Abstract
After having justified the selection of theories, the fourth chapter uses them to assess the term civil society. It is argued that the term civil society is equally elusive as the term NGO and that it has acquired different meanings over time. The main challenge consists in ascribing civil society a constitutive role that is a role as an essential intermediating force in a system of checks and balances in modern democracies. Liberalism, it is argued, does not master this challenge but only assigns civil society a role subordinate to the market (economic liberalism) or a background function (political liberalism). Deliberative democracy in contrast sees civil society as a distinctive sphere of action which is equivalent to the state and the market and whose normative core consists in operating according to the ideal of open-ended communication without the pressures of decision-making. With this conception of civil society, deliberative democracy prepares the ground for assigning NGOs an important role as political actors who mediate between the particular and the general, and thus also between economic interests of corporations and the public good.
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- 1.
Hendriks states that the prolific use of the term civil society has resulted in a terminological overload which makes it almost impossible to agree upon a definition (Hendriks, 2006: 486).
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This statement, however, is open to doubt. As will be argued in the next sections, a truly emancipatory conception of civil society only succeeds if civil society is assigned a constitutive, positive function as a sphere equivalent to the spheres of the state and the market.
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Neo-Marxist thinkers admit the connections between the three sectors but frame them as dependency-relations rather than as mutually enabling relations. Chandhoke for example acknowledges that civil society is not autonomous of either international politics or markets but concludes from this that we must not let our normative expectations of civil society blind us to the nature of real civil societies which for her are characterized by their lack of transparency and accountability and by Chandhoke (2002: 35, and 47ff.).
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Among civil societarians Thompson distinguishes between two strands which differ with respect to the liberties that they regard as most important: “One group favours social institutions because they believe they provide more opportunities for individuals to develop their various talents and interests, and therefore promote the free pursuit of a diverse range of activities. A robust civil society makes it more likely that all citizens (…) will find greater support in pursuing their life plans whatever they may be. For the other group, the liberty that matters most in civil society is economic freedom, and the social institution that matters most is the market” (Thompson, 1999: 117). This distinction precisely articulates the difference between communitarians who want to strengthen social institutions in order to strengthen the community and radical liberal theorists who are driven by their mission to maximize economic freedom and to spread the economic functioning logic across the borders of the market system. One could even say that the market-oriented strand of civil societarianism works towards a renewed reunion of market and civil society – but in contrast to the Hegelian and Marxist concepts, in this case the market would comprise civil society and not vice versa. Thompson reproaches both strands for neglecting governmental institutions. In my view, this criticism is only justified with respect to the liberal strand of civil societarianism.
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For an argument against perceiving civil society as a substitute for government, see Edwards (2000: 15).
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The deliberative model thus shares the republican assumption that there is a force other than the state on the one hand and the market on the other hand, namely civil society. But compared to the republican model the deliberative model does not make particularly strong demands on civic virtues. It concentrates instead on the process of opinion-formation which occurs in civil society (Benhabib, 2002: 106; Habermas, 1996b: 27).
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Noonan points out that while modernization promoted the ideas of equality and individuality and “established a space within which a free life could be led, the evolving capitalist economy created a new form of material dependence on economic dynamics that were judged rational not relative to whether they satisfied fundamental needs for all citizens, but according to how rapidly they allowed capital to grow” (Noonan, 2005: 102). On the force of economic imperatives, see also Dryzek (1999: 49) and Ulrich (2008: 191ff.).
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Korten makes a similar distinction with respect to the dominant modes of resource acquisition in the three spheres of action: he states that NGOs primarily acquire resources through the “integrative power” of the citizen, whereas governments primarily rely on “threat power” and business organizations primarily rely on “economic power” (Korten, 1990: 97, quoted from Murphy and Bendell, 1999: 6).
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Another way to define civil society positively and constitutively would be to emphasise its role as “an arena in which people come together to advance the interests they hold in common, not for profit or political power, but because they care enough about something to take collective action” (Edwards, 2000: 7).
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Baur, D. (2012). Civil Society: Coming to Grips with an Elusive Term. In: NGOs as Legitimate Partners of Corporations. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2254-5_4
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