Philosophical
History of the Idea of Civil Society
by
Rory O'Brien
February
1999
http://web.net/robrien/papers/civhist.html
The
following is a short overview of the thoughts of some influential philosophers
who, down through the ages, pondered on how people could best meet their
individual needs while also achieving collective ends. It is supposed that this
happens best when people in a society treat each other in a "civil"
manner.
The
Classical Period
Socrates
Over two
thousand years ago, classical philosophers were grappling with the concepts
surrounding communal life in the polis, the Greek city-state. How could people
obtain the ‘good life’ given the inherent conflicts between their needs as
individuals and the needs of their society? Socrates, according to Plato,
advocated that issues be resolved via public argument using the dialectic, a
form of rational dialogue in which the arguers test propositions against other
propositions in order to uncover the truth, that is, until they achieve a
reasoning that cannot be refuted.
Plato
Plato
described a person’s soul, or personality, as having three parts: an appetite, which
seeks physical satisfactions; a spirit, which seeks social approval; and
reason, which seeks truth. A just person is one in whom reason, aided by a
strong spirit, constrains the demands of the appetite. A just society is one in
which people dedicate themselves to the common good, practice civic virtues of
wisdom, courage, moderation and justice, and perform the occupational role to
which they are best suited. Plato’s ideal state is ruled by philosopher-kings,
who make decisions based solely on the common good.
Aristotle
For
Aristotle, the best state is a polity which is ruled by the middle class, who
are more likely to be moderate in their individual aspirations, and more likely
to strive for equality, than either the rich or the poor. But since a small
middle class can rarely stand up to the passions of the rich or poor it tends
to become either an oligopoly (rule by the rich minority) or a democracy (rule
by the poor majority).
A democracy
is preferable to an oligopoly, he said, and it highlights two aspects of
liberty. The first is that individuals should have the opportunity to
participate in ruling through taking part in public office. Laws should be the
result of public deliberation among average citizens rather than experts, since
people through discourse enhance their collective practical intelligence and
ensure optimal satisfaction of all parties in the society. The second is that,
subject to obeying rightly constituted laws, people should be able to live as
they like, free from interference from the state. In this, people are to be
treated as equals.
Aristotle
separated scientific knowledge, in which predictions about natural things are
made on the basis of theory, from practical intelligence, which is concerned
with the morality and rationality of human action. Unlike the constancy of
nature, human activity is inherently unpredictable, and can only be understood
through experience rather than theoretical deductions. Thus, society cannot be
revised through a comprehensive theory, like the ideal of Plato’s Republic, but
only through building upon the rational characteristics that are already part
of existing experience.
The Middle Ages
Saint
Augustine
A century
after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Saint
Augustine wrote his City of God, in which he subordinated belief in a natural
law of society based on reason, to one based on faith in God. Submission to the
will of God, as elucidated by the fear-inducing institutions of Church and
State, was required to lessen the pain and suffering of humans forever tainted
by original sin. This thought formed the basis of law and order during the
subsequent centuries of the feudal era.
Thomas
Aquinas
In the
thirteenth century, based on the rediscovered writings of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas
reconciled reason with faith by positing that correct human conduct can be
rationally ascertained through study of the laws of nature, but only in
accordance with the divine laws ordained by God. Scripture provides the moral
values which guide people in their interpretations of natural law principles in
their formulation of specific human laws. The Bible’s admonishment to
"love thy neighbour" thus provides a guideline to recognizing that
people get along best when their mutual rights are respected, leading to laws
that treat all citizens alike.
Martin
Luther and John Calvin
Martin
Luther and John Calvin founded the Protestant religion at the beginning of the
Renaissance period as a protest against the authority of the Roman Catholic
Church, which they viewed as being corrupt. Their main contribution to the idea
of civil society was not that the State should be similarly replaced, but
rather that people should be free to choose their own religious commitments
while demonstrating charity and service to their neighbours.
