What Makes Civil Society Civil? The State and Social Groups

What Makes Civil Society

Civil? The State and Social

Groups

Neil A. Englehart

Bowling Green State University

Many scholars use “civil society” to denote a realm of peaceful social organization

independent from and often antagonistic to the state. The mass demonstrations

that peacefully brought down Eastern European governments in the late 1980s legi-

timized this understanding. At the same time, however, governments were falling in

less developed countries, and the social groups that emerged were decidedly

uncivil. In these places competing groups preyed upon each other, which sometimes

led to protracted civil wars. The view of civil society as spontaneously self-organized

harmony cannot deal with these Third World cases. To better understand such

developments this article proposes an alternative view of civil society, inspired

in part by the writings of Kant, in which social harmony emerges after the

state reduces violence and constrains predation by organized groups. The case

of Somalia illustrates the usefulness of this alternative vision.

Polity advance online publication, 31 January 2011; doi:10.1057/pol.2010.25

Keywords civil society; state failure; Kant; Somalia

Is the concept of civil society useful for understanding Third World politics?

Over the last two decades Eastern European intellectuals revived the concept as

they sought a third way between revolution and reform, neither constituting a

viable strategy against powerful socialist states. The history of civil society is long

and complex.1 Eastern Europeans were attracted to theories about civil society in

which the term denotes an autonomous and spontaneously harmonious realm of

organizational life that is distinct from and antagonistic to the state. According to

1. John Keane, “Despotism and Democracy,” in Civil Society and the State, ed. John Keane (New

York: Verso, 1988), 35–72 and Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1998); Edward Shils, “The Virtues of Civil Society,” Government and Opposition 26 (January 1991): 3–20;

Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: The Free Press, 1992); Jean L. Cohen and Andrew

Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Krishnan Kumar, “Civil Society: An

Inquiry into the Usefulness of an Historical Term,” British Journal of Sociology 44 (September 1993):

375–95; John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University

Press, 1999); Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, eds., Civil Society: History and Possibilities (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Polity . 2011

r 2011 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/11www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

this view, social groups are naturally civil and cooperative, and anti-social

violence usually arises from excessive concentrations of power in the state. The

spontaneous and largely non-violent mass demonstrations that peacefully

removed despotic governments in Eastern Europe appeared to vindicate this

view, and have decisively shaped understandings of civil society around the

world.

Yet at the same time despotic governments were falling elsewhere, with very

different results. In places like Afghanistan, the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and

Somalia, social groups did not coalesce into harmonious civil societies. Instead,

they evolved into decidedly uncivil warring factions.

Why this difference between the Second and Third worlds? What produced

civil societies and peace in some places, and uncivil societies and war in others?

If we assume that civil society generates the many benefits often attributed to it,

such as fostering tolerance, supporting democracy and building social capital,

then we need to explain why some societies are more civil than others. What

makes a society civil?

The literature on civil society often applies the concept asymmetrically. Many

scholars treat the notion of spontaneous harmony as a description of life in

advanced industrial democracies, but an unrealized ideal for other places.2 They

encourage less industrialized countries to develop more civil society, which in

practice usually means more NGOs. International donors wish to foster civil

society as a way to resolve conflict, to democratize government, and to remedy

weak, corrupt states. Implicitly following the Eastern European formula, donors

assume that civil-society organizations will provide a bulwark against state

oppression.3 Yet giving money to non-state groups does not necessarily promote

greater civility and tolerance, and can have perverse effects. Chabol and

Daloz for instance suggest that the rapid expansion in the number of formal

civil-society groups in Africa during the 1990s was “less the outcome of the

increasing political weight of civil society than the consequence of the very

pragmatic realization that resources are now largely channeled through NGOs.” 4

Even more troubling is Belloni’s description of civil society in Bosnia and

Herzegovina as “a space where ethnic elites maintain their domination by fostering

2. Chris Hann, “Introduction: Political Society and Civil Anthropology,” in Civil Society: Challenging

Western Models, ed. Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn (New York: Routledge, 1996).

3. Marina Ottaway and David Carrothers, Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion

(Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000); Beatrice Pouligny, “Civil Society

and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding,” Security Dialogue 36 (December 2005): 495–510.; see also Roberto

Belloni, “Civil Society and Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Journal of Peace Research 38

(March 2001): 163–80.

4. Patrick Chabol and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1999), 22.

2 WHAT MAKES CIVIL SOCIETY CIVIL?

fragmentation and insecurity.” 5 The assumption that civil society is spontaneously

harmonious is clearly inadequate for understanding societies that collapsed

into uncivil violence. Yet the term is frequently applied to such places, partly

because of its revitalization by the Eastern European experience. The problem

in many places is not that the state is too strong and society too weak, but

rather the reverse: highly autonomous groups, often armed, either escape state

control or manipulate state power against rivals. These groups can cause

considerable predatory violence and human-rights abuse. In such cases, the

strengthening of civil society against the state means the transfer of resources to

uncivil actors.

This article offers an alternative understanding of civil society and tests its

plausibility by looking at the case of Somalia, which has been largely stateless

since 1991. In this alternative view, social groups interact peacefully because

political authority enforces civility. This view originated with the ancients and has

been re-articulated and modified by Augustine, Hobbes, Burke, and Kant. Kant’s

account is emphasized here, since it closely fits current concerns and allows us to

rethink some problematic assumptions about the relationship between states and

societies.

Some researchers have questioned the naıve, purely positive view of civil

society that dominated scholarship immediately after the Cold War. Berman, for

instance, has shown that civil society can endanger democracy under conditions

of social upheaval and a weak state. Payne has noted similarities between armed

right-wing movements in Latin America and groups valorized in the social-

movements literature, calling them “uncivil movements.” Colletta and Cullen

have shown that networks of social capital, which are often associated with a

“vibrant” civil society, can be used to form predatory groups when states fail.

