Roy Erickson Mamengko
The "civil society argument," as Michael Walzer calls it, is actually a complex set of arguments, not all of which are congruent.[1] In the rough pastiche that has become the commonly accepted version, a "dense network of civil associations" is said to promote the stability and effectiveness of the democratic polity through both the effects of association on citizens' "habits of the heart" and the ability of associations to mobilize citizens on behalf of public causes. Emergent civil societies in Latin America and Eastern Europe are credited with effective resistance to authoritarian regimes, democratizing society from below while pressuring authoritarians for change. Thus civil society, understood as the realm of private voluntary association, from neighborhood committees to interest groups to philanthropic enterprises of all sorts, has come to be seen as an essential ingredient in both democratization and the health of established democracies.
Thus summarized, the argument leaves many questions unanswered. Some of these are definitional, arising from the different ways in which civil society has been applied in various times and places. Does it, for instance, include business ("the market") as well as voluntary organizations, or does the market constitute a separate,"private" sphere? If we exclude the market, should we nevertheless include economic associations--trade groups, professional organizations, labor unions, and thelike? What about political organizations? Does it make sense, following Antonio Gramsci, to distinguish "civil" from "political" society? If so, [End Page 38] how are we to distinguish between political associations per se and the political activities of groups in civil society, from interest groups to religious bodies, which are intermittently mobilized in pursuit of political goals?[2] Just when does the "civil" become the "political"?
Beyond such definitional concerns, there is also the elusive character of the relationship between "civil society" and democratic governance. Just how is it that associations formed among individuals produce the large-scale political and social benefits postulated by the civil society argument? Is the cultivation of "habits of the heart" that encourage tolerance, cooperation, and civic engagement the key? If so, under which circumstances and forms of small-scale interaction are these effects likely to appear? If, as some hold, civil society's chief virtue is its ability to act as an organized counterweight to the state, to what extent can this happen without the help of political parties and expressly political movements? Finally, what prevents civil society from splitting into warring factions (a possibility that theorists since Hegel have worried about) or degenerating into a congeries of rent-seeking "special interests"? What is it about civil society, in other words, that produces the benevolent effects posited by the civil society argument?
In attempting to answer these questions, it might be useful to make a rough distinction between two broad versions of the "civil society argument." The first version is crystallized in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, with important antecedents in the work of the eighteenth-century "Scottish moralists," including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson. This approach puts special emphasis on the ability of associational life in general and the habits of association in particular to foster patterns of civility in the actions of citizens in a democratic polity. We shall call this family of arguments "Civil Society I." The second version,articulated most forcefully by Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik, and their associates in formulating a strategy for resistance to Poland's communist regime in the 1980s, is also evident in recent literature on processes of "redemocratization" in Latin America. This argument, which we call "Civil Society II," lays special emphasis on civil society as a sphere of action that is independent of the state and that is capable--precisely for this reason--of energizing resistance to a tyrannical regime.
