Abstract:
Civil society’, much more than ‘state’, ‘government’, ‘power’, or even ‘democracy’ is an elusive term in political theory. At issue has been the question of what aspect of social life constitutes civil society. For the ancients, Cicero for example, civil society was necessarily an outcome of a political community. Later, civil society would be taken, not as emerging out of a political community, but to be the same thing as that community. By the time of Marx and Hegel, civil society was contrasted with political society. It lay in a social and economic order operating according to its own principle independently of the ethical requirements of law and political association. It was Antonio Gramsci, from an historicist but still thoroughly marxian perspective, who offered a tripartite conception of civil society in which civil society was not only juxtaposed to the state, taken as a coercive governmental apparatus, but, strikingly, to the economy and the private sphere of the family as well. We may find that in a clarified form of this conception lie not only theoretical bur also political insights into the contemporary conditions of ‘civil society’.
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