Walzer has argued that weak state oversight empowers predatory economic

actors.6 Recent examples of state failure further suggest that cooperation within

small groups frequently leads to violence, predation, and instability unless

restrained by states. The absence of a Leviathan leaves groups in a security

dilemma. They become predatory in order to prevent other groups from gaining a

strategic advantage over them.7 A number of scholars have noted that in Africa,

5. Belloni, “Civil Society and Peacebuilding,” 164.

6. Sheri Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World Politics 49 (April

1997): 401–29 and “Islamism, Revolution and Society,” Perspectives on Politics 1 (June 2003): 11–26; Leigh

A. Payne, Uncivil Movements (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Nat J. Colletta and

Michelle L. Cullen, Violent Conflict and the Transformation of Social Capital (Washington, DC: The World

Bank, 2000); Michael Walzer, “The Idea of Civil Society,” Dissent 39 (Spring 1991): 294–303.

7. Barry R. Posen, “ The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival 35 (Spring 1993): 27–47;

Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder, eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1999).

Neil A. Englehart 3

perverse, predatory, and uncivil relations based on ethnic, tribal, regional,

sectarian or other divisions have emerged in weak and failed states.8

Such problems exist to some degree wherever autonomous social organiza-

tions exist, including in advanced industrial democracies. This universality

suggests that it might be useful to think of civil society as an ideal type subject to

empirical variation. Weber argues that ideal types are “conceptually pure” models

that can provide a point of reference for understanding causal relationships

between phenomena, even though ideal types in their pure form are “not to be

found anywhere in reality.”9 Actual cases will always deviate from the ideal type:

deviation is the norm. The form of the deviation can help us better understand

the character of particular empirical cases.

The pathologies of civil society vary considerably. In some places they are

dominant, in others minimal. The key question is what causes this variation. Why

are pro-social, public-spirited civil groups common in some places and times,

while predatory, uncivil groups dominate in others?

Both the theoretical and empirical literatures suggest that the character of civil

society is shaped in large part by its relationship to the state.10 Eastern European

intellectuals, drawing on a classical liberal vision of civil society, highlight

tolerance: either a state permits society to spontaneously form harmonious

patterns of personal interaction and associational life, or it represses social

groups, destroys trust, and turns citizens against each other.11 Many scholars

focusing on the European experience—Shils and Gellner, for instance—

acknowledge the state’s role in maintaining the civility of civil society, yet also

argue that the main function of civil society in advanced industrial countries is

to restrain state tendencies toward tyranny.12 State and society are often treated

as monolithic entities locked in opposition. However, state elites often form

alliances with social groups against other parts of the state, and social groups

often seek state assistance as they advance their own interests against those of

8. For instance Robert Fatton, “Civility, Incivility, and Democratization: The Politics of Civil Society

in Africa,” in Africa’s Second Wave of Freedom, ed. Lyn Graybill and Kenneth W. Thompson (New York:

University Press of America, 1998), 23–42; Chabol and Daloz, Africa Works; Augustine Ikelegbe “ The

Perverse Manifestation of Civil Society: Evidence from Nigeria,” Journal of Modern African Studies 39

(March 2001): 1–24; Maha Abdel Rahman, “ The Politics of ‘Uncivil’ Society in Egypt,” Review of African

Political Economy 29 (March 2002): 21–35.

9. Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 90.

10. Kjell Erling Kjellman and Kristian Berg Harpviken, “Civil Society and the State,” in Civil

Society and Peacebuilding: A Critical Assessment, ed. Thania Paffenholz (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner,

2010), 29–43.

11. See, for example, Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985).

12. Shils, “Virtues of Civil Society”; and Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty (New York: Penguin,

1994).


other groups. Such interpenetration is more typical than not.13 This collabora-

tion occurs even in advanced industrial democracies, with society shaping the

state and the state shaping society. This suggests that the celebration of these

cases as triumphs of autonomous civil society may be overstated.14 As Hann

notes, “there is something inherently unsatisfactory about the international

propagation by western scholars of an ideal of social organisation that seems to

bear little relation to the current realities of their own countries.”15 Scholars who

apply the concept of civil society to non-Western settings have developed more

sophisticated and complex accounts of the interaction of state and society.16 They

recognize the many ways that states affect the conditions under which citizens

interact and under which groups form and operate. Repressive states may cripple

civil society and produce perverse, violent, and uncivil behavior. Repressive

states also may strategically seek to turn allied social groups against others.17 But

there are also cases in which states cannot contain competition between

predatory social groups. These cases pose the strongest challenge to the image of

spontaneous, self-organized harmony supposed in the European and East

European accounts of civil society. Indeed, the ultimate test of the plausibility

of a naturally harmonious social order would be in a place in which the state is

absent, so we can distinguish between the state’s effect on the organization of

society and those tendencies present in society absent the state.

Below I first review the argument for civil society as spontaneous harmony. I

then explore an alternative view that is inspired by the work of Kant and that

treats civility as an outcome of state action and authority. The plausibility of the

Kantian alternative is illustrated by the case of Somalia, which has lacked central

government authority for twenty years. If the view that society absent the state

tends toward civility is correct, then one would expect conditions in Somalia to

be quite good. Incivility, however, has prevailed and cannot be attributed to

political maneuvering by central government officials, a problem that plagues

many other African states.18 To show that the lessons from Somalia can be applied

13. See, for example, Joel Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, eds., State Power and Social Forces

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms

of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University

Press, 1994); Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn, eds., Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (New York:

Routledge, 1996); Chabol and Daloz, Africa Works; C.J. Fuller and Veronique Beneı, eds., The Everyday

State and Society in Modern India (Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000).

14. See, for example, Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1997); Kjellman and Harpviken, “Civil Society and the State.”

15. Hann, “Introduction,” 1.

16. For example, Hann and Dunn, Civil Society.

17. Ikelegbe, “Perverse Manifestation of Civil Society”; Abdel Rahman, “Politics of Uncivil Society.”

18. Chabol and Daloz, Africa Works; Will Reno, “Protectors and Predators: Why is There a Difference

Among West African Militias?” in Fragile States and Insecure People? Violence, Security and State-Building

Neil A. Englehart 5

elsewhere, I review the limited cross-national data on civil society, which suggest

that although Somalia is an extreme case, it is not an exception.

It is of course possible to find examples of strong states repressing civil society

groups, as was the case in Eastern Europe under socialism. Strong states create

necessary but not sufficient conditions for healthy civil society. We may not

always have civil society with them, but we cannot have it without them.

