What is civil society, and why should we care?

Ernest Gellner on the conditions of liberty.

There are many possible stories about why American political conservatism is such an intellectual trainwreck. Here’s one. Conservatives used at least nominally to argue that it was important to protect civil society from the depredations of government, and many genuinely believed it. Some still do, but now, the dominant figures in political conservatism want to use government to weaponize and suborn civil society.

Like all simplified fables, this gets a fair amount wrong, both in its understanding of what happened and in what it leaves out. Still, it isn’t a bad way to start understanding some of what is taking place. Yet it begs an important question. What is civil society?

When I wrote about how civil society could beat Trumpism a couple of weeks ago, I felt a mild sensation of intellectual guilt - I knew I was invoking a complicated set of ideas without properly explaining them. So here’s my attempt to make up for that, and to explain why we ought want to protect civil society too, leaning on the account in Ernest Gellner’s book, Conditions of Liberty.

I suspect that few people younger than 50 have read this book - it’s been out of print for thirty years or so. Gellner wrote it back in the 1990s, when civil society seemed to promise a path forward for the newly freed democracies of Eastern Europe. Now people are rediscovering the idea, not because of future hopes, but because they want to explain what is going wrong as the state escapes its restraints and threatens to crush the people’s liberties.

Gellner’s understanding of civil society is both relevant and a possible bridge between certain parts of the left and right. While he identified loosely with the left, Gellner was profoundly influenced by the kinds of classical liberalism articulated by Adam Ferguson and David Hume. They, in turn, wrote in the aftermath of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution of the previous century, when Scottish and English society had been torn apart by vicious religious controversies.

Gellner’s account of civil society, like those of his intellectual forebears, begins from the fact of profound disagreement and asks how best to manage it. From Gellner’s perspective, civil society is a marvelous accident, an unanticipated by-product of the seventeenth century stalemate between Calvinist enthusiasts (here and below, the term ‘enthusiast’ refers to Protestants who believe that God lives inside them, and are accordingly uncomfortable with certain kinds of hierarchy) and the English state. Yet this accident has shaped the world that we live in, creating a realm of autonomy in which people are free to live their lives in many different ways, within broad structures that support a reasonable degree of peace and shared order.

The dominant strain in American political conservatism has abandoned any commitments that it once had to this vision of pluralism. Some conservatives favor a shared notion of the common good, which ought be imposed as necessary on society. Others are more straightforwardly interested in domination and plunder. Neither faction has any interest in preserving the autonomy of civil society. Instead of a pluralistic realm to be protected or left alone, they see a “cathedral” of left ideology and argue that universities, non-profits, even multinational corporations are redoubts of the enemy that must be taken by storm. This is dingbat Gramscianism, strained through the turd-encrusted sieve of Curtis Yarvin Thought.

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Debates about civil society are confusing, because they often use the term to refer to very different things. Crudely speaking, the most important distinction is between a Marxist approach civil society, which mostly comes from Gramsci, and a liberal tradition, which can be identified with Ferguson, Hume and others. There is relatively little overlap between them (even if the great liberal thinker Norberto Bobbio, was in many respects sympathetic to Gramsci).

I’ll summarize the first approach briefly; it’s not what I want to focus on here, but, as already mentioned, it’s indirectly relevant to the ideological changes in conservatism. Marx treated ‘civil society’ as synonymous with the deep ‘base’ of economic relations that drove history. Gramsci argued instead that civil society was the superstructural realm of private organizations, educational and cultural institutions and the like. But, unlike other Marxists who dismissed superstructure, he saw it as enormously politically important. This realm of apparently independent and semi-independent institutions was a system of hegemony, providing the ideological underpinning of the prevailing order, while state coercion provided more directly brutal means of keeping existing power hierarchies entrenched.

From this perspective, both civil society and state may reinforce an existing economic and social order (albeit in a more subtle and complex relationship than in cruder Marxist formulations, such as Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus and Repressive State Apparatus framework). However, civil society also provides openings for change. In Gramsci’s understanding, Marxists could move towards power by first gaining hegemony, forming what Bobbio summarizes as “a collective will, capable of creating a new state apparatus and of transforming society, [as well as] elaborating and propagating a new conception of the world.” Reshaping civil society, though it would almost certainly require many years of trench warfare, was a crucial step towards remaking politics along better lines. From this perspective, then, civil society was a battlefield, which the dominant forces sought to hold in their struggle to retain ideological hegemony, while challengers looked to seize it away.