It might already be apparent that there is a degree of contradiction between "Civil Society I" and "Civil Society II," for while the former postulates the positive effects of association for governance (albeit democratic governance), the latter emphasizes the importance of civil association as a counterweight to the state. There is no reason in principle why the "counterweight" of civil society should not become a burden to a democratic as well as an authoritarian state. Indeed, there are those, such as the economist Mancur Olson, who perceive the "dense webs of association" praised by the civil society argument as enduring [End Page 39] threats to the smooth and equitable functioning of modern states and markets alike.[3]
Perhaps the most persuasive recent version of "Civil Society I" is that of Robert D. Putnam, formulated in part as an empirically grounded answer to the concerns raised above. Putnam's argument gained particular currency in his January 1995 Journal of Democracy essay, "Bowling Alone." It is more richly elaborated, however, in his study of regional governments in modern Italy, entitled Making Democracy Work. [4] In this book, Putnam attributes the superior effectiveness of northern Italy's regional governments to the dense "networks of civic engagement" fostered by "civil associations" of all kinds. "The denser such networks in a community, the more likely that its citizens will be able to cooperate for mutual benefit," he writes. He continues, with explicit reference to Olson's arguments: "social capital, as embodied in horizontal networks of civic engagement, bolsters the performance of the polity and the economy, rather than the reverse: Strong society, strong economy; strong society, strong state."[5]
Putnam's analysis in "Bowling Alone" examines trends in the United States over the last 30 years and argues the obverse: weakening society, weakening economy; weakening society, weakening state. According to Putnam, the basis of "civil community" has been eroding in the United States since the 1960s. We have been depleting our national reserves of social capital, social trust, and generalized reciprocity, he claims, and undercutting our capacity for mutually beneficial collective action. This trend is most evident in the decline of "traditional secondary associations" like the Boy Scouts, parent-teacher associations (PTAs), the League of Women Voters, and even weekly bowling leagues.[6]
Putnam's argument is stimulating, and his recourse to empirical evidence is refreshing. Nevertheless, his concerns about the health of U.S. civil society and his account of Italy's experiment in regional government point to significant weaknesses in both forms of the civil society argument. These weaknesses raise important questions that must be examined empirically as well as theoretically before we can properly understand the role of civil society in democracy and democratization.
Our argument is threefold: First, both Putnam's assessment of the state of "civil community" in the United States and his account of regional government in northern Italy underestimate the ability of newer organizations, and of specifically political associations such as social movements and political parties, to foster aspects of civil community and to advance democracy. Second, talk about "networks of civic engagement" glosses over the real, and often sharp, conflicts among groups in civil society. These conflicts, in the absence of specifically political settlements, may spill over into civil disruption and violence. Third, and most important, to understand any polity we must look first at the political settlements that ground it, and to the effects that such [End Page 40] settlements have on social forces and civil society. Taken together, our objections suggest the problematic character of both Putnam's definition of civil society and the larger civil society argument itself.
What Does Civil Society Do?
The broader civil society argument ascribes a variety of functions to civil associations. Putnam's discussion focuses on a narrow, though seemingly powerful, segment of them. For Putnam, the chief virtue of civil associations lies in their capacity to socialize participants into the "norms of generalized reciprocity" and "trust" that are essential components of the "social capital" needed for effective cooperation. Civil associations provide the "networks of civic engagement" within which reciprocity is learned and enforced, trust is generated, and communication and patterns of collective action are facilitated. These are horizontal networks, as opposed to the vertical networks of patron-client arrangements or of traditional hierarchical organizations such as the Catholic Church. The broader their reach, the more effective they are: Dense but segregated horizontal networks sustain cooperation within each group, but networks of civic engagement that cut across social cleavages nourish wider cooperation. . . If horizontal networks of civic engagement help participants solve dilemmas of collective action, then the more horizontally structured an organization, the more it should foster institutional success in the broader community. Membership in horizontally ordered groups (like sports clubs, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, cultural associations, and voluntary unions) should be positively associated with good government.[7]
That secondary associations generate "social capital" of the sort highlighted by Putnam is scarcely questionable. Whether this "social capital" is truly a "public good," available to society at large and capable of producing the effects ascribed to it, is another matter.[8] Putnam's caveat is important: "Dense but segregated networks" may or may not contribute to effective democratic governance; at times they become the basis for civil strife. Thus the networks that associations create should "cut across social cleavages" in order to nourish wider cooperation.[9]
Putnam's preoccupation here is a familiar one. In order to foster a genuine spirit of "wider cooperation," his argument suggests, such associations must not be "polarized" or "politicized." They must "bridge" social and political divisions and thus, presumably, be autonomous from political forces. These caveats echo a long tradition of "pluralist" analysis. Yet how can such associations shape political participation and "civic engagement" without engaging in specifically political issues and without representing compelling social interests? [End Page 41]
Putnam's formulation is all the more puzzling in the light of his findings, which place the Emilia-Romagna region in the heart of Italy's zone of "civic engagement." Putnam fails to note that most of this region's sports clubs, choral societies, cooperatives, and cultural associations had been organized by and for two major political parties, the Communists and the Christian Democrats. Indeed, one observer argues, "If a contemporary Tocqueville searched for autonomous groups on which to write on `democracy in Italy,' he would produce a thin volume indeed. . . . Parties usurp space that in other advanced industrialized countries is held by bureaucracies and by local grass-roots organizations. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they pervade all aspects of political, economic, and social life in Italy." [10] If Putnam's "civil community" can coexist with a seemingly politicized civil society, what are we to make of the argument about the necessity for "inclusive" associations that cut across social and political cleavages?