Spontaneous Harmony

The intellectual roots of today’s dominant conception of civil society lie in the

liberal tradition, especially in the work of Scottish enlightenment figures such as

Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith who linked their theories to property rights. The

Eastern European intellectuals who revived the concept of civil society eschewed

property-based theories as well as continental theories that depict civil society as

thoroughly penetrated by the state, either for better (Hegel) or worse (Marx).

Instead the Eastern Europeans turned to a more purely political version of the

concept, one often associated with Tocqueville but perhaps articulated most

clearly by Thomas Paine.

John Keane identifies Paine as a key transitional figure in the development of

the concept of civil society, and Cohen and Arato locate Paines’s Common Sense,

along with the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of

Man, as the consummate articulations of the polemical concept of civil society

against the state.19 Paine assumed that without the state, society was essentially

self-regulating and harmonious. There was little need for government:

Government is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which

society and civilization are not conveniently competent; and instances are not

wanting to show, that every thing which government can usefully add thereto,

has been performed by the common consent of society, without government.20

Paine was not an anarchist, however. He considered the governments in the

United States and France legitimate because they wiped away the old order and

permitted people to choose their own institutions. He considered all other

governments illegitimate and traced their origins to a past conquest of society by

“a banditti of ruffians” whose leader “contrived to lose the name of robber in

that of monarch.”21 Government, in other words, was created out of organized

in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Louise Anderson, Bjørn Møller, and Finn Stepputat (New York: Palgrave,

2007), 99–121.

19. Keane, Civil Society, 44; Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 89.

20. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1961 [1792]), 399.

21. Paine, Rights of Man, 404.


banditry, a notion that remains important in both political theory and empirical

political science today. Paine’s influence is reflected in contemporary political

theorists, on both the left and the right, who tend to see the state as separate from

and a threat to society.

Theorists on the libertarian right argue that private firms competing for

customers can supply society’s needs more efficiently and justly than can the

state, including protection from crime and contract enforcement. These could

be the domain of private protection firms, which could compete for customers

like any other business.22

This argument assumes that consumers will have meaningful choices between

suppliers of protection. But how can we assume that individuals will be free to

make such choices when protection firms will, by definition, possess the power to

coerce? Only an impartial organization with sufficient power to control private

protection firms can guarantee citizens the freedom to choose. Any such

organization would have to be much like a state, with the power to guarantee the

rights of citizens.

Despite its logical problems, this libertarian view informs a good deal of

empirical work in political science. “What is a state but organized banditry? ” asks

one prominent anarchist, echoing Paine.23 The rhetorical question is taken up in

Charles Tilly’s essay “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” While

not explicitly anarchist in his conclusions, Tilly elides the difference between

legitimate and illegitimate violence, and argues that states resemble well-

functioning protection rackets.24 Similar arguments are made by Olson, who uses

a metaphor of roving and stationary bandits, and McNeill, whose metaphor is

parasitism.25

Weaker versions of the libertarian view are common in political science

and economics. Economists who work from the game theoretic tradition

often argue that small groups need not rely on a Leviathan to solve collective

22. This view is perhaps most associated with Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York:

Basic Books, 1974). Nozick, however, argues that such an arrangement could lead to domination by a

single firm, and evolve into a minimalist state that claims authority over non-clients as well as clients. The

libertarian anarchist argument is set out most systematically in Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, rev.

ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1978).

23. Rothbard, For a New Liberty, 236.

24. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In,

ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1985), 169–87. In more recent work, Tilly distinguishes types of government activity according to more

or less destructive consequences, but he continues to resist the distinction between legitimate and

illegitimate violence. Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2003).

25. William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Mancur

Olson, Power and Prosperity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Neil A. Englehart 7

action problems.26 They thereby imply that states are not necessary to enforce

cooperation. However, small groups solve collective action problems relatively

easily, through monitoring and informal sanctions. The political issue is not

whether people can cooperate in small groups. There is no evidence of any

society lacking small groups, even where political order breaks down completely.

The question is whether relations between groups can be spontaneously civil.

Cooperation in small groups does not make a good analogy for society as a

whole because the cost of monitoring and sanctioning behavior rises sharply as

groups expand, and becomes exponentially higher between small groups of

cooperators.27 As small groups interact and attempt to satisfy their particular

interests, they come into conflict over scare resources, including security.

Ultimately this tends to produce violence, rather than the spontaneous harmony

Paine would expect.

This point is pertinent to the communitarian left as well. Some communitarians

assume that the mechanisms of cooperation within small groups can lead to

broader peace without the state. Michael Taylor, for instance, argues that

gossip, shaming, ridicule, withdrawal of reciprocity, ostracism and accusations

of witchcraft could produce social order in large-scale societies. He does

not attempt to establish the superiority of such small-scale societies, which

are “nowhere defined as an ideal, or viewed as a happy and continuously

harmonious place, free from conflict or from constraint or coercion.” 28 According

to Taylor, stateless societies must use coercion to maintain order, which leads one

to ask why they should be preferred to states.29 While some hunting and gathering

bands and horticultural settlements operate on the principles that Taylor

describes, it is not clear that members of those societies enjoy much “liberty.”

The claim is demonstrably false when extended to peasant communities. History

shows that most small-scale agricultural societies have been inegalitarian, with

the wealthy and powerful sharply limiting the autonomy of the poor and weak.30

Nor is it clear that acephalous societies provide security for individuals. Taylor

cites the Nuer as a small-scale society in which the right to use coercion is widely

26. For instance, Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1991); Elinor Ostrom, James Walker, and Ray Gardner, “Covenants With

and Without the Sword: Self Governance is Possible,” American Political Science Review 86 (June 1992):

404–17.

27. For an argument along these lines with specific reference to Somalia, see Satoshi Kanazawa and

Debra Friedman, “ The State’s Contribution to Social Order in National Societies: Somalia as an

Illustrative Case,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 27 (January 1999): 1–20.

28. Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3.

29. This is true even if we put aside the prior issue of how such communities might become

available to us. For further discussion of this point, see Christopher W. Morris, An Essay on the Modern

State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 74–80.

30. Victor V. Magagna, Communities of Grain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).


distributed. However, the classic account of that society, which Taylor himself

relies on, reports that the diffuse right to use coercion leads to more violence.

