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Essays on Civic Renewal

Legislating Civil Society
A Walt Whitman Center Project

Contents

Story: Legislating Civil Society
Case Study Plus:

1. Reclaiming the Public Airwaves: Civil Society and the Media. A 27-page research report that proposes that Congress stipulate, as a condition of licensing, that broadcasters provide time to eligible candidates, not to empower government or regulatory agencies, but to strengthen civil society. Abstract online. Paper available from the Whitman Center.

Story: Legislating Civil Society A consensus exists among political analysts from right to left that in the face of eroding trust in government, civil society must once again become a strong component of public life. Civil society, that sphere of social relations which lies between the domains of government and market, teaches citizens the arts of liberty and selfgovernment. Within such institutions as voluntary or civic associations, neighborhood watch groups, churches, and charity groups, people become more thoughtful citizens capable of solving problems together without the help of experts, acting as partners with their elected representatives. Civil society thus enlivens democracy.

As the term civil society becomes fashionable (see our enclosed news packet on civil society), it becomes open to depreciation and abuse. Arguments against the bloated federal bureaucracy lead too easily into an uncritical celebration of the market. When civil society is equated with the market, its values are confused with egotism and private profit. Civil society creates a sense of liberty, yet it also promotes a concern for civic virtue and the general goodsomething the market often undermines. For the Whitman Center, the idea of civil society empowers citizens rather than corporations and creates a climate for a renewal of democratic governance rather than the eclipse of all government.

If civil society provides the conditions for democratic government, local, state, and federal government also can play a role as a facilitator of civil society. This is the basis of our ongoing research project entitled "Legislating Civil Society." Our project addresses four major areas of policy:

• Campaign Finance Reform and Free Broadcast Time: How the federal government can help improve the quality and civility of public debate during national elections.

• A Geography and Architecture for Civil Society: How to design new and retrofit old shopping malls to include more public space usable for town meetings and civic gatherings.

• Arts Policy: How state and federal governments can encourage community outreach and education on the part of funded artists.

• Technology and Democracy: How to use the Internet and other new technologies to educate citizens into democratic education and decision-making.

Legislating Civil Society: An Introduction

American citizens have grown disaffected with government and bureaucracy. Nor are they happy with the alternative—an asocial and often rapacious private market that seems unconcerned with community needs and public ideals. There is a "third domain," however, which while once a robust sphere of common activities, has now largely vanished. That domain is civil society, a sphere of social relations which lies outside of the realms of the government and the market. At the Walt Whitman Center, we believe that civil society, if reinvigorated, may serve as a source for a healthy and strong democracy. In this introduction to the Center's series of papers, "Legislating Civil Society," we hope to explain what we mean by civil society and what role we believe the federal government can play in nurturing it today.

The best way to think about civil society is to envision the domains Americans occupy daily when they are engaged neither in government (voting, serving on juries, paying taxes) nor in commerce (working, producing, shopping, consuming). Such daily business includes attending church or synagogue, doing community service, participating in a voluntary or civic association, joining a fraternal organization, contributing to a charity, assuming responsibility in a PTA or a neighborhood watch or a hospital fundraising society. It is in this civil domain that such traditional institutions as foundations, schools, churches, public interest groups, voluntary associations, civic groups, and social movements belong. The media too, where they take their public responsibilities seriously and subordinate their commercial needs to their civic obligations, are part of civil society.

Civil society is the domain that can potentially mediate between the state and private sectors and offer people a space for activity that is simultaneously voluntary and public. It is a space that unites the virtue of the private sector—liberty—with the virtue of the public sector—concern for the general good. That is, it is public without being coercive or bureaucratic and voluntary without being privatized or commercial. This is why civil society is so crucial for a healthy democracy.

Historically, both an expansive, corporation dominated "free" market and a burgeoning, bureaucratic state have disempowered civil society. Local and civic institutions have been squeezed between an increasingly bureaucratized and monopolistic market sector and the state. During the late 19th century, capitalist corporations with an appetite for expansion and a tendency to monopoly began to encroach on and crush civil society. During the 20th century, seeing a need for further and further demand, big business promoted the idea that people were not citizens with public concerns but consumers with private desires. In its growing size and its glamorization of private consumption, big business has often posed a major (if less visible) threat to the interests of an actively engaged democratic public.

During the twentieth century, beginning in the Progressive Era and ending with the Great Society, the federal government has tried to curb the excesses of the free market to ensure the public weal—without, however, fully gaining the civic confidence of the public, which became a dependent client of the government. In assuming the powers it needed to confront corporate power and ensure an ever growing set of economic rights, government inadvertently encroached on and crushed civil society. Whereas the market conceived of people only as consumers, government increasingly conceived of them more as clients than as citizens. Squeezed between the warring and ever-expanding state and corporate sectors, civil society has largely vanished from American life.

