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The
Search for Civil Society
Benjamin
R. Barber
From
Rebuilding Civil Society. A Symposium
from: The New Democrat, volume 7, number 2 March/April 1995.
Can
We Restore the Middle Ground Between Government and Markets?
In the Age
of Gingrich, no one cares much for government. Yet at the same
time, the privatization of public policy-the dominant theme of
Republicans since the Reagan revolution-does not and cannot satisfy
Americans' longing for family values and a sense of community.
Americans are being offered an unpalatable choice between an excessive,
elephantine, and paternalistic government and a radically self-absorbed,
nearly anarchic private market. No wonder they are outraged at
politicians.
Yet once
upon a time, between the poles of government and market, there
was a vast, vital middle ground known as civil society. Although
in eclipse today, civil society was the key to America's early
democratic energy and civic activism. Its great virtue was that
it shared government's regard for the commonweal, yet unlike government
made no claim to exercise a monopoly on legitimate coercion. Rather,
it was a voluntary, "private" realm devoted to "public" goods.
Civil society
is the domain that can potentially mediate between the state and
private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that
is simultaneously voluntary and public; a space that unites the
virtue of the private sector- liberty-with the virtue of the public
sector-concern for the general good.
Civil society
is a societal dwelling place that is neither a capitol building
nor a shopping mall. It shares with the private sector the gift
of liberty; it is voluntary and is constituted by freely associated
individuals and groups. But unlike the private sector, it aims
at common ground and consensual, integrative, and collaborative
action. Civil society is thus public without being coercive, voluntary
without being private.
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, when they place their
public responsibilities ahead of their commercial ambitions, are
better understood as part of civil society and not the private
sector.
People occupy
civic space all the time; the trouble is, they seem not to know
it. Not long ago, following a lecture on citizenship and civil
society, a chastised middle-aged woman raised her hand and said
to the speaker: "You shame me, sir! Clearly, being a citizen in
civil society is vitally important. But I have to tell you, what
with my chairing the church bazaar committee, my service at the
hospital, my assignment on the PTA, and now I've been elected
head of my block association, well you see, I just don't have
time to be a citizen!"
What we
call things counts. We need to understand our civic engagements
not as private activities, but as non-governmental public activities,
and we need to call the spaces we share for purposes other than
shopping or voting civil society. When the free space that is
civil society goes unrecognized, we begin to treat the activity
that takes place within it as private activity that is on a moral
par with the most selfish forms of commerce. This is how associations
concerned about the good of all people-for example, labor unions
and environmental organizations-lost their identity as "public"
interest groups and re-emerged as "special" interests whose aims
are indistinguishable from those of the for-profit corporations
with which they compete.
The
Lost Tradition
How did
it come to pass that a nation that prides itself on its democratic
civic tradition lost touch with the foundations that gave that
tradition resilience? How could so rich a political idea-drawing
sustenance from John Locke, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and
Alexis de Tocqueville- get shunted aside?
Throughout
the 19th century, in Tocqueville's 1830s America and afterward,
our society comprised not two but three sectors: government, markets,
and civil society. In that era when, as Tocqueville observed,
liberty was local and civic activity more prevalent, a modest
governmental sphere and an unassuming private sector were overshadowed
by an extensive civil society tied together by school, church,
town, and voluntary association.
However
expansive they looked at the time, the Federalist constitution
and later the unionist Republican Party were by today's benchmark
studies in civic humility. Though his opponents feared he would
be a kind of monarch, George Washington in fact governed with
an executive staff that numbered only in the dozens. And the states
and the people, to whom the 10th Amendment had left all powers
not expressly delegated to the central government, were the real
theater and agents for civic action.
In this
simpler time, individuals thought of themselves as citizens and
their groups as civil associations; citizens and associations
together composed civil society. After the Civil War, civil society
rapidly began losing ground to nascent capitalist corporations
with an appetite for expansion and a tendency to monopoly. Market
forces soon began to encroach on and crush civil society.
Government
responded with an aggressive campaign on behalf of the public
weal, though it did not directly involve the public. In assuming
the powers it needed to confront the corporations, government
inadvertently encroached on and crushed civil society from the
opposite side. Squeezed between the warring and ever-expanding
state and corporate sectors, civil society began disappearing
from American life.
Sometime
between the two Roosevelts, it vanished altogether. Its denizens
were compelled either to find sanctuary under the feudal tutelage
of big government or to join the private sector, where schools,
churches, and foundations assumed the identity of corporations
and could aspire to be nothing more than agents for their members.
That their objective was the public good became irrelevant since,
by definition, all private associations necessarily had private
ends.
This melancholy
history has left us stranded in an era in which citizens have
neither a home for their civic institutions nor a voice with which
to speak. Be passively serviced (or passively exploited) by the
massive, busy- body, bureaucratic state, where the word "citizen"
has no resonance and the only relevant civic act is voting (an
activity in which fewer than half of citizens engage); or sign
onto the selfishness and radical individualism of the private
sector, where the word "citizen" has no resonance and the only
relevant activity is consuming (an activity in which just about
everybody engages). Be a "citizen" and vote the public scoundrels
out of office and/or be a consumer and exercise your private rights
on behalf of your private interests-those are the only remaining
obligations of the much diminished office of American citizen.