When a man feels that he has suffered an injury there is no authority to whom

he can make a complaint and from whom he can obtain redress, so he at

once challenges the man who has wronged him to a duel . . . There is no

other way of settling a dispute.31

This communitarian view influences the empirical political science literature

as well. Migdal’s influential study of weak states assumes that strong states control

society by dominating alternative sources of social power, whereas weak states

confront strong social groups that defy their authority. Migdal never considers the

possibility of strong states being matched with strong societies. His foursquare

matrix, diagramming the possible combinations of strong and weak societies and

states, leaves the strong state/strong society quadrant blank.32 Significantly,

Migdal’s colleagues in the state-in-society literature argue that the strongest, best

organized and most representative societies appear in strong or high-capacity

states.33 Putnam reverses Migdal’s formulation. “Social capital,” he writes, “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.” 34

A Kantian Interpretation

The correlation between a strong state and a strong civil society is difficult to

explain on Paine’s account, but it makes more sense when one appreciates the

potential dangers of uncivil social groups, and when one postulates a positive

role for the state in containing those dangers. This harkens back to an older

vision of civil society in which a law-governed state tames the predatory potential

of social groups. This argument goes back to ancient Greece, where civic

strife was a major political problem. It is the dominant theme of Aeschylus’

Oresteia, in which a perpetual cycle of vengeance within the Atreides family is

halted by a divine intervention that introduces public authority. The Furies,

vengeance personified, become guardians of Athens’ internal peace and pros-

perity, and employ violence to prevent further cycles of private revenge. They are

transformed into the Eumenides, “the kindly ones,” and community-destroying

31. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), 151.

32. Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 35.

33. Migdal, Kohli and Shue, State Power and Social Forces.

34. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 176.

Neil A. Englehart 9

private vengeance is replaced with public coercion, which holds community

together by deterring internecine conflicts.

Cicero offers a more philosophical account and argues that an association of

citizens under law—a societas civilis—can create a pacified society by preventing

private vengeance and enforcing civil peace. Augustine in the City of God adapts

Cicero’s argument and contends that strong secular power makes it possible to

live a godly life, free of the fear of private violence.

Kant presents a modern, secular version of the argument. He contends that a

strong rational-legal state governed by law is necessary before one can live an

ethical life. He helpfully glosses the German term burgerliche Gesellschaft with

Cicero’s Latin societas civilis, an association of people as citizens whose

interactions are regulated effectively by law. His politics, and his account of

civil society in particular, were never as systematically presented as his critical

philosophy. They appeared in various short works composed over a long period

of time.35 Although his position on civil society may have varied and even been

inconsistent at times, his approach to the concept helps resolve difficulties

inherent in current uses of the term.

For Kant the opposite of the state of nature is not mere society, but civil

society.36 His state of nature comprises kinship groups, sects, and other types of

association. The interaction between these groups is not regulated by law and the

state: they are free to prey on one another. Kant thus recognizes the dark side of

group solidarity. Indeed, his speculative history of the progress of reason depends

on such malevolent tendencies to drive social improvements. Through a process

that he calls “asocial sociability” people learn to cooperate and to protect

themselves by subordinating their own impulses and entering into a condition in

which all agree that political authorities can legitimately use violence to deter

predation.37 Such associations (societas) become civil (civilis) as they develop

increasingly sophisticated rules governing social interaction, based on reason

and experience.

Kant’s notion of “asocial sociability” separates his conception of civil society

from other understandings because he faces anti-social propensities fully. This

prevents him from slipping into the idealism found in many later accounts

of civil society, including those based on the Eastern European experience,

which assume spontaneous harmony. For Kant civility is not natural, but rather

constructed, and its construction is the product of historical experience and

35. Elizabeth Ellis, Kant’s Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2005).

36. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1991[1797]), 67.

37. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H.R. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1991), 44–46 and 229–30.


human agency. This makes Kant’s approach better suited for understanding a

wide variety of cases. His approach neither valorizes advanced democracies as

ideal nor condemns less developed countries as deviant or defective, but rather

treats all places as located on a continuum of civility.

For Kant, the most basic precondition for a civil society is a state able to

contain private violence and to protect individuals, groups, and their property. A

state creates the peace necessary for moral and intellectual progress both in

private groups and among individuals engaged in public debate. The state creates

what Norbert Elias calls “pacified social spaces . . . which are normally free from

violence.” 38 Pacification is central to the creation of civility, which Shils sees as

the defining quality of civil society.39 Such conditions make personal autonomy

possible. Autonomy, in turn, is essential to moral progress, which for Kant is

driven by the interaction of individuals in a community in which free speech is

not hampered by the fear of coercion.40 Public dialogue mutes selfish interests,

while the public use of reason thereby makes it possible for us to collectively

discover the moral law. This is the highest end of politics. Yet politics merely

enables this moral purpose; it is not realized or executed through politics. As

opposed to the physical control exercised by the state, the moral law can only be

realized privately through and among individuals.

Paradoxically, making civil society a precondition for moral progress strips

away the moral content that made civil society meaningful for Paine and the

Scottish enlightenment liberals. Moral progress for Kant resides in individuals.

Civil society enables individual progress by facilitating free speech, public

debate, and individual autonomy, which are essential for the public use of

reason. Civil society per se has no collective moral purpose.41

Hegel’s understanding of civil society stems from his dissatisfaction with Kant’s

separation of public life from private morality. Hegel seeks to reinfuse public life

with moral purpose. He therefore elaborates a vision of civil society closer to

today’s version. Civil society is a collection of private organizations separate from

the state in which citizens come together to advance their shared interests and

moral convictions. Hegel, however, sees civil society as a particularistic realm,

and argues that particularism can be overcome only by the unifying force of the

state. Habermas, whose vision of the public sphere has a strong resonance with

Kant’s conception of civil society, claims that through this move Hegel “took the

38. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 2: Power and Civility, trans. Edmund Jephcott

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 235.

39. Shils, “Virtues of Civil Society.”

40. Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ellis,

Kant’s Politics.

