These observations do not close the question. If we are to retrieve what is most useful from the civil society argument, we must pursue [End Page 48] nagging empirical questions about the ways in which social power is constituted, distributed, and managed in contemporary societies. One avenue, suggested by the doubts that we have uncovered at the center of the civil society argument, would be to inquire more deeply into the sorts of associational life likely to produce the "social capital" on which Putnam has put so much weight. Sweeping, mutually exclusive ideal types like "political society" and "economic society," the "public," "private," and "nonprofit" sectors, and even "civil society" itself are unlikely to capture the range of associational forms that prepare citizens to engage in collective action for mutual benefit. The role of less formal but more numerous groups, moreover, needs to be taken into account in any such analysis.[27] We are likely to find that social-movement organizations, grassroots interest groups, and grassroots political associations of all sorts are far more likely to generate Putnam's activated citizenry than the choral societies, bird watching clubs, and bowling leagues he is so fond of citing.
A second avenue of inquiry might start with the demography of "social capital" production in different societies, seeking clues about the ways in which the larger political context shapes the relations between civil society and the state. If the argument developed here is correct, the key to the success or failure of democratic institutions will lie not in the character of civil society but in their responsiveness as institutions--in their ability to mediate conflict by hearing, channeling, and mediating the multiple citizen demands that modern societies express through civil and political associations alike.
Finally, the civil society argument raises intriguing and pressing questions about the nature and political import of the relations that associations of all sorts might forge with the state and with one another. What is the sense, for instance, and what is the nonsense in the frequent demand that civil associations be "nonpartisan"? How might civil society act to advance citizens' interests in the absence of effective political representation, and what are the limits to such action? Is there a viable distinction between the multiple "special interests" of civil society and the "public interest"? If there is, how and by whom shall this public interest be safeguarded? Where civil associations are closely tied to parties, what sorts of relations between them are conducive to greater internal democracy and fuller representation of citizens' interests? Is greater intraparty democracy (and therefore openness to "civil society") correlated with democratic governance, or is there no very clear relationship between the two? And if not, just how might vigorous representation of the interests and demands of civil society be reconciled with the norms of compromise and accommodation that govern political settlements? These are classic questions of political philosophy, but they are also empirical questions that the civil society argument, however faulty as a general account of democratic governance, forces upon us. [End Page 49] Such questions cannot be answered in the abstract but only through careful empirical work.
Notes
1. Michael Walzer, "The Civil Society Argument," in Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1992), 89107.
2. Most important are "religious special-purpose groups," which tend to be relatively small organizations formed to fulfill specialized functions often oriented toward the reform of a larger religious body or society as a whole. Such groups have a long history in the United States, but their numbers and membership seem to have grown tremendously in recent decades. For detailed analysis see Robert Wuthnow, "The Growth of Religious Reform Movements," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 480 (July 1985): 10616; and The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
3. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Olson's argument is but the most ambitious of attacks on the "rent-seeking" behavior of our "interest-group society" emanating from the public-choice school of political economy.
4. Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 6578; and Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
5. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 173 and 176.
6. Putnam elaborates the argument in his 1995 Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture, where he focuses on explaining "the strange disappearance of social capital in America." See "Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America," PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (December 1995): 66483.
7. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 16775.
8. There are, in fact, what statistical analysis describes as "ecological correlation problems" with Putnam's data interpretation in some instances (see William S. Robinson, "Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals," American Sociological Review 15 [1950]: 35157). The co-occurrence of civic associations and effective government in the same region does not demonstrate that the people in the associations are the ones making the government work. To address that question, one must systematically introduce a mediating level of analysis that can demonstrate the actual avenues of influence among civically engaged people, civic associations, and institutional performance. Were the civic organizations party-organized, however, it would be easier to demonstrate the links among party membership, associating in party civic associations, parties, interest articulation or aggregation, and institutional performance. In fact, parties apparently play an important role in northern Italy's civic life.
9. As Putnam puts it in a more recent article, "To the extent that the norms, networks, and trust link substantial sectors of the community and span underlying social cleavages--to the extent that the social capital is of a `bridging' sort--then the enhanced cooperation is likely to serve broader interests and be widely welcomed." See "Tuning In, Tuning Out," 665.
10. Ted Perlmutter, "Italy: Why No Voluntary Sector?" in Robert Wuthnow, ed., Between States and Markets: The Voluntary Sector in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 157.
11. Aleksander Smolar, "From Opposition to Atomization," Journal of Democracy 7 (January 1996): 26. Václav Havel continues to represent this stance, characterized by a discourse that is primarily moral. See Václav Havel and Václav Klaus, with commentary by Petr Pithart, "Rival Visions," Journal of Democracy
7 (January 1996): 1223.
12. For a striking look at the advantages--and dangers--of political alignment for social organizations, see Cathy Lisa Schneider, Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). Schneider shows that Chilean Communist Party socialization in shantytowns that it controlled to significantly higher levels of social organization, community solidarity, and protest than elsewhere, but that the militancy of these towns, and the Party's isolation once it turned to armed struggle, left them broken by repression and without political resources after Chile's limited democratic transition.