The second, classical liberal account of civil society provides a very different understanding. It depicts civil society less as battlements or battlefield than as a means of sublimating the ideological energies and divisions that might otherwise lead to civil war. This helps explain why classical liberals became interested in the concept. Again, Hume and Ferguson were born in living memory of a sequence of war and revolution that had torn their country apart, as Presbyterians, Dissenters and churchmen fought bitterly over who was to hold power, and under what conditions. Doctrinal disagreements over whether altars should be located in the center of the church helped precipitate brutal battles, in which thousands died. Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians, who warred with each other for a century over which end of the egg ought be broken before eating, were a scathing parody of these religious vexations. But there were practical questions at stake in these fights too; most obviously, how much power should the Crown possess?

Ferguson and Hume wanted, then, to understand the conditions under which people who disagree ferociously can live in peace. How did the sectarian conditions that spurred civil war lead to a peace that became a kind of foundation-stone for liberty? That is the question that Gellner then takes up, asking as well how civil society can constrain the state.

As Jonathan Healey warns in his excellent history of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, The Blazing World, we shouldn’t make over-easy extrapolations from a very different period of history. Still, Gellner suggests that the current conditions of liberty are descended from those conditions that pre-occupied the classical liberals.

His biggest question is why these conditions should have come into being at all. For most of human history, we have either dwelled beneath despots who exercise conventional kinds of tyranny, or subsisted within the “tyranny of cousins”; societies in which one’s identity is cloyingly defined by clan based relations. Both profoundly constrain the freedoms that Western small-l liberals have come to take for granted. Now, instead, we live in a world where we can define our lives, within certain broad contours, as we like. How on earth did this come about?

Gellner’s explanation builds on Hume’s dictum that “superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it.” Hume and Gellner want to know why the wild-eyed extremist Protestants who fought a civil war to establish the rule of the Saints on earth eventually became advocates of religious toleration and freedom.

Hume emphasizes the internal logic of Protestantism; Gellner partly agrees but suggests that the politics count too. It is likely important that the enthusiasts were defeated, but not crushed. They had incentive to help build a civil peace within which they could pursue their own religious goals. In Gellner’s description:

the coming of Civil Society, a society liberal in the modern sense rather than the ancient non-liberal cousinly and ritualized plural and balanced society, presupposed a political stalemate between practitioners of superstition and the zealots of enthusiasm, such as in fact did occur in seventeenth-century England, leading to a compromise.

This was, as Adam Ferguson recognized soon after it began to shape itself, in many ways an unnatural development. It hadn’t ever happened before. But once this limited form of pluralism established itself it became, to some extent and for some period of time, self-perpetuating and self expanding. An initially limited form of civil society, which tolerated (some) different forms of religious practice, self-ramified to broaden religious freedoms and then foster civic freedoms too. This, in turn, helped support continual and indeed exponential economic growth. States which had a strong civil society seemed to do better economically than those states that “throttled” liberty, providing them with advantages in inter-state competition.

The result was not just that religious and doctrinal disagreements became matters of private conscience and peaceful social activity. It was the creation of a new kind of society in which coercive force was centralized in the state, but was counterbalanced by economic and social pluralism. State power only went so far. People could, within reasonably broad parameters, choose who they wanted to be, and what they wanted to do.

The distinguishing feature of civil society (as opposed to more traditional forms of social organization) was its modularity:

How is Civil Society possible at all? … The question may be spelled out more fully: how is it possible to have atomization, individualism, without a political emasculation of the atomized man (as in the world of Ibn Khaldun), and to have politically countervailing associations without these being stifling (as in the world of Fustel de Coulanges)?

Miraculously, Civil Society does achieve both these aims. It is defined by such an achievement. Modularity of man is an illuminating way of referring to this condition. … Modular man is capable of combining into effective associations and institutions, without these being total, many-stranded, underwritten by ritual and made stable through being linked to a whole inside set of relationships, all of these being tied in with each other and so immobilized. He can combine into specific-purpose, ad hoc, limited association, without binding himself by some blood ritual. He can leave an association when he comes to disagree with its policy, without being open to an accusation of treason. A market society operates not only with changing prices, but also with changing alignments and opinions: there is neither a just price nor a righteous categorization of men,, everything can and should change, without in any way violating the moral order. …

It is this which makes Civil Society: the forging of links which are effective even though they are flexible, specific, instrumental.