41. Seligman, Idea of Civil Society, 44.

Neil A. Englehart 11

teeth out of the idea of the public sphere of civil society,” and valorized the state

as the ultimate end of social life.42

Kant offers a more moderate view. He argues that the state creates necessary

conditions for justice and moral progress, but it is not the ultimate end of civic

life. Hegelians and others may find this dissatisfying, but the Kantian vision

actually conforms more closely with our intuitions about the proper role of the

state in society. A good civil society in current parlance is not a movement or a

crusade, metaphors that suggest motion in a particular direction and thereby

imply teleology. Instead, most scholars today praise a “civil society” for being

“vibrant,” which suggests activity without any specific direction. Civil society is

justified not by teleology, but by its beneficial side effects.

The Kantian perspective on civil society is incomplete. In practice states

sometimes repress citizens and cripple civil society. Kant’s political prescriptions

are notorious for their inability to generate transparency and accountability on

the part of governments. He twice sketches hypothetical histories of the human

species in which moral progress is tied to the development and elaboration of

political institutions.43 Yet he has no advice on how to encourage such progress,

and his insistence on obedience to lawfully constituted rulers appears to

frustrate efforts to enforce change on reluctant authorities. Herein lies the value

of the vast corpus of work inspired by Paine and the Scottish enlightenment. Their

understanding of civil society as a bulwark against state repression is an

important corrective when applied to competent, well-functioning states that

exercise tremendous power over citizens.44

However, most people do not live in such states. Kant’s conception proves

useful when thinking about places where private despotism is at least as much a

threat to freedom as the state. As Walzer puts it, the state “fixes the boundary

conditions and basic rules of all associational activity,” and “compels association

members to think about a common good” beyond their own narrow interests.

This role is essential, “for civil society, left to itself, generates radically unequal

power relationships, which only state power can challenge.” 45 Walzer has in mind

unequal concentrations of economic power, but in failing states the point is even

starker because of unequal concentrations of private coercive power, which

only state power can disarm. In many places with extensive associational activity

but without an effective state, people turn to militias and gangs for protection.

42. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press,

1991), 122.

43. The “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent” in 1784 and “Conjecture on the

Beginning of Human History” in 1786, both collected in Kant, Political Writings.

44. Note that Kant’s view does not require the state to be a neutral arbiter. It is sufficient for it to limit

the ways in which groups pursue their interests and treat each other, and to prevent them from using

violence.

45. Walzer, “Idea of Civil Society,” 302.


Even civic and philanthropic organizations can become hostage to competing

factions.

Kant does not depend on empirical examples to reach these conclusions.

But experience may provide useful illustrations. Furthermore, as Gerring points

out, case studies are heuristically useful for identifying causal mechanisms and

generating theoretical insights.46 So let us look closely at one profoundly uncivil

society, Somalia, where the state has collapsed utterly. In the contemporary world

it is as close as we can get to a state of nature in the eighteenth-century sense.47

Somalia: Society without State

Some scholars describe stateless societies as Hobbesian. Hobbes, however,

imagined the state of nature as an atomistic war of all against all. While

life in stateless societies may be nasty, brutish, and short, it is not solitary.

People find protection in small groups; in this respect Paine and the Scottish

enlightenment liberals correctly contend that society is self-organizing. But a

group’s capacity to protect itself also implies a capacity to prey on other, weaker

groups. Indeed, such predation may be demanded in chaotic environments

where groups must increase their capacity for self-protection or risk victimization

by others.

In Somalia the state was always weak, and it collapsed completely in 1991.

Individuals reacted by seeking alternative protection. Kin-based armed factions

emerged based on existing forms of social capital.48 Kinship had always been an

important organizing principle for Somali society, in part because it provided

personal security especially prior to the colonial period. As I.M. Lewis notes in his

classic study of Somali society, “the pastoralist’s general security rests upon the

fighting strength” of his kin group.49

Inter-clan competition for resources led to the rise of clan-based militias and

a violent dynamic in which gains for one group constituted threats to others.50

The ongoing conflict empowered the warlords who commanded the militias, and

disempowered traditional clan elders as well as the kind of unarmed social

groups (such as business and civic groups) associated with “civil society” in

current parlance.

46. John Gerring, Case Study Research (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

47. The emphasis here is on the period 1991–2005, from the fall of the Siad Barre regime to the

Ethiopian invasion.

48. Anna Simons, Networks of Dissolution: Somalia Undone (Boulder: Westview, 1995); Colletta and

Cullen, Violent Conflict.

49. I.M. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 255.

50. Posen, “Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict.”


Prior to the colonial period, male clan elders acted as mediators within their

lineage segments and negotiated for their clans during disputes with other clans.

In pre-colonial Somali society, this was the extent of governance.51 Under British

and Italian colonial rule, and after independence in 1961, the state attempted to

assume these functions and co-opted or weakened the elders. The fall of the state

in 1991 did not liberate Somalia’s elders, however. In southern and central

Somalia clan militias arose at the expense of traditional civil society. Elders of the

communities that were attacked had little leverage over the young gun-wielding

invaders. Elders of clans that made significant economic and territorial gains

during the civil war had no interest in a peace that would require them to

surrender their gains.52

In northern Somalia, clan elders were central to the disarmament of the

militias and mediated the accords that led to the creation of the secessionist

Republic of Somaliland, which is now the most stable part of Somalia.53

Elsewhere, the clan-based militias were dominant, and the elders were unable

to resume their former roles as mediators.54 In the central region of Hiraan,

for instance, when youths in a local militia went on a rampage,

the most revered and respected elders of the subclan from which the boys

came were dispatched . . . In the ensuing debate between the elders and the

boys, one of the thirteen-year-olds went up to one of the old men, put a gun to

his head, and shot him to death . . . The elders were clearly terrified that this

scene would become more and more common as their society deteriorated

51. Lewis, Pastoral Democracy.

52. Ken Menkhaus, “Traditional Conflict Management in Contemporary Somalia,” in Traditional

Cures for Modern Conflicts, ed. I. William Zartman (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2000), 183–200.

53. Somaliland Centre for Peace and Development, A Self-Portrait of Somaliland (Hargeisa:

Somaliland Centre for Peace and Development, 1999); Ken Menkhaus, “Local Security Structures in

Somali East Africa,” in Fragile States and Insecure People? 67–97.