The Age of
Reasoning
Thomas
Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
lived at the time of the English civil war of 1642 to 1651, which pitted the
King and his supporters, fighting for traditional government in Church and
State, against the supporters of Parliament, who sought radical changes in
religion and a greater share of power at the national level. Hobbes believed
that in their original ‘state of nature’, people regarded themselves as equal
to all others and, in competing for scarce resources, lived in a society of
"all against all". Consequently, life was "solitary, poore,
nasty, brutish, and short". Upon realizing that such a state of constant
struggle for individual power limits social developments and common wealth,
people would seek a new basis for society in which civic virtues are derived
from natural laws, the first of which is that all persons ought to seek peace.
The second, derived from the Bible’s Golden Rule, is that one should respect
the rights of others in order to safeguard one’s own rights.
Reflecting
the growth in economic transactions in society, Hobbes stated that social
relations are to be based on equality and mutual trust, and each person must
"performe their covenants made", which is to say they must live up to
their agreements and contracts. But since people are sometimes fallible, a
state must be created under the consent of the people to safeguard the peace
and ensure contracts were upheld. In order to secure the rights of all
citizens, the state must be impartial, so as not to unfairly promote the
interests of one person or group over another. The state or commonwealth, which
Hobbes termed Leviathan (after a Biblical sea monster), once created by popular
consent, would allow no threat to the general peace, including that of
political dissent. All lawmaking, judicial powers and executive powers are to
be exercised in a single body. This body, be it a parliament or, ideally, a
monarch, is to have authority even over religious doctrines and beliefs.
John Locke
John Locke,
writing only a few decades later, argued that the power of the state should be
limited so as not to threaten the basic rights of the citizens. He suggested
that the state be constrained by dividing its powers into three functional
components, carried out by two separate branches. The legislative branch is
concerned with law creation, while the executive branch has responsibility for
the functions of enforcing the law and conducting foreign policy. He based his
ideas on the doctrine of a God-given Natural Law, which posits that individual
citizens have certain natural rights as humans that no one can take away from
them, such as the preservation of life, liberty, and property. He promoted the
civic virtue of toleration for the beliefs and actions of others, provided they
do not impinge on people’s rights. Thus, he advocated that individuals be
allowed to meet together, form associations, and enter into relations of their
choice. Particularly in reference to churches, he said the state had no
authority to set religious doctrines.
[At this
point it is useful to digress a moment to describe some of the changes taking
place in society in the eighteenth century. It was the Age of Enlightenment, in
which philosophers developed their social and political ideas under the
influence of an advancing rationalism in the mathematical and physical
sciences. It was also a time of social upheaval and the Industrial Revolution,
in which advances in science and technology improved manufacturing,
transportation and communication. In turn, this created an expansion of
national and international trade, with a concommitant elaboration of financial
systems, and a rise in the fortunes and power of the merchant class. These
helped fuel a growth in the population of cities, an increasing division of
labour, and social inequalities, resulting in abyssmal living and working
conditions for the urban poor.]
The Age of
Enlightenment
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in the mid 1700s attempted to persuade people that Locke and Hobbes
had placed too much importance on the rights of individuals, leading to a
pursuit for individual material gain in a laissez-faire economy at the expense
of the pursuit of civic virtues associated with the common good. He felt that a
growing division of labour exacerbated natural inequalities and culminated in
the establishment of a powerful mercantile and propertied class that dominated
the rest of society. To avoid the jeopardy of civil war, this class sought to
appease the anger of the poor by instituting a new social order, a civil
society that would provide equality and freedom for all. But this was just a
trick, said Rousseau, that allowed the wealthy to maintain inequalities of
power and privilege by postulating an equal freedom to acquire such advantages.
And because of the consent given by the poor to such a form of governance, they
were unlikely to rebel.