Such questions affect not only Putnam's analysis, but also the work of those emphasizing the capacity of civil society to resist state repression, or what we call "Civil Society." [II] A commonplace of this version of the argument is that civil associations must be "autonomous." The argument is aired not just in the scholarly literature, but in political debates over the character and trajectory of civil society in Latin America and Eastern Europe. As Aleksander Smolar put it in a recent Journal of Democracy article, the "society-first" approach of the East European dissidents was "antipolitical." 11 Putnam's evidence, if not his argument, suggests that political autonomy is less important than the fact of association itself. [12] Indeed, Tocqueville himself identified specifically political associations as the key to the rich associational life that he celebrated in the United States of 1832.
Ironically, both "Civil Society I," which emphasizes the political benefits of an apolitical civil society, and "Civil Society II," which focuses on politically mobilized social actors outside customary political associations, tend to marginalize specifically political associations, especially parties. Convergence on this point, however, does not resolve the definitional imprecision raised at the outset. Indeed, the two versions of the argument disagree about the character of the very civil society they juxtapose to political society. The imprecision stems, in part, from the sheer sweep of the argument itself. Civil society has been credited with enhancing democracy or curbing authoritarianism in contexts as varied as Jacksonian America, post World War II Italy, Eastern Europe at the end of the Soviet empire, and Latin America under the generals. At times the concept seems to take on the property of a gas, expanding or contracting to fit the analytic space afforded it by each historical or sociopolitical setting.
Both "Civil Society I" and "Civil Society II" reflect the particular contexts to which they have been applied. Proponents of "Civil Society [End Page 42] II" wish to include groups that enable citizens to mobilize against tyranny and counter state power. In doing so, they rightly emphasize the confliction potential of civil society. They also tend to emphasize new forms of association, because political and traditional associations are often tainted by cooperation with the regime. Proponents of "Civil Society I" likewise define "civil society" in ways that fit their particular context. Thus for Putnam, civil society includes chiefly groups whose activities generate the desired "networks, norms, and trust" at the heart of "social capital." In contrast to "Civil Society II," he emphasizes traditional secondary associations, organizations not noted for their confliction character or political weight. The two versions of the argument tend to produce two different portfolios of qualified organizations. But if the argument is not to be circular, we must do better than that. The civil society argument hinges on the virtues of association and of organized society per se; it cannot confront the confliction potential thereof by definitional sleight of hand, but neither can it ignore the conflict at the heart of the modern "organizational society."
Devaluing Political Associations
Putnam's neglect of political associations is motivated by both empirical and theoretical considerations. On empirical grounds he rejects political parties as significant actors in the transformations he notes in northern Italy because the same parties produce strikingly different results in the dissimilar social contexts of northern and southern Italy. He also rejects American social movements and nonprofit organizations (whose numbers and membership have grown tremendously over the last 30 years) as significant counterweights to the trends he observes in the United States, but with less careful attention to the evidence. [13] His negative assessment of social movements is based on the grounds that membership in groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Sierra Club is mainly a matter of financial support and scarcely evidence of "civic engagement" in the concrete sense intended by his argument.
Putnam's rather cursory examination of social movements in the United States overlooks both the multifaceted character of many national groups and, more importantly, the grassroots bases of the vast majority of social-movement groups operating nationally. Putnam correctly notes that membership in highly professionalized social-movement groups most often consists of little more than writing a check and perusing the group's magazine. Yet closer examination of the Sierra Club, for example, would have shown that this is not always the case. State chapters and especially local chapters of the Sierra Club routinely sponsor community-service projects like urban river clean-ups and "environmentally aware" outdoor activities broadly similar to those sponsored [End Page 43] by the Boy Scouts, a group close to the heart of Putnam's "civic community."
