liaison’ (examples: ‘Ils sont dans une etroite societe’; ‘Faire societe avec quelqu’u n ’). Richelet seems to align sociable clearly with the latter m eaning o f societe as friendship or com panionship, since ‘ce m ot se dit des personnes & veut dire avec qui on peut faire societe, q u ’on peut frequenter, qui n ’est point d ’hum eur farouche’. Societe civile, which now m akes w hat seems to be its first dictionary appearance in French, seems, on the other hand, to be m ore am biguous. Its definition as ‘commerce civil du m onde’ is supported by the example: ‘il faut retrancher les m echans de la societe civile’. But this leaves quite unclear w hether societe is civile in this usage because it is characterized by civilite, or because it is shared by the m em bers o f a single civitas (the com m on polity o f a single city, state, or country). Richelet’s treatm ent o f the term societe seems confirmed and amplified sevenieenth century and 500 from the eighteenth century. It should be emphasized, however, th at this is not, in any strict statistical sense, a representative sample o f French works published during the period. A R T F L , the Project for Am erican and French Research on the Treasury o f the French Language, University o f Chicago, is a joint project o f the Institut N ational de la Langue Fran^aise (Centre N ational de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris) and the University o f Chicago.

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in R ochefort’s Dictionnaire general et curieux contenant les principaux m ots et les plus usitez en la langue franfoise, published in 1685. F or R ochefort, ‘ce m ot signifie com m unem ent un C ontrat, par lequel deux, ou plusieurs m ettent quelque chose en com m un’. But that usage o f the term is not his essential concern: ‘icy ce m ot, societe, est pris pour une conversation civile’.5 R ochefort, then, is interested in societe above all as a sphere o f conversation, com m unication, and fellowship. But he intro­ duces a different note by situating th a t exchange within a quintessentially hum an dom ain o f m utual dependence. G od, he insists, is sufficient unto himself; the anim als lack language and com m unication. Both are accord­ ingly ‘hors des liens de toute societe & com m unaute’. Only m an is neither perfect enough to be independent n o r so imperfect as to be incapable o f conversation. This is why ‘en qualite d ’anim al sociable & civil, il est necessaire q u ’il ait beaucoup de choses com m unes avec tous les individus de son espece, & encore plus avec ceux de son pais & bien plus encore avec ceux de sa m aison’.6 A longside societe as contract, and under the sign o f societe as com panionability, R ochefort introduces into his dictionary the notion o f societe as hum an interdependence. This is the m eaning o f societe th a t suddenly becomes prim ary, five years later, in A ntoine Furetiere’s Dictionnaire universeI (1690). Furetiere does not abandon the m ore voluntaristic definitions characteristic o f earlier dictionaries. But he prefaces them with another: SOCIETE. s.f. Assemblee de plusieurs hommes en un lieu pour s’entrecourir dans les besoins. Les sauvages vivent avec peu de societe. Les hommes se sont mis en societe pour vivre plus commodement & plus poliment; ils ont fait des loix severes contre ceux qui troublent la societe civile.7 Since this definition, or variations upon it, recurs frequently throughout the eighteenth century, it is w orth pausing here to identify its principal com ponents. First, society belongs in the order o f needs, to which hum an beings respond through com m on action and m utual support. The notion th at such a form o f association is n atural to hum an beings is not explicitly stated here, but it is m ade clear enough in the accom panying definition o f sociable as ‘d ’un naturel doux & dispose a vivre en com pagnie’, with the rem ark th at T hom m e est le seul anim al naturellem ent sociable, qui peut faire liaison, amitie avec un autre, p o u r s’entrecourir’. The same theme 5 Cesar de Rochefort, Dictionnaire general et curieux contenant les principaux m ots et les plus usitez en la languefran^oise (Lyons, 1685), p. 691. 6 Ibid., p. 692. 7 A ntoine Furetiere, Dictionnaire universel, contenant generalement tous les m ots franco is tant vieux que modernes et les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts, 3 vols. (The Hague and R otterdam , 1690), vol. Ill: s.v. ‘Societe*.

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was sounded in the Dictionnaire de I’Academie frangoise in 1694, where societe is defined as ‘frequentation, commerce, que les hommes aim ent naturellem ent a avoir les uns avec les autres’, with lla societe est une chose naturelle aux hommes, les hommes se deffendent, se maintiennent par la societe . . .’ given as examples. Second, this gathering o f m en is a fact o f hum an institution; in Furetiere’s language, men have ‘placed themselves’ in society to live more com fortably and politely. Society is at once natural to hum an beings and instituted by them. As the Dictionnaire de I’Academie frangoise put it in 1762, it is an ‘assemblage d ’hom m es qui sont unis p ar la nature ou par des lois, commerce que les homm es ont naturellem ent les uns avec les autres’. But w hat is the function o f laws within such a gathering? Clearly, one o f their principal functions is to defend civil society. As Furetiere rem arks with an example, men ‘ont fait des loix severes contre ceux qui troublent la societe civile’. Hence a third, recurring them e in the eighteenth-century dictionaries: the theme of society as potentially endangered or troubled. In 1694, for example, the Dictionnaire de I’Academie frangoise offers ‘cet homme etoit ennemy de la societe’ as an example; in 1762, it adds ‘troubler la societe. II merite d ’etre banni de la societe civile'. Society is an order o f peace and stability that m ust not be disturbed. The bonds o f society m ust be preserved from those who threaten them. A nd it is w orth emphasizing, in this context, the close lexical relationship between societe and liens. ‘Les liens de la societe’ becomes a recurring phrase in the course o f the eighteenth century. Society is bonds', society is hum an order, an order whose tranquillity m ust not be threatened. ‘Society’ is the name for the interplay of individual hum an wills; it is also the name for that which constrains and orders those wills, preventing them from producing anarchy. Hence the force o f the topos o f ‘troubling’ society: the enemy o f society, as the Dictionnaire de I’Academie frangoise rem arks, deserves to be banished from it. Each o f these themes resonates in the treatm ent o f societe in the Encyclopedie o f D iderot and d ’A lem bert, which contains two principal articles on the subject. T hat largely devoted to the jurisprudential m eaning o f the term offers the broadest possible definition o f societe as ‘une union de plusieurs personnes pour quelque objet qui les rassemble’.8 Possible societies may thus include societes generates (those generic to the hum an species) and societes particulieres (those occurring within a particular state, town, or other location). G eneral societies include m arriage (‘la plus ancienne de toutes . . . qui est d ’institution divine’); the 8 Encyclopedic, vol. XV, pp. 2 5 8 -9 (.?. v. ‘Societe [Jurisprud.]').