Rousseau
devised the idea of the social contract as a means whereby citizens would make
the common good their highest priority. This is accomplished by each person
subjugating their right for the individual pursuit of happiness to that of
their community’s right for collective well-being. The state is the arena for
defining the nature of the common good, and civil liberty emerges when all
people are willing to abide by the general will. Since common people are to be
the law-makers, they will promulgate laws that result in moderating
accumulation of individual wealth and thereby promote equality and trust.
It was the
thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, notably David Hume, Adam Ferguson and
Adam Smith, that laid the philosophical premises for capitalist mercantilism.
David Hume
David Hume,
in his Treatise on Human Nature, argued that there was no unity between Reason
and Morality, and that people set their goals on the basis of Morality, but use
Reason in achieving them. His three fundamental rules of conduct - the
stability of possessions, their transfer by consent, and the performance of
promises - are human conventions, and not based in any ‘natural law’. The
implications of this thought were profound, leading to the notion that people,
in using their reason to follow their self-interests, eventually achieve the
interests of society as a whole. People establish and follow the laws of the
land, not so as to serve some universal good, but to maximize their
self-interests in an enlightened manner.
Adam
Ferguson and Adam Smith
Ferguson and
Smith both held that the binding principle of civil society was a private
morality predicated on public recognition by one’s peers, joined through bonds
of moral sentiment. This philosophical stance did not preclude Adam Smith from
asserting that, because an individual’s identity and power rested on their
perceived value within an arena of exchange, the whole of society would be
better off if marketplace exchanges were unconstrained by the state.
Immanuel
Kant
Immanuel
Kant’s main principle regarding civil society was that people should treat
other people as ends in themselves rather than means to the ends of others. In
other words, we must consider how others would benefit themselves from our
actions, rather than how we might use them only for our own benefit, and we
must ensure that whatever means we use to pursue our own self-interests does
not interfere with others’ rights to pursue theirs. And while Kant echoed Hume
in his relegation of ethics and morals to the private sphere, he advocated a
public arena of rational, critical discourse concerning the ‘ends’ posed by the
state. In this regard, he was the first to suggest that a functional civil
society should be seen as distinct from the state.
The
Nineteenth Century
G.W.F. Hegel
G.W.F. Hegel
at the beginning of the nineteenth century traced the evolution of the idea of
civil society within historical contexts, and affirmed its basis as a human
creation and not as a metaphysical reality with prior existence in a natural
order. He, too, envisioned civil society as a separate sphere from the state,
one in which people were both workers as well as consumers of other people’s
work. As consumers, people strive to be equal to others, yet to satisfy a need
for recognition they must consume distinctive goods. Thus, needs proliferate,
the variety of goods proliferate, and different kinds of work proliferate.
People, in their division of labour, are mutually dependent on one another.
They become skilled and their value increases, but this promotes technological
developments that reduce production costs by replacing workers with machines.
For Hegel, social relations existed within a class structure consisting of an
agricultural class, consisting of landowning farmers, a business class, consisting
of workers, craftsmen, and businessmen, and a class of civil servants, who were
educated, middle-class bureaucrats that were presumed to be dedicated to the
welfare of all.
All of these
things presuppose a civil society that stood in opposition to the state, one in
which a plethora of interests competed with one another, generally without
consideration of the common good. To ensure that certain interests do not
predominate over others, Hegel refuted Hume and Kant’s separation between
public reasoning and private morality, and divised the notion of the
Corporation as the meeting place of both the will of the individual and the
universal will of society, such will uniting practical and ethical elements
into a single form of reasoning. The Corporation allows for communal life,
through mutual recognition of its members’ needs and contributions, and it
mediates between the particular interests of its members and the universal
interests of the state. The Corporation then, in its mediation role, has the
duty to practice as well as teach civic virtue as a means of promoting the
common good, but it is the State that is the ultimate arbiter of morality, and,
as such, gives civil society its necessary moral directions.
