The Practices of Civil Society

Abstract

I have so far maintained that there is an important distinction to be maintained between social practice on the one hand, and ideological effect on the other. By categorically distinguishing between the two we can avoid an over-integrationist conception of capitalist social formations. However, there is clearly an opposite error we could make and that is to fall into cultural pluralism. We might find ourselves arguing that there are simply many different social practices, each with its own culture, that they bear no particular relationship to each other, that some happen to have ideological effects, and that there is no systematic relationship between them. In this chapter I intend to set out an account of civil society which avoids these deficiencies but which, at the same time, renders coherent the manifest diversity and variability of capitalist social formations.