As civil society shrinks, a major threat is posed to American democracy. Only in civil society can citizens educate themselves into the responsibilities of political judgment and decision-making. Only there can they understand governing institutions as an extension of their own agency, rather than as adversarial to it. If this sphere of interaction is allowed to languish, democracy and liberty will continue to fade away. The questions we want to pose are straightforward and concrete: how can we resuscitate civil society? How can we as political leaders, intellectuals, and citizens renew a commitment to local, civic institutions and the ideals of democracy? Is there a role for the federal government in rejuvenating institutions it has inadvertently helped to crush? Does it also have a responsibility to oppose the effects of the market on civil society? And can it do this without duplicating the errors of earlier reforms that often hurt the very civic institutions that government intended to nourish?

Arguing in favor of civil society may seem to buy into the political alienation that characterizes skeptics and extreme zealots in America. Certainly the state, with its bloated bureaucracy, has trespassed on the ground of civil society and its critics are correct to point out that the federal government has become increasingly unresponsive to citizens' demands. More importantly, many social critics, among them Ernie Cortez, Francis Lappe, and Harry Boyte, have shown that citizens often recreate the bonds of civil society on their own without any help from the state simply by becoming active in local political struggles. We agree that citizens themselves can and should nurture civil society on their own terms, and we agree that a busybody government bureaucracy can often undermine such processes with well-intentioned liberal programs.

However, there is a partisan and unpersuasive tone to the criticism of the state. The problem is not democratic government per se but bureaucracy, unresponsiveness, bloat, unaccountability, and inertia wherever they are found. And make no mistake, they are found in the private commercial sector—the market—no less than in the government sector. The market is often seen as more efficient and responsive than the state, yet the large, bureaucratic corporation can be just as inefficient and unresponsive. Nor does the market promote citizenship, since it typically encourages maximization of private pleasure and profit—consumerism and materialism perhaps, but not civic comity. Indeed, corporations, unlike democratic governments, lack any formal means of accountability, and their soft despotism is thus more troublesome in the long run.

We think that to use hostility towards the federal government as a means to dismantle every form of regulatory power is dangerous, if not outright cynical. We believe that instead we must re-envision what the federal government should do in the future in light of the need to reinvigorate civil society and help citizens to restore confidence in their own power of democratic agency. How we think about the state as citizens is crucial, for it clearly affects what we expect from the state and from ourselves. The major premise behind this series of papers is that we must ask the state to serve the needs of civil society and, through a reinvigoration of our own sense of citizenship, reappropriate its democratic institutions. Where the government encroaches on liberty, legislation must help government help itself—limiting its purview and liberating not market forces but civil society in order that it may act freely. Where the private commercial sector is the problem, government must again become the public's ally in curbing commercial and market abuses.

We are not suggesting that the federal government can or should create civil society any more than we would expect the market to do this. Civil society is born out of the self-willing processes of engaged citizens. But the federal government can provide more fertile soil in which civil society can grow. It can support citizens in the work they themselves need to do and prevent bureaucracy—whether governmental or commercial—from interfering. The role of the state we envision here is a new role—one which conceives of the state less as a regulatory bureaucracy and more as a facilitator of democratic civil society. We must reinvent government by reconceiving it as an ally—not an enemy—of civil society and an instrument by which citizens pursue those public and civic ends they cannot achieve on their own as individuals or consumers.

As we enter the crucial year of 1996, we should not limit our debates about the role of the federal government to budgetary issues. We need to reinvigorate the civic and moral debate about what we want from our government and transcend the limits of budget-driven policy. It is here that we offer our legislative papers as a provocation to public discourse and policy debate.

Although these papers will offer some concrete legislative proposals, we see our major goal here as focusing on large political issues and reconceptualizing legislation around the idea of regenerating civil society. These are not detailed policy documents, although they review policy carefully. Nor do they promote detailed legislative plans, although they do suggest new kinds of legislative action. We have focused initially on three areas—telecommunications, federal arts funding, and public space—to seek out ways in which the idea of civil society can actually reconfigure the role of the federal government as an ally of the civic domain and a partner to citizens. We hope that both politicians and citizens can make use of this series of papers, "Legislating Civil Society," to start thinking in more productive ways about the role of the federal government in relation to civil society and strong democracy.

For more information, contact:Kevin Mattson
Research Director-Walt Whitman Center
Department of Political Science
409 Hickman Hall-Douglas Campus
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08903

(908) 932-6861
(908) 932-1922 FAX

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