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Author(s): Salvador Giner
Title: The Withering Away of Civil Society
The Withering Away of Civil Society
Issue: 3/1985
Citation Salvador Giner. "The Withering Away of Civil Society". PRAXIS International 3:247-267.
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https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=29630
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THE WITHERING AWAY OF CIVIL SOCIETY?

Salvador Giner

I. Introduction

The demise of civil society is now a distinct possibility. The ensemble of

relationships, moral assumptions, rules and private institutions that often goes
by that name is undergoing profound changes. Under the new conditions
created by them, the survival of civil society—as traditionally understood and
perceived—will be highly problematic, if not impossible.
In this article I wish to look at the transformation and disappearance of the
inherited world of civil society as well as the course which some of its values and
institutions are likely to follow. In order to do so, I begin with some
considerations on the history of the notion of civil society in its several versions.
I then move on to a definition and description of civil society itself as it has taken
shape and evolved in certain parts of the Western world during recent times.
This is followed by a consideration of the trends which, stemming largely from
the logic of civil society itself, have led to the incipient rise of a new social order.
This social order is, to a large extent, incompatible with a civil society as
traditionally understood. It increasingly hinges upon a number of either
interlocking or mutually competitive and relatively autonomous organizational
structures (corporations) and upon organized collective interests. For that
reason, some attention will be devoted to the substitution of the inherited
features of civil society by those of the new, corporate universe. The essay
comes to an end with some reflections on how certain values at the heart of civil
society may still survive successfully—and not as mere relics—within the
moral constitution of today’s emerging corporate world.
Historically, civil society has been understood with notorious imprecision.
The meaning attributed to the expression has shifted within schools of thought
as well as between them.1 The term has been amply used within two traditions,
the liberal and the Marxist. In turn, it is possible to distinguish, within each of
these two strands, at least another two significant broad interpretations, if not
more. I shall therefore present, albeit briefly, four different views of civil
society: (a) the classical liberal, (b) the Hegelian, (c) the classical Marxist, and
(d) the neo-Marxist. It ought to be remembered that their sequence in time is
only partially relevant since even the earliest version, the classical liberal,
continues to enjoy a notable degree of acceptance today. Indeed, neoconserva-
tive thought and practice actively support most of its by now venerable
assumptions, although, for quite some time, the expression “civil society” itself
has almost ceased to be used by traditional liberals. By contrast, it has retained
the favour of socialists and Marxists. The latter, however, have never succeeded
in appropriating it exclusively for themselves. It remains also, and in some
fundamental ways, a liberal conception.

