Civil society: its rivals and kin

It is a common agreement among historians of ideas that civil society is a no-tion of ancient origins, that has already been used by Aristotle and Cicero� In the modern era, it was debated by John Locke (1689), Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1991), and Karl Marx (1970), who already understood this notion in very differ-ent ways� The first work regarded as an empirical study of civil society is de Toc-queville’s Democracy in America (1988), first published in French in the 1830s�

Yet, the idea of civil society had its renaissance in the late 1970s, returning in a slightly modified form (Szacki 1997: 16)� There are authors who claim that the civil society revival was rooted in movements of anti-totalitarian opposition in Eastern Europe and point to Solidarność as its direct source (Cohen, Arato 1992:

31; Pełczyński 1988)� Regardless if this is an exaggerated opinion, discussing civil society just after discussing Solidarność seems a justified choice� Polish sociol-ogy often highlights the links between Solidarność and the subsequent emer-gence of third sector after 1989� Both of those grand research topics were often associated with the problem of the sociological vacuum� Another grand problem of Polish sociology – social capital – will be discussed in Chapter 7� This chapter therefore needs to start from a conceptual distinction between two notions: civil society and social capital� It is important because they often overlap, either due to the fact that empirically they are in a relation, or due to the conceptual chaos and usage of “civil society” and “social capital” as buzzwords�

I am not able to “solve” the civil society theoretical debate, yet in order to ana-lytically separate it from the issue of social capital, I would say that the both con-cepts have different key-social structures as their base� In the case of civil society, the key structure is the social organization, and in case of social capital, it is a social network� This may sound very simplistic, but I found it to be the best way to show the differences between the two – sometimes regarded as very close – concepts�

Civil society is about the self-organization of society� For social philosophers and political theorists, civil society is something either next to the state or opposite to the state� As Jerzy Szacki (1997: 21) noted about the authoritarian regimes, scholars tended to present civil society as a morally good alternative for the degenerate state� Yet, all the societal self-organization of a non-state or non-governmental character is a much broader set of phenomena than civil society� Ernest Gellner

(1991: 500) pointed that civil society is not a society of cousins, which means that organization based on ascribed (or constructed as ascribed) relations is not con-stitutive for civil society: family, clan, ethnic group, religion are bases for societal organization, but not for civil society� At least in its ideal model, civil society is built on free-choice associations of individual citizens� These associations might be interest-driven, yet there are to be distinguished from the associations made for profit� It is therefore possible to ask many empirical questions regarding civil soci-ety, always constructed in societies of various networks: How is it possible that the so-called “cousins” often create free-choice associations together? Why so many associations are church based? Why national ideology is a driving force of associa-tionalism? Yet, I believe, after Szacki (1997) and Gellner (1991), that taking every sort of organizational base for collective action of a non-state character as a civil society is obscuring the picture� As I am going to discuss in Chapter 7, social capi-tal is a phenomenon based on social networks and it also includes many primary relations, such as families�

Civil society may be considered on the two levels: the macro-level of the whole society, and the organizational level of associations� The macro-level considera-tions about civil society are typical for the social philosophy and political theory, but also for grand theory in sociology� The macro approach is also present in em-pirical studies on the so-called condition of civil society in a given society� In this strategy, macro indicators, such as the number of associations in given society or the participation rate in associations, are used to measure the condition of civil society� This is an archetypical case of dispositional sociology: the measurements on the level of individuals are aggregated on the level of society and used to ex-plain social processes� These kinds of indexes are a very good strategy for com-paring various societies, but from the point of view of relational sociology, they are very unreliable in constructing explanations� My point is that the only pos-sible strategy of explaining (or understanding in a meaningful way) something about civil society requires taking into account its relational character, which on the level of general discourse requires analyzing how its ideologies are posit-ing civil society towards state or other large communities (nations), but on the level of practices, it requires studying how concrete organizations relate to other organizations (of governmental character, ascribed character, for-profit charac-ter, or other organizations of civil society)� Therefore, the strategy of studying civil society which I consider to be the most apt is studying given social fields in which around the issues of civic concern there are also active civic associations�

The civil society, especially in the context of Eastern Europe, for quite long time was idealized and presented as something morally good and contrasted to with

the state, which the anti-communist opposition in the Soviet block regarded as a corrupt tool of oppression� Alternative social structures built, for example, by Solidarność were perceived as an emanation of freedom and positive societal mo-bilization� The Polish way of thinking about civil society as opposed against the state, according to Jean L� Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992: 31), was the most dra-matic� As I will demonstrate in the next section, many authors writing about the civil society in Poland were not only lamenting about its bad condition, but also contrasting it with the state as something morally valorized� This might be consid-ered as something very typical for all sociologists: to perceive a self-organization and other so-called spontaneous forms of social life as positive in opposition to the state, government, and other large institutions formatting the modern societies�

Civil society is also a concept bridging the dichotomy of statal and private (Kulas 2010; Szacki 1997)� Involvement in associational life is a departure from private activities, yet it is still not simply a public action, in the political sense�

Many associations deal mostly with private concerns of their members (who, for example, love to play chess or breed homing pigeons), but provide them with a platform for sharing these concerns� Associations, which have strictly public goals, attempt to achieve them not in a strictly political way�

Before moving to a deeper analysis of how the sociological vacuum was em-ployed in considerations on civil society, I need to make a short excursion to the macro-sociological problem of “competition” between civil society and nation�

According to Szacki (1997) and Calhoun (1994), these two collectives are rivals�

Civil society is built on blocks of associations – individuals are not members of civil society as such, they participate in it through the mediation of organiza-tions, which they create by a free choice� Nation is, according to its nationalistic ideologies, something given, and to participate in a nation there is no need for any organizational mediation� Of course, on the level of practices of any nation-alistic regimes (or at least regimes using elements of nationnation-alistic ideologies), the mobilization to nation-participation is achieved through the use of organiza-tions� Yet, these organizations, at least in plans, are of a mass-participation� From the point of view of nationalist ideologies, civil society is something suspicious�

From the point of view of civil society enthusiasts, national mass society is a threat for liberty�⁴³

This section did not have the ambition to present the whole theoretical dis-cussion on the concept of civil society� Its goal was to present the theoretical 43 The consequences that these two approaches to the polity have for the conditions of

democracy will be discussed in the Chapter 8�

rivals and kin of civil society� Thanks to articulating the difference between civil society and social capital, on one hand, and civil society and nation, on the other hand, I can move forward and discuss the intriguing relations between civil so-ciety and the sociological vacuum