Civil Society: Analysis of Diverse Meanings PDF

## II. LA SOCIEDAD CIVIL ### 1. LAS DIVERSAS ACEPCIONES In today's political language, the expression "civil society" is generally known as one of the terms of the great dichotomy of civil society/State. This means that its meaning and scope can only be determined by defining the term "State" at t...

## II. LA SOCIEDAD CIVIL ### 1. LAS DIVERSAS ACEPCIONES In today's political language, the expression "civil society" is generally known as one of the terms of the great dichotomy of civil society/State. This means that its meaning and scope can only be determined by defining the term "State" at the same time. Negatively, "civil society" is understood as the sphere of social relations that are not regulated by the State, understood restrictively, and almost always polemically, as the set of apparatuses that, in a socially organized system, exercise coercive power. It can be traced back to August Ludwig von Schlözer (1794) and is constantly revisited in German literature on the topic, with a distinction between *societas civilis sine imperio* [civil society without central power] and *societas civilis cum imperio* [civil society with central power], where the second expression indicates what is referred to as the "State" in the great dichotomy. In a context where, as we will see later, the opposition between society and the State had not yet emerged, a single term was sufficient to designate both, although with an internal distinction of species. The restrictive notion of the State as an organ of coercive power, which allows the formation and ensures the persistence of the great dichotomy, coincides with the set of the ideas that accompany the birth of the bourgeois world: the affirmation of natural rights that belong to the individual and to social groups, independently of the State, and which, as such, limit and restrict the sphere of political power; the discovery of a sphere of interpersonal relations, such as economic ones, which do not require the existence of a coercive power for their regulation because they are self-regulating; the idea generally so effectively expressed by Thomas Paine, not by chance the author of a famous essay about human rights, that society is created by our needs and the State by our malice [1776, trad. it. p. 69] because man is naturally good, and every society needs, to survive and prosper, to limit the use of civil laws to enforce, with coercion, the maximum development of natural laws that do not require coercion to be applied; in short, the expansion of private law through which individuals regulate their relationships guided by their real interests, of which each one is *iudex in causa sua,* to the detriment of public or political law where *imperium*, understood as the command of the superior who, as *iudex super partes* has the right to exercise coercive power, is enforced. It can never be stressed enough that the use of "civil society" as a sphere of social relations, different from the sphere of political relations, is due to German writers (in particular to Hegel and to Marx, as we will see later), to authors who write in a language where *bürgerliche Gesellschaft* means both civil society and bourgeois society, and that in the legal language that was widely affirmed by the end of the 18th century, *civil law*, distinct from *criminal law*, encompasses the traditional subjects of private law (the *Code civil* is the code of private law, in German *bürgerliches Recht*). Precisely because of the use of the expression "civil society" in the 19th century, which is the same one that continues to be applied today, it derives from the opposition, unknown to tradition, between a political sphere and a non-political one, so it is easier to find a negative definition than a positive one, especially since, in practice, public law and the general theory of the State (the *allgemeine Staatslehre* of the academic German tradition from Georg Jellinek to Felix Ermacora) never lack a positive definition of the State: civil society as a set of relationships not regulated by the State, and therefore as everything that is left over once the scope of state power is clearly defined; but even in such a vague notion, different meanings can be distinguished depending on whether the State is considered pre-state, anti-state, or post-state. When one speaks of civil society under the first of these meanings, one seeks to mean, in agreement or not with the doctrine of natural law, that before the State there are different forms of association that individuals form among themselves to satisfy their most diverse interests, and over which the State superimposes to regulate them, but without hindering their development and preventing their continuous renewal; although, in a non-strictly Marxist sense, one can speak in this case of civil society as a substructure and of the State as a superstructure. Under the second meaning, civil society takes on an axiologically positive connotation, which indicates the place where the manifestations of all instances of change of power relations are found, where groups form that struggle for the emancipation of political power, where counter-powers acquire strength. In addition to this meaning, a negative axiological connotation can also be given to the matter, when the point of view of the State is taken into account, and the ferment of renewal that civil society carries is considered as seeds of disintegration. Under the third meaning, "civil society" has a chronological meaning, like that of the first, and an axiological one, like that of the second: it represents the ideal of a society without the State, destined to emerge from the dissolution of political power. This meaning is found in Gramsci's thought where