Praxis International 5:3 October 1985 0260-8448 $ 2.00

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248 Praxis International

II. The Liberal Theory

1. According to the earliest liberal philosophers, civil society was a

community or commonwealth made up of individuals who had entered into
permanent and civilized relationships with each other in the pursuit of their
legitimate interests. Although for those thinkers the state was one of the results
of such civilized social intercourse, government was conceived as an institution
whose sole function was the preservation of the civil society’s good order.
Government and the state ought not to interfere in the spontaneous life and
prosperity of civil society. Three centuries after Locke’s publication of his Two
Treatises on Government (1690; the Essay on Civil Government was completed in
1679), liberal writers such as Hayek still separate the state from the rest of
society in a similar manner. He considers the former as “one of many
organizations,” though one which “is confined to the government apparatus
and which does not determine the activities of the free individuals.” In fact what
for Hayek really constitutes society is the “spontaneously grown network of
relationships between individuals and the various organizations they create.”
Among the latter the state is an artificial construct. It is inimical to freedom
unless oriented towards letting society (civil society) be.2
Crucial though the distinction between state and civil society was eventually
destined to become, it was unclear in the work of the earliest liberal theorists.
Thus Locke repeatedly speaks of “political or civil society,” using both terms
interchangeably as synonyms: For him, civil, or political, society is a “civil
state,” a condition of civility, the opposite of the “state of Nature”3 in which
men found themselves before they entered into that nexus of permanent,
rational and reasonable freedoms and mutual obligations that alone forms a true
body politic. The further distinction between civil society in general and that
part of it which must specialize in government only takes shape in Locke’s
writings in an implicit, though certainly far from cryptic manner.4 His (and
Hume’s)5 overriding preoccupation was to distinguish between a wild,
uncultivated state of mankind and a more advanced state, where prosperity,
orderly freedom and a more rational life became possible. It was this
preoccupation that conferred its particular thrust to Ferguson’s Essay on the
History of Civil Society. Published nearly a century after Locke wrote his Second
Essay, it was more historically minded and focussed on the stages of the
transition from the state of nature to that of “polished” nations, that is, nations
possessing a civil society. However, the increasingly important distinction
between the political and the purely civil spheres of society still continued to be
implicit. None the less, with Ferguson civil society had begun to be contrasted
not only with the barbaric state of nature but also, and very specially, with all
sorts of despotism, oriental as well as occidental, and with feudalism. This latter
contrast became important: in Ferguson’s Essay “rude,” oriental and feudal
societies were depicted as chafing under arbitrary and overbearing tyrants,
while enlightened civil societies were described as havens for free competition
and peaceful social intercourse.6 Liberals, needless to say, were wholly
conscious of the limitations of such freedom and security. Thus for Locke, men
had divested themselves of a primeval “Natural Liberty” and “put on the Bonds

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Praxis International 249

of Civil Society” for the sake of comfort, safety and peace, as well as for that of a
more regulated and evidently less dangerous freedom than that of the state of
nature.7
Early liberal attention to the past and its despotic or feudal legacy began to
switch, however, towards new developments when the state, always conceived
as a circumscribed and protective institution, became more powerful than
envisaged. Government and its apparatus (as perceived by Tocqueville and
even by Mill) was beginning to transgress its ascribed boundaries. It was this,
for the inheritors of the liberal tradition, that made them aware of the
important, nascent dichotomy between political and civil society. Yet the
boundaries of civil society themselves had been left most unclear: demarcation
lines were left in the realm of law and the rights of individuals as citizens. No
specific content had been conferred upon civil society, save a recognition that it
was made up of men endowed with individual interests and of different class
and unequal life chances (to use the telling expression coined by a much later
liberal writer Max Weber). Civil society in classical liberal thought was
understood, therefore, not as a specific structure but rather as a state of
civilization, a level of moral maturity, entailing tolerance and toleration, a
sphere established for the realization of individual interests in terms of peaceful
pursuit, mutual contract, privacy, and private rights and property.8 Civil
society for the liberal mind was, and continues to be, a historical achievement in
the moral evolution of mankind. And, for later liberal theorists, it became also
an achievement under threat.
2. For the classical liberal tradition the state emerges as a consequence of civil
society, and it is established with the purpose of preserving its integrity. Hegel,
who for the first time theorized the relationship between these two entities and
attempted a more clear demarcation between them, inherited this chief tenet of
liberalism.
Hegel’s theorization stems from his effort to overcome certain aspects of
liberal individualism without falling prey to anti-individualism. He wanted to
reconcile universalism with the particularistic features brought about by the
individualistic and particularistic tendencies of the new liberal civilization,
which were embodied in the civil society. This move towards integration
between individualism and universalism9 allows us to understand Hegel, in this
respect at least, as a liberal (though perhaps a revisionist one) for he did not wish
to see individualism trapped and perishing in the clutches of an overriding
universalism. This interpretation is not far-fetched, since Hegel explicitly
recognized the claims of privacy, the centrality of individual interests, and the
inviolability of personal rights.10 His problem was their reconciliation with his
own conception of a harmonious social order: would the vigorous and
unattenuated presence of those liberal virtues allow such order to endure
unperturbed?
It is in the continued existence of the private universe of civil society that
Hegel’s statements “only in the state does man have a rational existence” and
“man owes his entire existence to the state“11 must be understood. While civil
society is the realm of the particular, including the selfish, the egoistic, the
familistic and even the tribal, the state is the home of the universal, and