Stripped of the gender language (Gellner was, very definitely, One Of Those Guys)*, this is a very useful explanation of the foundations of civil society and its value. Civil society is that situation in which we are free to form our own associations, independent of the power of state and clan. As he goes on to argue:

Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join (say) the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep, in fact you would hardly be allowed to do such a thing, and you can leave it without incurring the death penalty for apostasy.

From this perspective, civil society is a crucial underpinning of the kinds of social order that welds together democracy and markets. According to classical liberal influenced political economists such as the late Doug North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry Weingast, it is the most important distinguishing characteristic between the “closed orders” of ancient and modern authoritarian states, and the “open access orders” that preserve liberalism. According to more left-of-center political economists such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, a strong civil society is a crucial protection against tyranny. Both of these strains of thought lay heavy emphasis on the essential role that democracy plays in supporting to free societies. Open civil society and democratic institutions are inseparable from each other, although Gellner liked to insist that democracy emerged from civil society rather than vice versa.

Equally, Gellner argues that civil society is not a natural equilibrium. It came about through chance conditions - very possibly the conditions that Hume and Ferguson identified, perhaps others. It is in perpetual tension with nationalism, Gellner’s other great preoccupation (and the one he is most famous for writing on: his books on nationalism are still in print). A moderate nationalism can stabilize civil society; a radical nationalism will corrode it or attack it directly. Back in the early 1990s, Gellner was preoccupied with the conditions under which Central and Eastern Europe might rebuild civil society after Communism (he spent his last years teaching at the Central European University in Hungary). He feared that nationalism might again devour its sibling in the womb. As he remarked of the last days of the Hapsburg Empire:

the nationalists were hostile not merely to rival cultures, but also, and perhaps with special venom, to bloodless cosmopolitanism, probably in part because they perceived in it an ally of political centralism, and felt it to be a support for the old trans-national empires against neo-ethnic irridentism. They felt special loathing for those they considered to be the principal carriers of such cosmopolitanism. (They were right in the end, the liberals committed to an open market in goods, in a sense men and ideas, were the last supporters of centralism, remaining faithful to it even when the old baroque absolutist partisans of the ancien regime had themselves given up the struggle).

Gellner worried about how this drama would end, and he was right to worry. Most prominently, Viktor Orban, whose early career was fostered by the Open Society Foundation, turned on it, and civic liberalism more generally, condemning pluralism, embracing an extreme nationalism and doing everything he could to strangle civil society in Hungary. Media was tamed or lamed. Universities were transformed into ideological forcing houses, controlled by foundation structures that were stacked with Orban’s allies, and non-profit organizations were regularly hounded or driven out of existence. The Central European University where Gellner once worked, was forced to leave Budapest and Hungary, after having left Prague before.

Orban is now in real political trouble, but only after many years where he sought to reshape civil society in his own image. If the opposition is elected without sufficient seats and support to change the constitution, it may have a very hard time reversing these changes.

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From Gellner’s perspective, civil society is an essential underpinning of our current way of life. The worry is that it is not universally essential. Other ways of organizing society, many of which would strike us as wicked or miserable, are can be maintained without it. Indeed, maintaining civil society may be a continual challenge. Civil society requires the management of nationalism (some sense of national identity is good, to mitigate more immediate sources of partiality, but not too much). So too for the market system: “a liberation of the market from political control would be catastrophic.” Civil society may be burdensome to the individual: in many respects, living in a modular world is far more demanding than living in a society where you know exactly what role you are supposed to play. Yet its benefits, in the eyes of those who have adopted its norms at least, are enormous.

It is striking that the main tendency of American conservatives, who often used favor the independence of civil society from government, have moved decisively away from it. This is in part thanks to the influence of integralist political theorists, who view civil society’s pluralism with disgust and aversion. Imposing the common good means telling commoners what is good for them rather than letting them figure this out for themselves. But the more politically important faction is composed of those who’ve embraced a kind of trans-reversed Gramscianism in pursuit of straightforward political domination.