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family (‘une societe naturelle dont le pere est le ch ef’); the societe civile ou politique form ed by the union o f several families in a single city, town, or village (whose members ‘sont lies entre eux par leurs besoins m utuels & par les rapports q u ’ils o nt les uns aux autres’); and, finally, the societe universelle com posed o f all men ‘d ’un meme pays, d ’une meme nation & meme du m onde entier’. Particular societies, in their turn, may include those form ed for purposes o f religion (‘com m unautes & congregations, ordres religieux’), for tem poral affairs (‘com m unautes d ’habitans, les corps de ville’), for the adm inistration o f justice (‘les com pagnies etablies pour rendre la justice’), for the arts and sciences (universities, colleges, academies, and other literary societies), for the conferral o f honours (‘ordres royaux & m ilitaires’), or fo r financial, comm ercial and other undertakings. In this last context, indeed, societe is little m ore than a synonym for ‘co n tract’. Les societes qui se contractent entre m archands, ou entre particuliers, sont une convention entre deux ou plusieurs personnes, p a r laquelle ils m ettent en com m un, entre eux, tous leurs biens, o u une partie, en quelque com m erce, ouvrage, ou a u tre affaire, p o u r en p a rta g er les profits, ou en su p p o rter la perte en com m un, chacun selon ses fonds, ou suivant ce qui est regie p ar le traite de societe.9

Clearly, then, societe is a capacious term. Clearly, too, the term has a capacity to efface understandings o f collective existence traditional to the Old Regime. It is rem arkable, for example, th at this discussion reserves no particular privilege to the m onarchical state, whose ghost appears to hover som ewhat uncertainly over the border between societe civile ou politique and societe universelle. It is rem arkable, too, that tow n govern­ ments, corps o f m agistrates, colleges, and universities can be placed unproblem atically under the same rubric as financial and commercial undertakings. N o distinction is found to be necessary between collectiv­ ities instituted by divine o r royal authority and those deriving from a contract am ong individuals, between those bodies exercising public power and those subject to it. V irtually all hum an activities are caught within the fram e o f this definition, and they appear, above all, as com m on human activities. The barest possible reference to the divine institution o f m arriage seems merely to point up the secular force o f the term societe in its general attribution to form s o f association natural to hum ankind, or instituted for conscious hum an purposes. 9 Encyclopedic, vol. XV, p. 258. The expanded version o f this article in the Encyclopedic methodique was even m ore direct. Its form ulation o f this sentence read: ‘N ous entendons ici particulierem ent p ar le m ot societe, une convention par laquelle deux ou plusieurs personnes m ettent en com m un, entre eux, tous leurs biens, ou une partie, . . . etc.’, Encyclopedie methodique. Jurisprudence, 10 vols. (Paris, 1782-91), vol. VII, p. 609.

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The second, m ore substantial article on societe published in the Encyclopedie treats it as a term o f ethics. It would be interesting to be able to identify all the sources o f this text. But we can at least recognize two substantial ones: Jean-Jacques B urlam aqui’s Principes du droit naturel (1747) and Claude Buffier’s Traite de la societe civile (1726), excerpts from which are liberally folded into the text.10 B urlam aqui’s appearance here is perhaps predictable: one would hardly expect the m ajor Encyclopedie article on the subject o f society to be untouched by the natural law tradition o f which he was an influential expositor in the m iddle o f the eighteenth century. But Buffier - the Jesuit best know n for his role in the popularization o f Lockean philosophy in France - is a m ore intriguing source, not least because his Traite de la societe civile represented a sustained attem pt to elaborate the principles o f a rational and secular social ethic, and to explain the rules and rew ards o f social civility, w ithin an ultim ately religious fram ework. Perhaps the m ost striking feature o f this Encyclopedie article is the abandon with which it m ultiplies the reasons th at society is at once natural and necessary to hum ankind - alm ost as if the spectre o f anarchy and disorder is so strong th a t it m ust be exorcized with as m any argum ents as possible. ‘Les hom m es sont faits pour vivre en societe’, the argum ent begins. This is so because G od wished that ‘les liens du sang & de la naissance commen