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possesses rational properties which cannot be found elsewhere. That is why the
“essence of the state is ethical life” which is expressed in “the unity of the
universal and the subjective will.” This unity is realized through the education
of the citizens in their duties towards the public realm and specifically towards
the authority of the state. It is this authority—unselfish, objective, rational,
universal—that makes civilized life possible, including the pursuit of the
particularistic aims of individuals.
Hegel’s idealization of the state reaches its climax when he affirms that its
“divine principle” is the “Idea made manifest on earth.” This idealization also
leads him to the identification of the state with the organic community of the
nation or fatherland. If the early liberals had failed to distinguish clearly
between political and civil society (a distinction carefully drawn by Hegel, as
well as by some later liberals) Hegel in turn failed to distinguish between the
state apparatus and the nation. Yet, idealizations and confusions apart, Hegel
saw the key virtue of Western political life as that of having developed states
that left a free scope to their citizens not only to pursue their interests but also to
administer the law in detail and to engage in their customary practices,
unmolested by despotic intervention. Civil society is thus perceived by Hegel as
the arena for the deployment of subjective and private needs and pursuits.
Unlike the state, it lacks systemic qualities, and therefore it needs a framework
and an agent of coordination. This higher coordinator is the state, the only
social entity endowed with universalism and objectivity. And Hegel does not
seem to contemplate the danger that the state may engage in wanton
interference with the life of civil society, nor that its administrative apparatus
may ever become endemically interventionist. The state’s ethical force remains
unquestioned:12 the impersonality of legislation, the impartiality of the courts,
the anonymity of the bureaucracy and the altruism of national (state) loyalty are
its living proofs.

III. The Marxist Theory

1. By understanding the state as the embodiment of reason and universality,
Hegel had given the theory of civil society, as it stood before him, a new slant
whose possibilities Marx was quick to grasp, obviously, in so far as Hegel’s
interpretation entailed a hardly disguised glorification of the Prussian
bureaucracy and of an oppressive state of affairs, Marx found Hegel’s ideas
pernicious. Marx denied any superiority, neutrality and universalism to a state
which, for him, was a class-bound entity. The split between the political
realm—claiming to represent the interests and aspirations of an entire society,
but failing in fact to do so—and the realm of private life, had been a creation of
bourgeois society. Under this division of spheres the civil society was the arena
for selfish competition, wage-linked capitalist exploitation and class inequality.
The political order—or juridical and governmental superstructure—was the
guarantor of that universe of depredation and moral squalor which was
capitalist civil society. The legal mystifications of political society were highly
efficient in maintaining asymmetrical bourgeois freedoms and unequal prop-
erty rights. Only the restoration of the political realm to civil society through

