Civil society is clearly an American concern. Of course, it is not because volunteerism, caring social institutions or a strong charity sector are somehow unique to our country. All these exist in different forms around the world. But in no society are they so intricately tied to national identity as in ours.
The reasons for this are more complex than they appear. We like to believe that we care so much about civil society because it is our great strength. Diverse communitarians like to quote Alexis de Tocqueville to each other and revel in the amazing diversity with which Americans work together from the bottom up. I do this myself all the time. And for good reason: de Tocqueville felt deeply about us, and the scope of our independent sector is astounding.
Civil society for the 21st century
But that is only the other side of the coin. Americans are also clearly obsessed with civil society, because while the civil sector has always had a central place in our national life, its place has always been contested in ways that cut to the heart of our politics, and because the very idea of civil society suggests deep tensions in our understanding of what our society is and how it works.
First, it points to the great distance between theory and practice in American life. Dominant social and political theories of ourselves have always been stark, liberal stories: highly individualistic, rights-based, prone to extreme abstraction, and government-centric. The actual practice of American life has not much resembled these theories. Instead, it has been very communal, rooted in commitments and shared obligations, pragmatic and practical and focused on culture. This has often meant that our theories do not explain our virtues or vices very well, and that we lack a conceptual vocabulary to fit the way we live.
This gap between theory and practice does a particularly great disservice to understanding the role of civil society, as our civil sector cannot really be described in the terms usually required by our different political ideologies. In particular, this often leads to different misconceptions about the relationship between civil society and government in America, and different aspects of our politics have distinctly different valences.
In the conservative and libertarian imagination, civil society is often forced into theories of classical liberal individualism, which view the voluntary sector as essentially a counterforce to government and thus a means of enabling individual independence and preventing the encroachment of federal power. It is in the civil sector that liberal theories of legitimacy – which derive from direct consent and leave the rights and freedoms of the individual completely untouched – are said to be best realized in practice, so in civil society legal social organization is said to actually take place. Implicit goals of this civil society approach include the transfer of responsibility from government to civil society, particularly in the areas of welfare, education and social insurance.
In the progressive imagination, civil society, on the other hand, is often understood in the context of a strong suspicion of undemocratic centers of power, which are implicitly intended to enable the oppression of minority groups and the wider society’s commitment to equality due to subjugating prejudices and backwardness. This has led to a tendency to subordinate the work of civil society to the legitimizing mechanisms of democratic politics – and especially national politics. In practice, this means allowing the federal government to set goals for social action and then seeing civil society organizations as available means to achieve those goals, valued for their practical effectiveness and local flavor, but not oppressed or effectively controlled by the individual citizen without his consent. Implicit goals of this approach to civil society include transferring decision-making responsibility from civil society to government, which can then use civil society bodies as mere administrators of public programs – particularly in the areas of welfare, health and education.
Both visions of civil society articulate a view of American social life as fundamentally composed of individuals and the nation-state. The dispute between the left and the right in this regard concerns whether individuals need to be released from the grip of the nation-state or the need to break free author that the state from potential oppressors among its citizens. Civil society is seen as a tool to do one or the other. Such visions, in other words, tend to ignore the vast social space between the individual and the nation-state—which is, after all, the space in which civil society actually exists.
This is, of course, a very distorted way of thinking about and fighting about the political life of our country, since most of the government in America is handled by the states and localities. And it’s also a distorted way of thinking about our social life, which is lived mostly in institutions that fill the space between individuals and the federal government.
Politics shaped by such multi-layered distortions easily devolve into crude, abstract debates between radical individualism and intense centralization. And these in turn turn into accusations of socialism and social Darwinism, libertinism and puritanism.
But centralization and atomism are not actually opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are closely related tendencies and often coexist and reinforce each other—each making the other possible. The centralization and nationalization of social services displaces mediating institutions; the consequent disintegration of communal entities into atomized individuals leaves people less able to help themselves and each other, leaving them to look to the national government for help; and then the cycle repeats itself. It is when we pursue both of these extremes together, as we often do in modern America, that we most exacerbate the dark sides of brokenness and disintegration.
There is an alternative to this dangerous combination of hyper-focus and hyper-individualism. It is found in the complex structure of our complex social topography and the institutions and relationships that exist between the isolated individual and the nation-state. When we see civil society at the heart of American social life, we can see our way toward policies that might overcome some of the dysfunctions of our time—politics that can lower the temperature, focus on practical problems, remind us of the sources of freedom, and replenish social capital. In the context of this American moment, such politics could hardly be more valuable.
That’s why it’s a good thing that we Americans are particularly interested in civil society. Even if we disagree about its place and function, the fact that we see it as essential to who we are suggests that we know that our theories are inadequate and that understanding ourselves through the nature and work of our civil society could help us better know our country and better realize its ideals.
In this regard, American life provides a rich and constructive context for thinking about civil society, and civil society provides a rich and constructive context for thinking about American life.
The goal of this series is to stimulate discussion and provide a place for diverse thinkers to propose, discuss, and reiterate their understanding of the role of civil society in 21st-century America. We encourage all readers to actively participate in the discussion in the comment fields. SSIR and Independent Sector have also included a limited number of crowdsourced articles in the series.
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