54. In some urban areas elders and business groups have successfully created administrations

that supply some public goods. These arrangements have typically been fragile and vulnerable to

clan-based conflicts. Ken Menkhaus, “Governance Without Government in Somalia: Spoilers,

Statebuilding and the Politics of Coping,” International Security 31(Winter 2006/7): 74–106. For a

while, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in Mogadishu offered an alternative to clan-based militias. The

courts employed a pan-Islamic rhetoric that transcended clan, although eleven of the twelve courts

were associated with the Hawiye clan and subclans. Cases involving members of a particular subclan

would be transferred to the appropriate court. Far from being an example of spontaneous social

organization against warlord violence, the ICU actually resembles the model of clan-based militias.

It briefly appeared that the ICU might begin to reconstruct a Somali state. U.S. counter-terrorism

operations, however, brought this experiment to an early close. The United States began backing

rivals to the ICU, who accused the courts of cooperating with Al Qaeda. U.S. policy backfired by

generating support for the ICU among non-Hawiyes. International Crisis Group, Counter-Terrorism

in Somalia (Nairobi/Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2005). After the pro-U.S. warlords were

driven out of Mogadishu, the ICU dramatically expanded its territory, provoking an Ethiopian

invasion.


further into chaos. They were afraid to exercise their traditional authority for

fear of their lives.55

Modern civil society fared little better. NGOs were forced to seek protection

from clan militias, and as a consequence most became agents of clans.56 Many

NGOs have become ancillary organizations supporting the incivility of armed

groups. For instance, some women’s groups have acted as human shields for clan

forces.57 NGOs have trouble transcending clan because, according to one

researcher, “Somalis who work for NGOs are regarded by other Somalis first and

foremost as representatives of their clans.” 58 This is clearly not what most people

mean by the term civil society, and Somali NGOs are careful not to advertise

their clan connections to foreign funders. Nor do international NGOs escape

entanglement: “most relief agencies become identified with the Somali clan in

whose territory their headquarters are located, with the result that these agencies

are expected to hire ‘their’ clan members as local staff.” 59 The UN intervention in

the early 1990s strengthened the hands of clans that could supply services to

international organizations. The Hawiye clan, whose militias invaded southern

Somalia and Mogadishu, particularly benefited from the intervention. They

were able to drive out businesses and property owners from other clans and

then monopolize the provision of services, such as housing and security, to

international agencies. It appears that most international organizations were

ignorant of this dynamic, which significantly strengthened the very militias that

were disrupting southern Somalia.

Not all NGOs are handmaidens of the militias. Many groups do excellent and

much-needed work in Somalia by supplying medical care, schools, and limited

public services in the absence of the state. In some areas either clan elders or

NGOs mediate and contain conflict. Indeed, in some respects it is remarkable

that they have been able to accomplish so much. However, their work is

hampered by the absence of a state that can control violence and provide

security. Menkhaus et al. observe that “Somalia has arguably been the most

dangerous place in the world to be a civic leader of any sort.” 60 This makes

55. Andrew Natsios, “Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia: The Economics of Chaos,” in Learning

from Somalia, ed. Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 40.

56. I.M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali, 4th ed. (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 27. See also Ken

Menkhaus with Hassan Sheikh, Shane Quinn, and Ibrahim Farah, “Somalia: Civil Society in a Collapsed

State,” in Civil Society and Peacebuilding: A Critical Assessment, ed. Thania Paffenholz (Boulder, CO:

Lynne Reinner, 2010), 321–50.

57. World Bank, 1999 Human Development Report—Somalia (Nairobi: World Bank, 2000), section

1.2.5.

58. Lee Cassanelli, Victims and Vulnerable Groups in Southern Somalia (Ottawa: Research Directorate,

Documentation, Information and Research Branch, Immigrant and Refugee Board of Canada, 1995), 9.

59. Cassanelli, Victims and Vulnerable Groups, 9.

60. Menkhaus et al., “Somalia,” 321.


groups vulnerable and forces them to seek protection or pay for it them-

selves. Without protection from militias, startup costs for new organizations are

extremely high.

Businesses have fared no better from the collapse of the state and are forced

to fight off predatory militias. Many firms have raised their own forces.

Contrary to the Libertarian view, markets without states are not free. Strong clans

often extort protection money and enforce local monopolies for favored

businessmen. The lack of state-supplied public goods also handicaps the

business community. The Somali Business Council, an NGO formed by a group

of Somali businesses (but, significantly, based in Dubai) complains that “we

now pay for our security, electricity, water and all the other things a government

is supposed to do . . . We would rather pay taxes and leave all that to the

government.” 61

Foreign businesses have also found themselves entangled in clan violence,

most notoriously in the “banana wars” of the early 1990s. The U.S.-based Dole

and the Italian firm De Nadai competed for rights to export bananas from

parts of southern Somalia invaded by Hawiye militias. Eventually, both

companies formed their own militias, and employees of both were killed in the

ensuing violence, which ended only after the European Union banned Somali

banana imports.62

Some writers steeped in anti-statist conceptions of civil society have celebrated

Somalia as a place free of state despotism.63 The former Somali government

was indeed weak and predatory. Still, the emergent society hardly merits the

description “civil.” Traditional elders, NGOs, and businesses are handicapped

unless they have access to arms or protection. The possibilities for public debate

and public-spirited activity have dramatically contracted. Post-state Somalia

conforms far more closely to Kant’s predatory state of nature than to Paine’s

spontaneous harmony.

It is noteworthy that civil society is flourishing in the one part of Somalia with

the strongest government. Having declared its independence, the northern region

of Somaliland has developed more effective governance than any other part of

the country. This is partly due to the dominance of the Isaaq clan. Traditional clan

61. IRIN, “Business Community Demands Role in Peace Process,” ohttp://www.irinnews.org/4April 23, 2003. Scholars disagree as to whether businesses should be viewed as parts of civil society.

Menkhaus et al. note that in Somalia, fund-raising imperatives make it difficult to distinguish civil-society

groups from businesses. “Somalia,” 326.

62. Norfolk Education and Action for Development Centre, “Banana Wars in Somalia,” Review of

African Political Economy 22( June 1995): 274–75; Chris Webersik, “Fighting for the Plenty: The Banana

Trade in Southern Somalia,” Oxford Development Studies 33 (January 2005): 81–97.

