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ERDEM SELVİN

The Tensions on the Role of Civil Society in Public Sphere

In the course of State and Public Sphere, we had discussed liberal and republican thoughts of

state and society formations by dealing with the classical texts. Each side has its own peculiar

understanding and emphasis on the existence of civil society and its role in public sphere. The

role of civil society in public sphere is utmost an interesting and significant concept since in

democracies, it is accepted as vital. However, in history, there is a multitude of different

explanations of civil society. Firstly, in antique times, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero emphasize

the existence of public sphere, at least the liberties which would come in the existence of the

community, in explaining their own ideas i.e. good society. Then, Hobbes’, Locke’s

Rousseau’s and Kant’s ideas were dominant as the rise of individuality and enlightenment. In

modern era, Hegel, Tocqueville, Marx, and Gramsci take into account the role of civil society

in different ways. And Jürgen Habermas adds the civil society into the public sphere

argument. That is why; it was always a heated debate in the history of political thoughts. In

this paper, I will look at the different descriptions of civil society by liberals and republicans

given in different conditions. The terms that used by each side, the backgrounds, the major

motives of the philosophies in constituting such an institution, who are the relevant actors that

consist the civil society provided by each side and each thinker which included in my reading

list. I will try to find the questions as how each side approaches towards the existence of a

strong civil society, the importance of it, the composition of it, what would be the results, i.e.

is this going to serve as protection for freedoms of free will of individuals or create a common

sense in creating the will of the society, in which conditions these could be realized, are there

any hierarchies constructed into society i.e. whose interests are more visible etc. At last, after

giving a brief wrap-up, I will give my closing remarks in the topic of the role of civil society

in public sphere by dealing with whether the arguments can be applied for today’s problems.

The need for liberty and equality are very motives of liberal thought. As everyone knows, I

think, the story begins with the John Locke’s assumptions on life, liberty and property1. The

theories like social contract, representative democracy, rule of law, separation of powers were

the very basics of the journey which ends in the limited government for the sake of atomistic

individualism assumptions against the absolute power of states. In this perspective, the

1 He is not actually accepted as the liberal thinker by most authorities in the history of political science;

however, when we think of the stress on the justification on life, liberty and property, we can take this argument into the consideration as the basics of liberal thinking.

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liberalists attributes more importance to the role of civil society in public sphere and their

understanding of civil society and the constituents of it are shaped by the thoughts on human

nature as self-interested individuals, free market, invisible hand, class compromise, freedoms

of interests, their competition, lack of interference from above as The State2. Republicanism,

on the other hand, mostly underlines the importance of rightly representation of societies.

Again here, the role of civil society in public sphere is very important but their understanding

of civil society and the constituents of it are in some degree different from the explanations of

liberalists. We begin to examining the republicanism by looking at the Rousseau’s

understanding of history and the creation of society. If we accept the society as something

different from the one constructed by self-interested individuals, then we take the

representation of the society, the main drives for public good, reaching to consensus as much

more significant and different from the human nature explanation of liberalists.

The clearest distinction between republican and liberal thoughts were given by Jürgen

Habermas’ text, The Three Normative Models of Democracy, in this course therefore I have

an ambition to give firstly his assumptions on the separation of the two. He introduces the

strengths and weaknesses of liberal and republican understanding of democracy or governing

process and by doing so; he adds another normative model for governing process as

deliberative democracy. His principles in describing the tensions between republican and

liberal view of democracy are the concept of the citizen, the concept of law and the nature of

processes of political will-formation. According to him, the liberal view sees the role of

democratic process with programming the state in the interest of society and the state as the

apparatus of public administration and the society as a system of market-structured

interactions of private persons and their labor. Politics (in the sense of political will-

formation) is understood as a medium to gather people and protect the social interests against

the state which obliges itself to flourish the collective goals by taking the required power as in

administration. On the other hand, republican view sees politics as constitutive for the

socialization process as a whole. Politics, as the reflexive form of substantial ethical life,

makes communities become aware of the importance of the presence of each other so as to act

with full deliberation as citizens and create the reciprocal recognition as free and equal units

under law. In this sense, solidarity becomes a third source of social integration beside