Furthermore, large groups with a national media profile are simply the most visible promontories in the broader landscape of contemporary social movements. Grassroots groups form the vast majority of social-movement organizations nationally and, compared to Washington-based groups, are far more engaged in the communal life and civic networks of local communities. For example, a recent directory of national environmental organizations listed 645 groups, while the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, a national clearinghouse for grassroots environmental groups, claims to be in contact with between seven thousand and nine thousand groups nationwide. [14] The demography of the peace movement evinces the same pattern. The 1987 edition of the Grassroots Peace Directory listed 7,700 groups working for peace, but less than 300 claimed to be national in scope and only about half of those were located in Washington. To assess the capacity of the women's movement to promote "civic engagement" solely on an examination of NOW paints a refracted portrait of the efforts of the thousands of rape-crisis centers, battered-women's shelters, women's health clinics, bookstores, theater groups, women's studies programs, credit unions, reading circles, clinic-defense teams, and other "nontraditional" women's groups in localities across the United States. [15] The social ties and trust among members of community-based movement organizations should not be equated with those typical of "mass-mediated" membership organizations. [16]
These observations would come as no surprise to Tocqueville, who saw specifically political associations as the "great free schools" of democracy in the United States of the 1830s. Tocqueville regarded political associations as dangerous to any regime, including an open one. Yet despite such reservations, he ends by endorsing free political associations on the grounds that only such freedom can prevent "either despotism of parties or the arbitrary rule of a prince," and that political association is in practice the mother of civil association, not the other way around: "So one may think of political associations as great free schools to which all citizens come to be taught the general theory of association." Where political associations are forbidden, Tocqueville continues, "civil associations will always be few, weebly conceived, and unskillfully managed and either will never form any vast designs or will fail in the execution of them." [17]
Theoretically, the short shrift that Putnam gives to political associations and social movements seems to stem from concerns, similar to those raised by Tocqueville, that are rarely addressed by the proponents of "Civil Society II." For Putnam correctly perceives that not all organized groups contribute positively to "effective governance." In this respect, he echoes the fears not only of the pluralists but of Tocqueville [End Page 44] as well, who treated "political associations" as a different species and wrote, "One must not shut one's eyes to the fact that unlimited freedom of association for political ends is, of all forms of liberty, the last that a nation can sustain. While it may not actually lead it into anarchy, it does constantly bring it to the verge thereof"--a passage that Tocqueville pointedly quotes in his later discussion of the relations between political and civil associations.
The doubts that Tocqueville raised were grave ones, and were soon enough confirmed by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In full-blown political associations, Tocqueville worried, dissidents can league together to "form something like a separate nation within the nation and a government within the government." Were political passions to be raised to such a pitch, could it then be supposed "that in the long run such a group will just talk and not act?"[18] In such circumstances, the "dense networks of civil engagement" generated by associations of all kinds would provide apt recruiting grounds for rival bands bent on destroying their opponents, a probability ably documented by contemporary students of the recruitment strategies of revolutionary movements.
Against such a possibility Putnam erects a twofold defense: First, he downplays or rejects the role of specifically political associations and movements in his portrait of the "civil community." Second, in describing civil society itself, he adopts the pluralist restriction that only broad, horizontally structured groups capable of "cutting across" salient social cleavages are likely to achieve the effects more generally attributed to civil society. According to the pluralist argument, if citizens belong to a variety of organizations whose memberships "cut across" rather than track "salient social cleavages," such associations will weaken those cleavages and thereby make society more governable. But this is equivalent to arguing that "the weaker civil society, the stronger the state," which is clearly not Putnam's point. Nor is it the civic utopia envisioned by proponents of "Civil Society II," for whom the precise function of civil society is to serve as a counterweight to the state.