13. To our knowledge, the proliferation of social-movement and citizen-advocacy organizations was first discussed by John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald in The Trends of Social Movements in America (Morristown, Pa.: General Learning Press, 1973) and demonstrated empirically in the case of Washington-based groups by David King and Jack L. Walker, Jr., "An Ecology of Interest Groups in America," in Jack L. Walker, Jr., ed., Mobilizing Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professions and Social Movements (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 5775; and for women's and racial- or ethnic- advocacy groups generally by Debra Mink off, Organizing for Equality: The Evolution of Women's and Race-Ethnic Organizations in America, 19551985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995). For similar accounts of nonprofit groups see P.D. Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and Michael O'Neill, The Third America: The Emergence of the Nonprofit Sector in the United States (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1989).
14. Only about one in four of these national groups is based in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. See John C. Brainard, ed., The Directory of National Environmental Organizations, 4th ed. (St. Paul, Minn.: Environmental Directories, 1992).
15. Topsfield Foundation, Grassroots Peace Directory (Pomfret, Conn.: no pub., 1987); Brainard, ed., Directory of National Environmental Organizations; Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancy Martin, eds., Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women's Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1995).
16. Putnam dismisses thousands of community-based nonprofit service organizations in similar fashion by equating their potential for producing "social capital" with that of the Ford Foundation, the Mayo Clinic, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Only if the tremendous growth in the "nonprofit sector" over recent decades were attributable primarily to growth among the large national-level groups specifically mentioned by Putnam would his assessment of the sector as a whole be well founded. His argument appears to be on sounder footing in "Tuning In, Tuning Out," where he appeals to evidence from a variety of national studies, including the General Social Survey, to show that participation in organizations has been declining since the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the use of participation in general as a stand-in for "social capital" makes even this data questionable, as Putnam himself argues that "who benefits from these connections, norms, and trust--the individual, the wider community, or some faction within the community--must be determined empirically, not definitionally" (p. 665)--essentially the point we make below.
17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 193, 524, and 192. It is curious that Larry Diamond, in his synthesis of ideas on the role of civil society in democratic consolidation, "Rethinking Civil Society: Toward Democratic Consolidation," Journal of Democracy 5 (July 1994): 8, should quote the "free schools" passage as referring to civil, rather than political, associations. Like Putnam, Diamond wishes to exclude political parties from "civil society," and he would dole out similar treatment to civil associations that refuse to be "civil" in their behavior (p. 11).
18. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 19091.
19. Larry Diamond, more explicitly than Putnam, would simply exclude from "civil society" those groups whose ends or behavior might threaten democratic governance. See Diamond, "Rethinking," 11. Such an expedient makes the civil society argument nicely circular, and it denies us the opportunity to understand how real societies work.
20. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
21. Others solve this dilemma by positing conditions that must be met for civil society to work its magic. Groups must be "moderate" and restrained in their demands; they should be democratic themselves or at least support democracy; they should be institutionalized and have a stake in the system; they should not
reinforce social cleavages, but cut across them; and so on. The circularity of such condition-setting should be apparent.
22. There appears to be no relation, for example, between the changes in the character of Italian regional politics and politicians that Putnam's research uncovered and the "civicness" of the regions. Rather, Putnam ascribes the increased moderation and efficacy that he found to the new institutions (the regional governments), not to the civic culture in which some of them were embedded. The increased responsiveness of government represented by the new institutions was the key to their success, though Putnam shows that success varied in character and degree from region to region.
23. There are, of course, versions of the civil society argument in which social movements and social activists play a central role. Michael Walzer's article, cited in note 1 above, is one of them. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, in Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), present an extensively elaborated version. In neither case, however, do the authors take sufficiently seriously the difficulty of divided or "dangerous" civil societies.
24. There is generally a close correlation between individual participation in any association and broader civic engagement; see Samuel Barnes and Max Kaase, Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979). Nonetheless, it seems likely that specifically political associations (whether social-movement organizations, interest groups, or political parties) are more conducive to promoting civic engagement than many other sorts of association. That would certainly be in keeping with Tocqueville's argument. Like many other aspects of the civil society argument, however, it remains an intriguing empirical question.
25. Walzer, "Civil Society Argument," 1023. See also Diamond, "Rethinking," 1516.
26. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). Huntington's notion of parties as necessary channels for political participation in modern and modernizing societies relied heavily on the ordering and controlling functions of parties. His favorite example, the Leninist communist parties of the time, proved a fickle choice, because they failed precisely to incorporate the responsiveness that makes successful democracies work but which Huntington systematically ignored in his account of the sort of "institutionalization" necessary to achieve political "order."
27. Given the social significance of bowling in the United States as documented in "Bowling Alone," informally organized groups of no league bowlers merit some consideration. On recent excursions to AMF East Carolina Bowl one of the authors of the present essay observed dozens of people bowling without benefit of league sponsorship. Contrary to Putnam's "whimsical, yet discomfiting" example, however, no one was bowling alone.