2 I approach “The State” as there are no higher authority above state, the ideal one, the desired or non-desired

the concentration of powers in the one hand. I take “The” conception, i.e. The State or The Society, in the same manner as Hegel uses it in explainin the concentration of everything, the ideal one, the real truht as The Absolute in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

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sovereign state authority and decentralized market. Habermas says that for republicans, civil

society which leads actually the political public sphere has a functional importance because

the independence of civil society from public administration and market-mediated private

commerce allow political communication to flourish itself independently. By doing so, public

sphere and civil society secures the integrative power and autonomy of the communicative

practice of the citizens. On the conception of citizen, liberals emphasize the importance of

individual rights. These are the negative rights3 as we understand in the lack of government or

legal intervention or external compulsion. On contrary, republicans see political rights as

positive liberties which include preeminently rights of political participation and

communication. Governance actually takes legitimacy by providing citizens with active

participation without involving this communication practices. On the concept of law, liberals

take individual rights as the center of legal order but these subjective rights, according to

republican view, exist thanks to the objective legal order. Priority is a key matter here. On the

nature of process of political will-formation, liberals see politics as a field where struggle for

power takes place. The power relations, the race to reach it, the struggle as we see competition

in market conditions are the main factors that shape the political process of opinion and will

formation in the public sphere and in parliament. As contrary, republicans see this process in

respect to public communication oriented to mutual understanding. It is the deliberative style

what is more crucial here. Legitimacy could be realized with the clash of opinions which are

freely discussed in political arena.

“What makes society ‘civil’ is the fact that it is the locus where citizens can freely organize

themselves into groups and associations at various levels in order to make the formal bodies

of the state authority adopt policies consonant with their perceived interests. Yet, civil society

cannot be viewed as opposed to the state and economy by definition. These three spheres of

liberal democracy are strictly interconnected. Free exchange of goods and services and the

state, based on the rule of law, are preconditions of liberty and thus civil society. But at the

same time both a corrupted state and a corrupted economy can be the greatest danger for civil

society. The liberal democratic order should involve equilibrium between these three sets of

factors: adequate government, a properly functioning market economy and a civil society that

can balance the two other factors.” (Dorota & Pietrzyk 2001:5) Here we can see that the

inevitability of liberal democracy in order to construct civil society in state formation or

3 Rights considered negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech, private

property, freedom from violent crime, freedom of worship, habeas corpus, a fair trial, freedom from slavery.

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public sphere but beside this, it is obvious that this explanation takes liberal arguments into

core of the argumentation. However, we cannot take the community for granted if we look at

from the republican eyes. Man is, by nature, the member of community; individuality comes

second in thinking that way. Individual freedom and happiness might interfere with the good

of society but common good should prevail. The public good should be considered as the

principle object of individuals’ endeavors and the happiness of individuals as the great end of

civil society. A republican constitution which was for Kant, who actually advocates liberal

republicanism, the best form of government assumes that each citizen gives his consent to the

action of sovereign through being directly or indirectly represented in the legislature. Hence,

the citizen may, in a moral sense, regard all laws as emanation of his will, and this is an echo

of Rousseau’s general will4. “In Hegel

5 view, civil society contains three stages: a) a system

of needs; b) the administration of justice; c) the public authority and competition. It is the

sphere where individuals seek to satisfy each other’s needs through work, production and

exchange. It is based on the division of labor, system of social classes, law which promotes

security of property, and may be regarded as the external state based on need and at the same

time as the system of universal interdependence and lower kind of knowledge. Individual

pursuits are linked through a web of mutual dependence that is governed by a system of

formal rules described by Hegel as external state or state based on need and abstract

reasoning.” (Dorota & Pietrzyk 2001:41) In Hegelian viewpoint, we can see the rejected

concept of social contract warning that we cannot consider the state as a contract. There is a

duality in character of modern man: man as a member of civil society and as a citizen of the

state. The same individual works for himself and his family and at the same time for the

universal and has it as an end. And the justification of the state in Hegel is quite different from

that of the classical liberalism. Not the individual but the state is viewed as an absolute end.

The concept of civil society as an arena of conflicting particular interests distinguished from

the state creates a division between state and civil society. Conversely, Marx6 saw the solution

of problems posed by the eighteenth century theorists of civil society not in the division

between civil society and the state but in its eradication as we count revolution.