Lessons
Old and New
There is
no task more pressing for our leaders than the restoration of
a non-governmental public space that citizens can call their own.
Tocqueville celebrated the local character of American liberty
and thought that democracy could be sustained only through vigorous
civic activity in America's municipalities and neighborhoods.
He would scarcely recognize America today, where our alternatives
are restricted to government gargantuanism and private greed,
and where the main consequence of the recent elections seems to
be the supplanting of New Deal arrogance by market arrogance.
Ironically,
America's admirers abroad have learned lessons from us that we
have forgotten. At the time of the American founding, our Committees
of Correspondence played a role comparable to that of the pro-
democracy group Civic Forum in Eastern Europe, creating space
for civic action in the face of an oppressive government. In Vaclav
Havel's Czech Republic, where Civic Forum helped transform the
nation, and in Fang Lizhi's China, where a similar spirit is being
cultivated, civil society has proved to be a prelude to democracy.
It is clear to those who live under tyranny that freedom must
first be won by citizens establishing their own public space;
only afterward can it be secured by constitutions and law. Although
American government today is neither colonial nor totalitarian,
it has usurped the space of civil society. The situation cries
out for a remedy.
Without
a civil society to nourish engaged citizens, politicians turn
into "professionals" out of touch with their constituencies. Consider
the wreck of health care last year. In a debate that increasingly
became technocratic and abstract, the people in whose names reforms
were being drawn up were invisible. The "public" had no voice
in the debate and those in search of it hardly knew where to look,
for neither opinion surveys nor the special interest groups claiming
to speak for the people accurately reflect civil society. The
abyss that separated the President's plan from its intended constituents
sealed its demise. While the merits of the health care plan recently
adopted in Oregon can be debated, Oregon got a plan because it
created "health parliaments" and similar institutions that gave
citizens a direct hand in shaping the reforms.
The story
of AmeriCorps also holds important lessons. National and community
service belongs in the domain of neither government nor the private
sector, but in civil society-indeed, such service helps define
citizenship. Yet because civil society is not a part of our political
consciousness, many Americans mistakenly view AmeriCorps either
as government-sponsored volunteerism (a contradiction in terms)
or as a special interest benefit package for college students
and the disadvantaged. In truth, it is an exercise in high citizenship
of which Americans can feel especially proud.
A
Mediating Domain
In the last
30 years, Democrats and Republicans have hardened their battle
lines. The former are pledged to defend government, however alienating
and inefficient a tool it has become. The latter are committed
to privatization, even if it means compromising the ideals (family,
religion, liberty) to which they have traditionally been committed.
The parties are locked in a zero-sum game in which the government
cannot expand justice without diminishing liberty and in which
the private sector cannot expand liberty without diminishing justice.
Citizens
are happy with neither choice. They sense that democracy is precisely
that form of government in which not politicians and bureaucrats
but an empowered people put flesh on the bones of their liberty;
and in which liberty carries with it the obligaions of social
responsibility and citizenship in government as well as the rights
of legal persons against government. It is that form of government
in which rights and responsibilities are two sides of a single
civic identity, one that belongs neither to state bureaucrats
nor to private consumers but to citizens alone.
Civil society
is in fact the domain of citizens: a mediating domain between
markets and government. It can contain an obtrusive government
without ceding public goods to the private sphere. It also can
dissipate the atmosphere of solitude and greed that surround markets
without suffocating us in big government's exhaust fumes.
William
Bennett's Book of Virtues tells many a salutary moral tale, but
the virtues it celebrates are the product neither of government
nor markets but of families and citizens acting in the free space
of civil society. There is a danger that Americans will think
that the act of buying the book somehow is tantamount to acquiring
the virtues. Character can be a source of American renewal, but
those who think commercial markets can instill character better
than government have not spent much time with the consumption-
obsessed shoppers who cruise suburban malls on Thursday nights,
when stores stay open late.
We do not
need a novel civic architecture to recreate civil society. Rather,
we need to reconceptualize and reposition existing institutions.
Schools, foundations, community movements, the media, and other
civil associations need to reclaim their public voice and political
legitimacy against those who would write them off as hypocritical
special interests.
Americans
are sick of the partisans of both political parties who would
make them choose between a far too filling government stout and
a much too vapid market lite. Americans want, need, and have a
right to civil liberty- the liberty earned by citizens engaging
in self-government, willing neither to turn over their destinies
to government proxies nor to pretend that commercial markets can
produce the social goods and values that are necessary for democratic
community life.
A third
way needs to be found between private markets and coercive government,
between anarchic individualism and dogmatic statism.
If we fail
to find it, we seem fated to enter an era in which America's public
voice, the nation's civic soul, will be left forever mute. reg.
Benjamin
R. Barber is Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science at Rutgers
University and author of Strong Democracy (1984), An
Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), and the forthcoming Jihad
Versus McWorld.
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