63. For instance Maria H. Brons, Society, Security, Sovereignty and the State: Somalia From

Statelessness to Statelessness? (Utrecht: International Books, 2001); Peter Maass, “Ayn Rand Comes to

Somalia,” The Atlantic 287 (May 2001): 30–31.


leaders in cooperation with the Somali National Movement (the clan militia from

the civil war) formed a government and began disarming society.64 A directory of

NGOs and community-based organizations in Somalia maintained by the Belgian

NGO Novib shows that Somaliland now the major center of associational activity

in Somalia. It boasts nearly half the NGOs in Novib’s directory, while containing

only about a third of Somalia’s population.65 The popularity of Somaliland is

largely due to the region’s security.66 The former capital, Mogadishu, once domi-

nated NGO activity in the country because of the concentration of international

NGOs and the many resources they brought. The civil war and subsequent UN

intervention led to an explosion of fake NGOs established to extract funds from

international organizations looking for local counterparts.67 Due to this historical

legacy, Mogadishu continues to have the country’s second largest number of

civil-society organizations (about half as many as Somaliland). For security

reasons, many international organizations that maintain contacts in Mogadishu

actually base their operations in Somaliland, if not outside the country altogether

in Kenya or Djibouti.

The extent and persistence of state collapse in Somalia is extraordinary. But to

what degree does the extremity of Somalia’s failure make it sui generis? Does it

resemble other places with weak or failed states?

A Global View

According to the scholarly literatures on civil society and state failure, where

states are unable to restrain violence, predatory groups emerge.68 The persis-

tence of central government institutions alters this dynamic somewhat. When

the central government persists, political leaders, in order to deliver benefits

(including security) to followers and secure votes, will often seek to co-opt or ally

themselves with predatory groups.69 This often reinforces sectarian, ethnic, or

64. Somaliland Centre for Peace and Development, Self-Portrait.

65. This can be regarded only as a very rough count of Somali civil society groups. However, under

current circumstances it is the best available. ohttp://www.somali-civilsociety.org/directories/csall.php4,

accessed May 30, 2007.

66. Novib, Mapping Somali Civil Society (Nairobi: Novib, 2003).

67. Lewis, Modern History, 299; Menkhaus et al., “Somalia,” 330. This is not to say all local NGOs were

fake. After all, some remained active after foreign funding dried up. However, many have sought

protection and have become, in effect, instruments of militias.

68. For example, Colletta and Cullen, Violent Conflict; Ikelegbe, “Civil Society, Oil and Conflict in the

Niger Delta Region of Nigeria,” African Studies 39 (September 2001): 437–69; Reno, “Protectors and

Predators.”

69. For example, Max Ahmadu Sesay, “Politics and Society in Post-War Liberia,” Journal of Modern

African Studies 34 (September 1996): 395–420; Chabol and Daloz, Africa Works; Abdel Rahman, “Politics

of Uncivil Society”; Reno, “Protectors and Predators”; Phebe Marr, Iraq’s New Political Map (Washington,

DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007).


regional divisions, contributing to the further decline of the public sphere—if

indeed it can be said that a public sphere ever existed.70

Such scholarship suggests that the Somali case is not qualitatively different

from other weak and failing states and that, therefore, the Kantian approach

can be applied in such settings. Somalia is an extreme case, but the patterns

found there are also present where states persist. Even in advanced industrial

democracies interest groups and state bureaucracies seek mutually beneficial

alliances against their respective rivals. Groups represent their aggressive actions

as being in the public interest, and they may well believe their own claims. The

competition between such groups does not undermine the Kantian approach to

civil society, because it is framed as a process of development dependent on

historical context. All societies fail to some degree to meet the ideal type of a

spontaneously harmonious idea of civil society.71

The absence of systematic cross-national data on civil society hampers our

ability to test for the Kantian vision statistically. There have been no attempts to

cross-nationally assess all relevant aspects of civil society, including the relative

civility or public-spiritedness of individuals and groups. Some quantitative data

on associational activity are available but limited. Much of the extant data deal

with international NGOs rather than domestic civil-society groups, cover few

countries and are collected infrequently. The best data come from the Civicus

Civil Society Index, but unfortunately only the first wave data (2003–2006) are

currently available and cover only forty-six countries.72 Table 1 reports the

correlations between the Civil Society Index’s four dimensions (structure,

environment, values, and impact) and three of Kaufman et al.’s governance

indicators (government effectiveness, rule of law, and voice and accountability).73

70. Jean-Francoise Bayart, “Civil Society in Africa,” in Political Domination in Africa, ed. Patrick Chabal

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Fatton, “Civility, Incivility, and Democratization”; Ikelegbe

“Civil Society, Oil and Conflict”; Abdel Rahmen, “Politics of Uncivil Society”; Marr, Iraq’s New Political Map.

71. Hann, “Introduction.”

72. The data cover forty-nine territories, including multiple provinces in some countries. Also, in some

cases the data are available only for parts of a country rather than nationwide. In such cases, I have

averaged the data from the available provinces to represent the entire country, in order to make compa-

risons with countries for which data are available only at the national level. It should also be noted that the

Civicus data are not drawn from a random sample of countries. The sample countries are significantly more

democratic and less wealthy countries than the global mean for the baseline year of 2003.

73. Structure refers to the size and breadth of civil society, environment to the conduciveness of the

political and social environment to civil society, values to the degree to which civil society promotes a

participatory and democratic ethos, and impact to civil society’s ability to influence policy and promote

social change. See Volkart Finn Heinrich, Assessing and Strengthening Civil Society Worldwide, Civicus

Civil Society Index Paper 2, 2004. The Kaufman et al. government-effectiveness indicator measures “the

competence of the bureaucracy and the quality of public service delivery”; rule of law measures the

likelihood of not experiencing violent crime and the quality of policing and contract enforcement; and

voice and accountability measure civil and political rights to participate in politics. Daniel Kaufmann,

Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, Governance Matters III: Governance Indicators for 1996–2004

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005).


The correlations support the hypothesis that good governance is important for

strong civil society. All the governance indicators correlate positively with all the

dimensions of civil society, and all the correlations are significant except between

rule of law and structure, which is significant only at the 0.1 level (p¼ 0.093).