4 We take Rousseau as founding father of left and republican ideas because of his assumptions on eradication

of civil society and the sovereignity of general will. 5 In the course, we underlined Hegel with his critique of liberal republicanism, critical republicanist manner.

Authonomy was the key word in explaning Hegel and Kant’s argumentation. 6 And we took Karl Marx with his critique of critical republicanism, abolishment of the state which is actually

the domain of class stuggle.

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Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, undertakes a thorough historical-philosophical

inquiry that returned to the origins of both democracy and political philosophy in the Ancient

Greek world, and brought these original understandings of political life into the modern era.

Since she deals with the human nature in her complex and unique way, we can take her

arguments into consideration in terms of not liberal or republican understandings of civil

society and public sphere but as core indication. Her goal was to propose a phenomenological

reconstruction of different aspects of human activity. She makes a stringent critique of

traditional of political philosophy, and the dangers it presents to the political sphere as an

autonomous domain of human practice. The realm of action and appearance (including the

political) is subordinated to and becomes instrumental for the ends of the Ideas as Plato puts it

in the cave allegory. Arendt set herself is to save action and appearance, and with it the

common life of the political and the values of opinion, from the depredations of the

philosophers. In The Human Condition, Arendt argues for a tripartite division between the

human activities of labor, work, and action with the hierarchy of importance upon the political

freedom and responsibility. Labor is inevitably linked to the humanity which is closest to the

animal. Arendt refers to humanity in this mode as animal laborans. Because the activity of

labor is commanded by necessity, the human being as laborer is the equivalent of the slave;

labor is characterized by unfreedom. With the rise of the social, the emergence of necessary

labor has the effect of destroying the properly political by subordinating the public realm of

human freedom to the concerns mere animal necessity. Arendt names humanity in working

activity as homo faber (the builder of walls both physically and culturally which divide the

human realm from that of nature and provide a stable context of spaces and institutions within

which human life can unfold. The activity of labor and the consumption of its fruits, which

have come to dominate the public sphere, cannot furnish a common world within which

humans might pursue their higher ends. For Arendt, the activity of work cannot be fully free

insofar as it is not an end in itself, but is determined by prior causes and articulated ends. The

quality of freedom in the world of appearances is to be found elsewhere in the vita activa,

namely with the activity of action proper. “To act, in its most general sense, means to take

initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ‘to rule’

indicates), to set something in motion. Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by

virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. Freedom is to be seen as a

character of human existence in the world. Man does not so much possess freedom as he, or

better his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe;

man is free because he is a beginning.” (Arendt 1998:177) So we can understand that

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humanity represents the faculty of beginning. Freedoms come from acting and the capacity

for initiation gives actions the character of singularity and uniqueness. To define politics or

the unfolding of history in terms of any teleology or immanent or objective process is to deny

what is central to authentic human action, namely, its capacity to initiate the wholly new,

unanticipated, unexpected, and unconditioned by the laws of cause and effect. Arendt argues

that “Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men…corresponds to the human

condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is

specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of

all political life.” (Arendt 1998: 23) Arendt’s theory holds that actions cannot be justified for

their own sake, but only in light of their public recognition and the shared rules of a political

community. For Arendt, action is a public category, a worldly practice that is experienced in

our intercourse with others. Action as the public disclosure requires a public space in which it

can be realized, a context in which individuals can encounter one another as members of a

community. For this space, Arendt turns to the ancients, holding up the Athenian polis as the

model for such a space of communicative and disclosive speech deeds. Such action is for

Arendt synonymous with the political. Therefore, we can understand the argumentation of

Arendt as republican in the emphasis on collective self-determination, solidarity, acting

together etc especially in the ideas On Revolution.

On the other hand, Gramsci7 is different from Arendt in saying that politics include various

ways or tactics i.e. war and mentions about the revolutionary strategy while Arendt supports

the prohibition of violence. He actually does not fit in the paper of republican and liberal

tensions on the role of civil society but we can take his arguments in contrast to the ones of

Arendt and also the other side of medallion as the hegemony integrated into the civil society.