the ideal characteristic of all Marxist thought of the extinction of the State is described as "the absorption of society politics in civil society" [1930-31, p. 662]; as civil society where hegemony is exercised, different from domination, freed from political society. In the three different meanings, the non-state assumes three different figures: in the first, it assumes the figure of the pre-condition of the State, that is, what is not yet state; in the second, the antithesis of the State, that is, what is presented as an alternative to the State; in the third, the dissolution and end of the State. It is more difficult to give a positive definition of "civil society," because it means providing a collection of everything that was placed in the suitcase of the demand to circumscribe the scope of the State. It's enough to note that in many contexts the opposition of civil society / political institutions is a reformulation of the old opposition of real / legal country. What is the real country?, What is civil society? In a first approximation, one can say that civil society is the place where economic, social, ideological, and religious conflicts arise and develop, which state institutions are responsible for mediating, preventing, or repressing. Therefore, the subjects of these conflicts and consequently of civil society, precisely because they are opposed to the State, are social classes or, more broadly, groups, movements, associations, and organizations that represent them or that declare themselves to be their representatives; alongside class organizations, interest groups, associations of various kinds with social and indirectly political purposes, movements for the emancipation of ethnic groups, for the defense of civil rights, for the liberation of women, youth movements, etc. Political parties have one foot in civil society and the other in institutions, so much so that it has been proposed to enrich the conceptual dichotomous scheme and to insert the concept of *political society* between the two concepts of civil society and state [Farneti, 1973, pp. 16 ff.] aimed at encompassing precisely the phenomenon of political parties, which actually belong neither entirely to civil society nor to the State. In fact, one of the most frequent ways to define political parties is to show that they fulfill the function of selecting, aggregating, and transmitting the demands made by civil society that will become subjects of political decisions. In recent systemic theories of the global society, civil society occupies the place reserved for the formation of the demands (input) that are directed toward the political system, to which the political system has the task of giving an output; the contrast between civil society and the State is presented as the contrast between the quantity and the quality of demands and the capacity of the institutions to give adequate and rapid answers. The much-debated question of the governability of complex societies can also be interpreted through the terms of the classical dichotomy of civil society / State; a society becomes more ungovernable as the demands of civil society increase and do not increase at the same pace as the capacity of institutions to respond to them. Moreover, the capacity of the State to respond has reached limits that may be insurmountable (hence the issue, for example, of the "fiscal crisis"). Closely linked to the issue of governability is the issue of legitimacy. The ungovernability produces legitimacy crises. This issue can also be interpreted in terms of this same dichotomy: institutions represent legitimate power in the Weberian sense of the word, that is, the power whose decisions are accepted and implemented because they are viewed as emanating from an authority to which one recognizes the right to make decisions that are valid for the whole community; civil society is the place where they are formed, especially during periods of institutional crisis, the powers that tend to gain their legitimacy even to the detriment of legitimate powers, where, in other words, processes of delegitimization and re-legitimization develop. Hence the frequent assertion that the solution to a serious crisis that threatens the survival of a political system must be sought first and foremost in civil society, where new sources of legitimacy and, therefore, new spaces of consensus can be found. After all, within the sphere of civil society, the phenomenon of public opinion is also usually located, understood as the public expression of consensus and disagreement concerning institutions, transmitted through the press, radio, television, etc. Moreover, public opinion and social movements walk hand in hand and are mutually conditioned. Without public opinion, which, more specifically, means without channels for transmitting public opinion, which becomes "public" precisely because it is transmitted to the public, the sphere of civil society is destined to lose its function and ultimately to disappear. In the end, a totalitarian state is a state in which civil society is completely absorbed by the state, a state without public opinion (or with a state opinion only). ### 2. LA INTERPRETACIÓN MARXISTA The current use of the expression "civil society" as a term closely linked to the State or political system, derives from Marxist and, through Marx, Hegelian, thought, although, as we will see later, the Marxist use is reductive with respect to Hegelian use. We owe the influence of Marxist literature in the contemporary Italian political debate the frequent use of the expression "civil society" in everyday language. Evidence for this is that in other linguistic contexts, the expression *civil society* is replaced in the same dichotomy by the term *society*; in Germany, for example.