Particularly notable are the strong correlations between the environment in

which NGOs operate and the government-effectiveness indicator, which suggest

that strong states provide the healthiest environment for social organizations. In

addition, note the strong positive relationship between NGO values (including

public-spiritedness) and government effectiveness, which suggests that strong

states foster the kinds of attitudes associated with civil society. These results are

precisely what a scholar from a Kantian perspective would expect. Scholars who

adopt other versions of civil society, including Paine’s, would expect government

effectiveness to make little difference or even to inhibit civil society. The limitations

of the data make it wise to consider these conclusions tentative. Because statistical

results are by nature probabilistic, these correlations do not imply that strong states

will always foster civil society. Nonetheless, the correlations do suggest that on

balance strong states are more likely than weak states to foster civil societies. The

numbers clearly contradict the expectation one might derive from Paine’s account

of civil society and from the Eastern European experience.

Conclusion: The Synergy of Social and State Power in CivilSociety

Both the Somali case and available statistical evidence suggest that the

Kantian conception of civil society is relevant where states are weak and unable

to govern. The absence of state containment of violence permits the growth of

predatory groups. These groups may protect their own but to do so they must

Table 1Correlations Between Civil Society Index and Selected Governance Indicators

Structure Environment Values Impact

Government effectiveness 0.308* 0.851** 0.606** 0.438**

N 44 44 44 44

Rule of law 0.206 0.804** 0.575** 0.403**

N 43 43 43 43

Voice and accountability 0.255* 0.803** 0.612** 0.473**

N 44 44 44 44

**Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level.

*Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level.

Sources: Civicus Phase 1 data (2003–2006); Kaufman et al. Governance Matters III, data for 2002.


prey on others to obtain resources. Without strong state institutions to contain

escalating competition between groups, violence is endemic. The competition

and insecurity that spawn predatory social groups simultaneously inhibit the

cooperation, trust, and peaceful organization we normally think of as characteristic

of civil society.

The costs and risks of organizing and maintaining civil groups are exponentially

higher when the state cannot provide protection against uncivil predatory groups,

leaving civic groups, religious organizations, women’s associations, and such

defenseless before armed militias. As a result, fewer civil groups form, and those

that do form tend to serve organizations that provide protection. Predation breaks

down public trust and cooperation and fosters a zero-sum view of public life.

Internal pacification, in contrast, generates a synergy of social and state power.

Rather than the zero-sum game implied by an antagonistic view of state-society

relations, state control of violence promotes trust and a willingness to contribute

to the public good, as well as a dense network of civil associations. Michael

Mann’s distinction between despotic and infrastructural power can help one

understand this synergy. Despotic power refers to arbitrary action over other

parts of society—exactly what Migdal means by social control. Infrastructural

power refers to the state’s capacity to penetrate society and thereby coordinate

and regulate social life. This requires cooperation from social groups. Thus,

“infrastructural power is a two-way street: it also enables civil society parties to

control the state.”74 Just as civil society emerges only where states control private

coercive power and promote civility, so states become stronger when they foster

civil societies.

The proper task of state building is therefore not to create a set of institutions

that can subordinate society. Rather, it requires the creation of institutions that

protect citizens from petty despots and predation, and that enable people to form

groups and engage in peaceful discourse without worries about their safety.

The surprising fragility of the Eastern European socialist regimes illustrates this

point. Those regimes, following Hegel and Marx’s valorization of state power in

pursuit of the revolutionary goal of defeating bourgeois civil society, had tried to

severely restrict civil society organizations. Their failure shows the fallacy of the

position. First, they could never quite eliminate alternative social organiza-

tions. In the Kantian view, the Eastern European states unintentionally fostered

conditions for civility by regulating the use of violence, but were unable to

contain the potential for social organization that civility created. Instead they

alienated themselves from the societies they created, inadvertently making their

74. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–

1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 59; see also Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and

Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).


regimes fragile, not strong. As Walzer puts it, “the production and reproduction of

loyalty, civility, political competence, and trust in authority are never the work of

the state alone, and the effort to go it alone . . . is doomed to failure.”75 Second,

the end of communist totalitarianism entailed not the collapse of the state, but

rather its opening to new segments of society. The state persisted even after the

regime collapsed, partly because social groups found it useful: “the collapse of

totalitarianism is empowering for the members of civil society precisely because

it renders the state accessible.”75 Vaclav Havel’s journey from dissident to

President of the Czech Republic exemplifies this process. The communist parties

of Eastern Europe had built relatively strong and competent states that could

effectively—if brutally—keep the peace and prevent social groups from arming

themselves for uncivil conflict. Thus, when the revolution came, the crowds that

turned out were peaceful and harmonious—not because that is an intrinsic

feature of autonomous social groups, but because the state had kept society civil.

By contrast, many of the Third World regimes that were overthrown at the

same time lacked strong, effective states. In some cases rulers even undermined

their own state apparatus to prevent it from becoming a center of opposition.76

When those regimes fell, the emergent society was distinctly uncivil because

social violence had not been constrained by the state.

Theorists of civil society have paid a great deal more attention to the happy

events in Eastern Europe than the troubles of the Third World. The peaceful

overthrow of socialism apparently confirmed Paine’s image of civil society. Yet in

retrospect it is clear that we need to reopen the question “what is civil society?”

and take a broader view that encompasses the rest of the world. To begin that

task, the Kantian conception of civil society as a consequence of a competent,

law-governed state must be wedded to the currently fashionable conception of

civil society as a check on the despotism of the state. Treating civil society as an

ideal type, rather than an empirical description that applies to some societies and

serves as a goal for others, will improve the concept’s usefulness for understanding

Third World societies and, arguably, advanced industrial democracies as well.

Neil A. Englehart is Associate Professor of Political Science at Bowling Green

State University. He works on state failure, state formation, non-state armed groups

and human rights. His recent work has appeared in The Journal of Peace

Research, European Journal of International Relations, Modern Asian Studies and

Asian Survey, and he is currently working on a book on state failure and human

rights. He can be reached at [email protected].

75. Walzer, “Idea of Civil Society,” 301.

76. Neil A. Englehart, “Governments Against States: The Logic of Self-Destructive Despotism.”

International Political Science Review 28 (March 2007): 153–83.


What Makes Civil Society Civil? The State and Social Groups

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