The discussion about civil society in Marxist tradition as complementary is given here to

supply the other side of the issue. In distinguishing the civil society from the state, hegemony

is key issue according to him. He criticizes Marxism in terms of economic determinism. In

this aspect, we can say that he has a liberal view. He says that it is not Marxism to seek for the

economic inequalities and interests behind anything. There are certain relations of forces

which are direct references to Marxist historical development. One version is action oriented

7 He writes upon the myth of Lenin while he was under torture. He adds Marxist tradition some new aspects.

He also sustains some Hegelian ideas. His writings were mostly affected by Soviet Revolution. He has Leninist side since he supports the role of party and organization of masses. He is arrested for Fascist party campaign in Italy. He talks about the war making.

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class struggle as class relations in terms of economics. The other is conflict between relations

of production and forces of production which are understood as technology in aspect of

organization of class gets into conflict because of relations of production. We say that as

structural account. Gramsci takes class struggle into account and mentions about the relations

of forces. He has a position action oriented. Relations of forces are not economic relations or

according to him. First level of relations of forces is objective, given economic relations or

facts about economics. This gives birth to the class-in-itself and class-for-itself arguments of

Marx. This level is immediate, the fact that some are patrons, some are workers is a given

thing. Second level is concepts like political consciousness. There are three stages to reach it.

Firstly, in economic corporate level, on artisanship, in-between firms and traders, the

homogenously creation of corporate interests. The other stage is that the people come together

and attend the governance as well as the bourgeois revolution of aristocrats, proletariat

revolution of workers, reaching bourgeois consciousness. Thirdly, the reaching to

consciousness of other subordinated groups. Here the party comes to the scene and creates a

superstructure. In this process, we can say that there is determinism. And inevitably, the

distinction between civil society and political society occurs but social relations are

unavoidable. Hegemony, according to Gramsci, is intellectually or morally bringing about

unity. The separation of interests happens and the state serves just one group. In this way, the

national energies come across. In immediate level, subordinated groups’ interests are realized

but in long term, the dominant groups become the decision-makers. And lastly, in third level,

with its disciplining institutions as military forces, political forces, the state come across. All

three levels are actually generating the state. Therefore, Gramsci actually introduces the

formation of state with the help of hegemony while creating public sphere. He suggests that

“What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can

be called ‘civil society’, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’, and that

of ‘political society’ or ‘the state’. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the

function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the

other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the state and

‘juridical’ government.” (Gramsci 1971: 12) Bobbio Norberto, in his Gramsci and the

Conception of Civil Society, implies that Gramsci is the first Marxist writer who uses the

concept of civil society for his analysis of society. “Gramsci claims that this concept of civil

society derives from Hegel’s and Hegel’s concept of civil society as understood by Gramsci is

a superstructural concept. A great difficulty arises from these two points: on the one side,

Gramsci derives his thesis on civil society from Hegel and sees it as belonging to the

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superstructural moment and not to the structural one; but on the other hand, Marx also refers

to Hegel’s civil society when he identifies civil society with the whole of economic relations,

that is with the structural moment.” (Bobbio 1979: 31) But we can say that Gramsci do not

refer to the system of needs but economic relations, not the one of initial moment that is the

explosion of contradictions which the state will have to dominate but the one of final moment

when the corporations provide the basic transition into the state.

While Gramsci and also Hegel and Marx were dealing with the invisible hegemony integrated

into the civil society, Jürgen Habermas searches the historical development of public sphere

and the stance of civil society in it by looking at the construction, the relevant actors and

common institutions et. He gives a schema for the structural position of public sphere as:

Private Realm Sphere of the Public Authority

Civil society (realm of

commodity ex-change and

social labor)

Conjugal family’s internal

space (bourgeois

intellectuals)

Public sphere in the

political realm

Public sphere in the

world of letters (clubs,

press)

(market of culture

products) “Towns”

State (realm of the “police”)

Court (courtly-noble society)

(Habermas, Jürgen. 1991 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Pp.30)

Therefore, he sees the public sphere in the middle of the governance body and the private

realm. In the 18th

century, with the rise of intimate sphere or bourgeois intimacy as in the case

of salon or coffee houses example, the court lose its central position in the public sphere and

the public sphere itself was transformed. Intellectuals met with the aristocracy in those kind of

realms so poor men have disadvantages and beside this, we can see the economic and political

disputes here thus there are landed or moneyed interests. However, Habermas argues that