Alexis de
Toqueville
Alexis de
Toqueville was a French sociologist and politician who provided a contemporary
analysis of American society from the beginning of the democratic state. He
felt that Americans based their actions on two primary concepts, individualism
and equality. While de Toqueville felt that too much emphasis on individualism
would lead to widespread egoism and a breakdown in civic virtue, he
acknowledged that Americans had a saving grace in their promotion of equality.
It is through a feeling of being equal to others that allows people the mutual
respect needed to encourage successful public participation in political life.
This manifested itself in the penchant for the citizenry to form groups and
voluntary associations. Only as part of a group can individuals realize their
self-interest is best served by considering the needs of others as well. A
great deal of the success of the American political system rested on its
reliance on a multitude of local governments, which allowed for more public
involvement in issues pertinent to all. He feared, however, that the American
predeliction for material gain would cause them to lose interest in public
affairs, and he was also apprehensive of the potential social rifts caused by
the increasing wealth and power of the owner class over the worker class.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
was also concerned about the growing power of the owning class. Although he
believed that a democracy was the best type of state, he felt that Hegel
incorrectly idealized the state, erroneously assuming it could set the moral
tone of the society and ensure the common good among competing interests. Marx
felt that the private dimension of civil society overpowered the public aspect,
which, in a market-oriented society, resulted in an overemphasis on the rights
of the individual to pursue self-interest and a corresponding de-emphasis on
the rights of the citizen to pursue communal interests.
People, he
thought, in a society characterized primarily of a system of production and
consumption, became alienated insofar as they were prohibited from developing
their full talents and powers as human beings. Being atomized and estranged
from others, they also are less likely to cultivate civic virtues, and more
likely to treat others as means, not ends. In a capitalist market economy, in
which the quest for money is encouraged, avarice is a common value. One’s
feeling of self-worth and identity rests less on traditional virtues, and more
on one’s occupation, income and possessions.
Under
capitalism, wealthy owners of the means of production treat workers as a
commodity, using them as machine tenders in increasingly sophisticated
technologically-based systems of goods manufacture. They expropriate the
surplus value of their labour, and use this capital both to enrich themselves
and to further expand and develop their business. As these enterprises grew,
they became increasingly important to the national interests in a highly
competitive international arena. This, said Marx, meant that the state was even
more likely to protect their interests against the interests of the workers.
This domination of one class over another is inevitable under capitalism and
would continue until a revolution occured, instilling a classless society in
which a true civil society would flourish.
The
Twentieth Century
John Rawls
John Rawls
is one of the foremost political thinkers of this century. His main
contribution to the concept of civil society is his theory of justice. To set a
common standard viewpoint by which to judge the various means of allocating
what Rawls calls primary goods, such as rights, powers, opportunities, income,
wealth, and the bases for self-respect, he postulates a "veil of
ignorance" that assumes that one’s position and situation in life is not
known. This makes it likely that decisions regarding distribution of primary
goods will be made on the basis of providing a decent life for those in the
worst possible situations, since the decision-makers may find that, upon
lifting the veil, that is the position they themselves are in.
In addition
to a principle of equal liberty, which includes the right of all people to vote
and hold public office, freedom of speech, conscience, thought, association,
the right to private property, and due process of law, he adds a second principle
of equal opportunity to compete for any position in society. These principles
underscore Rawls’ idea of ‘political liberalism’, in which he differentiates
between a political realm, consisting of public institutions and social
structures, and a nonpublic cultural realm, in which people interact with
others in a diversity of associations according to shared moral doctrines. No
single morality arising from a non-public setting should be allowed to become
the basis of justice, lest the state become a repressive regime.
To ensure
the values of a constitutional democracy, which Rawls feels is the best kind of
government since it allows for pluralism as well as stability, a constitutional
consensus must be achieved through equal rights, a public discourse on
political matters, and a willingness to compromise.
References:
DeLue,
Steven M., Political Thinking, Political Theory, and Civil Society, Allyn and
Bacon, Boston, 1997
Seligman,
Adam B., The Idea of Civil Society, Macmillan Inc., New York, 1992