There’s always been a right wing fascination with Gramscianism, which included the late Rush Limbaugh, or at least his regular ghost-writer. Reactionary ideologist Curtis Yarvin has explicitly disclaimed Gramsci, but his notion of the “Cathedral” - a decentered but extraordinarily powerful consensus of academia, journalism and political elites - is a crude and debased version of Gramsci’s arguments about hegemony. Yarvin’s influence on the Silicon Valley right has been immense. More superficially presentable conservatives such as Chris Rufo disagree with his arguments about the Cathedral, but only to the extent that they think Yarvin is too pessimistic. According to Rufo, Florida’s Orban, Rick DeSantis, was successfully storming academia by taking over New College, and using it as a spearhead for a broader transformation of the academy.

Perhaps not so much,** but the Trump administration is now trying out this strategy at scale. It’s not just attacking universities, but non profit organizations (including the Open Society Foundation - that a foundation founded to defend Karl Popper’s principles is constantly attacked by conservatives says quite a lot about where we are), law firms and broadcasters. The administration wants either to destroy them or to force them to cave to its preferred ideology, replacing a plural system which is open to many different voices with a closed one, in which nominally independent organizations are required to repeat the government line.

The standard justification is that that the Trump administration is merely correcting for the excesses of the left wing. That obviously isn’t true: the demands for control are far more sweeping in effect and intent than would be necessary to address the problems they purport to solve. In its crudest form, these are efforts to impose control. Gellner again:

What distinguishes Civil Society (using the term to describe the entire society), or a society containing Civil Society (in the narrower sense), from others is that it is not clear who is Boss. Civil Society can check and oppose the state. It is not supine before it.

That is exactly why conservatives who are committed to the One Boss principle find Civil Society unbearable. And this has implications for all those who buy into the idea of civil society, whether they are left-leaning, right-leaning or centrist. Entirely apart from the Trump administration’s true intentions, you absolutely do not want a political system in which the government is able to remake civil society in its likeness. The value of civil society stems precisely from its capacity to (a) restrain government from tyrannical behavior, and (b) create a realm of free engagement, where people can live their lives, and freely create and dissolve bonds among each other.

There is plenty that is missing from the classical liberal account of civil society that Gellner lays out. It doesn’t capture many of the power dynamics that actually existing civil society entails. Civil society’s actual degree of pluralism varies, and is the subject both of legitimate debate and actual political struggle (something that both intelligent left- and right-Gramscian approaches capture better than classical liberal accounts).

Still, it does an excellent job in explaining why it is a problem when the government tries to capture civil society. If we lived in a world where the winning faction of conservatives recognized the value of civil society, we would be a lot better off than we are. There is also excellent reason to think that the left should be more appreciative of civil society too, and less prone to fantasies that everyone would change their politics if only this or that intellectual institution was controlled by the right people with the right way of thinking.

Liberal accounts of civil society push us to recognize the benefits of genuine pluralism, however painful and messy it may be, and however difficult to maintain in practice. Gellner’s particular version also has the particular benefit of emphasizing how contingent the development of civil society was, and how chancy its survival may be without relentless hard work.

Other societies may develop the economic benefits that helped civil society take off.

Whether we like it or not, the deadly angel who spells death to economic inefficiency is not always at the service of liberty. He had once rendered liberty some service, but does not seem permanently at her command. This may sadden those of us who are liberals and were pleased at being given such a potent ally - but facts had better be faced.

There will always be tensions in the relationship between nationalism and liberalism, which endanger the pluralism of civil society. Strong forms of national identity and strongman government based on fostering us-them divisions go hand-in-hand with each other. If economic growth stutters or fails, then social mobility is likely to become more problematic, and abusive hierarchy - the default condition of human society - may return.

That, then, is what civil society is (under one useful definition) and why we ought care about it.

* There are multiple other possible objections. Gellner is very definitely parti pris. His account of Marxism is ungenerous, of Muslim society controversial, and of those whom he did not like or agree with unkind, if sometimes very funny. Shaky opinions are stated emphatically, and even as obvious and unchallengeable truths. I don’t recommend that people gulp down his arguments hook and line. But there is a great deal in his writing that is sharp, and a quite considerable amount that I believe be profound. Furthermore, Gellner is one of the few social scientists who knew how to write, providing the reader with a flow of examples of how to explain abstruse ideas and phenomena with lucidity and wit.

** In practical terms, the Florban Strategy has turned out to be a disaster.