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July 4, 2008
“Civil society” has become a key term in modernpolitical discourse. Those who use the term refer back to, and seek to resuscitate the 18th century notion of civil society — an elusive term encompassing all voluntary association, often concerned with public matters, extending all the way from local sport clubs to the free press. In addition, it denotes not so much organization as idioms of behavior characterized by civility; in other words, codes of formal manners and sophisticated,often ironic forbearance, owing nothing to the lure of the good.
In this review of John Keane's Civil Society: Old Images, New Images in Telos (Spring 1999) Catherine Pickstock says:
Keane outlines both the advantages and disadvantages of the tradition of civil society. On the positive side, it can be seen as a way of securing peace in an inevitably pluralistic world, without recourse to naked state intervention. On the negative side, Keane appreciates Norbert Elias’s realization that codes of civility are the other side of the state’s imposition of a purely formal order and its monopoly of violence. He shows how such a thesis is extended by Zygmunt Bauman to show how civility is consistent with totalitarian horror.
Pickstock says that the real weakness of Keane’s book is that, without any notion that there might be a real shared common good, one is delivered over to a Rorty-type pragmatism that can only legitimate either the free contractualism of the market or bureaucratic manipulations.
These are the two basic options in the 20th century, which on the surface seem to operate in tension, although, at a deep level, collaborate with each other. Here, civil society is no genuine third way. All it does is reinforce both the market and the state through codes of politeness and innocuous, yet sinister clubs for the successful.
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