“Such orders, chambers and academies were preoccupied with the native tongue, now

interpreted as the medium of communication and understanding between people in their

common quality as human beings and nothing more than human beings.” (Habermas 1991:

34) Still, public sphere was realized behind closed doors since they did not want their equality

to be heard by the state. Although all the salons or coffee houses have specific differences,

they have a number of institutional criteria in common. Firstly, the basis which all discussions

are conducted is based on common humanity. Secondly, it was a domain of common concern

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that is not determined by church, market or state. We call common concern as reproduction of

social life, art and cultural product. Thirdly, inclusive public started to be adopted. The issues

discussed became general not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility:

everyone had to be able to participate. Habermas says that “ The public sphere as a functional

element in the political realm was given the normative status of an organ for the self-

articulation of civil society with a state authority corresponding to its needs. The social

precondition for this ‘developed’ bourgeois public sphere was a market that, tending to be

liberalized, made affairs in the sphere of social reproduction as much as possible a matter of

private people left to themselves and so finally completed the privatization of civil society.”

(Habermas 1991:74) With the transformation of law in the 18th

century, civil society started to

be released from its bounds. Yet, the liberalization of market, or explaining the advances of

public sphere go hand in hand with the laissez faire, the colonial systems etc. at least we are

explaining the public sphere and civil society by looking at market situation. So it is not

wrong to say that liberal arguments were at the core of the development of bourgeois public

sphere, or the privatization of civil society. Habermas concludes this argument by saying that

“Nevertheless, only during this phase was civil society as the private sphere emancipated

from the directives of public authority to such an extent that at that time the political public

sphere could attain its full development in the bourgeois constitutional state.” (Habermas

1991: 79) According to him, the constitutional state as a bourgeois state established the public

sphere in the political realm as an organ of the state so as to ensure institutionally the

connection between law and public opinion. Dissolving the domination is a typically

bourgeois idea. When we take the fulfillment of rights into consideration as basic rights

(freedom of opinion, of speech, of press, of assembly, and of association) and their political

function (right of petition, equality of votes etc.) and other basic rights and implication

concerning individual’s status grounded in the intimate sphere, and the transactions of private

property in the civil society, we can understand that this publicness or publicity legitimizes or

justifies the public character of parliamentary deliberation and the organs of the state. He

argues that “The public sphere was safeguarded whenever the economic and social conditions

gave everyone an equal chance to meet the criteria for admission: specifically, to earn the

qualifications for private autonomy that made for the educated and property owning person.”

(Habermas 1991: 86) That’s why; he deals with the question how to create a general

consensus or reconciliation in fact there are number of inadequacies and minority problem in

the society. So his arguments have much more complexities than liberal or republican

tensions on the role of civil society in public sphere.

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To sum up, there are different explanations on the role of civil society in public sphere given

by republicans and liberals because of different motives. In this paper, I tried to explain them

by looking at first the birth of these ideologies, then the stresses on the civil society and public

sphere. Jürgen Habermas’, Hannah Arendt’s, to some extent Hegelian and Kantian ideas

about the civil society or rights against to absolutist state, Gramsci’s supply of Marxist

tradition were the main arguments in explaining the tensions and different contradictions

about public sphere and civil society.

Today, we still discuss about the role of civil society in public sphere and in political

decision-making issues and we come across the reflections while people are participating to

demonstrations against state’s much more involvement of private lifes of people or

government’s overmuch effort in order to dictate over society. It is common discussion that

what would be the red line of demonstrations whether it is violation of laws or active

participation in politics as we see in most democracies. However, I think that we need to be

careful in taking side next to liberal or republican ideas since the two explanations may serve

for different interests but it could give the same result such as civil society.

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah. (1998) The Human Condition. The University of Chicago.

Bobbio, Norberto. (1979) Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society. Routledge & Kegan

Paul Ltd.

Dorota & Pietrzyk. (2001) Civil Society – Conceptual History from Hobbes to Marx.

University of Wales

Gramsci, Antonio. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers

Habermas, Jürgen. (1999). The Inclusion of the Other. Polity Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1991) The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere. MIT Press.

Hall, J. (1995). Civil society: Theory, History, Comparison. UK Polity Press.