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the destruction of the state and their mutual reintegration, would put an end to
this situation. Eventually the result would be the abolition of both contradic-
tory structures, and their substitution by a far superior universe.13
Following Hegel, Marx defined civil society as the sum total of social
relationships outside the strict realm of the state. Contrary to the vision of the
early liberals, though, civil society was not conceived by him as an aggregate of
unrelated individuals—or individuals only related to each other by contracts
and mutual obligations, freely entered into—but rather as a situation of mutual
dependence bred by the bonds of class, necessity and “the material conditions
of life.” It was the coherence and economic structure of civil society that
provided the underpinnings of other aspects of the social order, such as law,
belief, and the state itself:
It is natural necessity, essential human properties, however alienated they may
seem to be, and interest, that hold the members of civil society together; civil, not
political life is their real tie . . . Only political superstition today imagines that
social life must be held together by the state whereas in reality the state is held
together by civil life.14
These views, expressed in an early manuscript, and which seem to relegate
the state to the status of a by-product of the political economy as it is embodied
in civil society, continued to be firmly held by the mature Marx. Thus in
Capital he insists:
It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to
the direct producers . . . which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of
the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of
sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the
state.15
But the state is not superfluous, for it is through its institutions that the ruling
classes, and more specifically the bourgeoisie, implement their labour laws,
impose their repressive measures, and reinforce their uneven distribution of
wealth, capital, and rewards. Whether the notion of the state as class tool is
really what Marx believed, or whether he really thought that it possessed a
much greater degree of autonomy and sophistication is a moot point here, more
appropriately discussed by those who wish to build a theory of the state upon his
premises. What is relevant for our discussion is Marx’s emphasis on the nature
of “bourgeois civil society” and its inner strengths, which postulates a primacy
of the economic over the political, not to mention the ideological. Civil society is
the realm of class, inequality and exploitation, and forms “the natural basis of
the modern state.” The latter exists because “the contrast between public and
private life,” the “contrast between general and particular interests” must be
maintained under modern conditions. The state administration is, if anything,
helpless before the “reciprocal plundering of different civil groups,” and
impotence is its natural law:
For this tearing apart, this baseness, this slavery of the civil society is the natural
base on which the modern state rests, as the civil society of slavery was the natural
basis on which the classical state rested. The existence of the state and the
existence of slavery are inseparable. . . . If the modern state wished to do away

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with the impotence of its administration, it would have to do away with the
contemporary private sphere for it only exists in contrast with the private
sphere.16

The state, we are told, is the “active, self-conscious and official expression” of
civil society,17 but the supremacy of the latter is asserted in every possible way.
There is an interesting congruence here between Marx’s interpretation and the
classical liberal vision. It is the moral judgement passed by each that differed.
Marx’s concentration upon class and the capitalist mode of production led
him to neglect the institutional analysis of civil society, not to speak of the state
itself. In a way, his notion of the civil society was still very close to Hegel’s,
though he avoided the lumping together, by the latter, of all the familial and
economic relationships that fell outside the political realm. Yet his constant
emphasis on the “sham” and “facade” nature of many bourgeois organizations
together with his inclination to see the state as a by-product of class domination
led Marx to concentrate his attention elsewhere. As a consequence, and for a
very long time indeed, Marxists felt quite happy with the vague lineaments of
the civil society as presented by Marx, to the point that most of them came to
identify social structure with class structure by implication, the latter being
largely the result of a given mode of production. In fact by civil society Marx,
Engels and their followers referred to the entire set of class relations and forces
of production, as distinct from their political and ideological manifestations.
2. The founders of liberalism originally developed the state/civil society
dichotomy. Hegel gave it greater precision and specificity. Marx took it a step
further in the direction of concreteness. At each one of these three stages the
meanings and attributes of each component of the analytic pair shifted. One
more step, and a fourth historical change in interpretation, was to be provided
by certain neo-Marxist critics, principally Gramsci.
Most contemporary Marxists believe that Gramsci developed Marx’s theory
of civil society and the state without modifying it substantially: he enriched it.
He might have done so, but his views on this matter were certainly somewhat at
variance with those of the master. And there were at least two interpretations in
Gramsci’s work itself. To begin with, Gramsci analytically disentangled civil
society from the “economic infrastructure” and then divided the superstructure
into what he termed two general “levels”: civil society itself (i.e., “the ensemble
of organisms commonly called ‘private’ ”) and political society (“the state”).
The first level exercises a form of class domination (called by Gramsci
“hegemony”) which expresses itself through indirect control: it breeds
domination through indoctrination, education and ideological processes lead-
ing towards a consensus about the acceptability of social inequality. Hegemony
creates the “common sense” on which class society can rest undisturbed. By
contrast, the second level exercises direct domination, either through institu-
tionalized violence or through the forcible maintenance of public order: it is
based on an “apparatus of state coercive power.”18 In other passages of
Gramsci’s work, however, the state is described as only one element of a wider
political society. “The constituent elements of the state in the large organic
sense” are, on the one hand “the state properly so called” and on the other,

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Praxis International 253

“civil society.”19 This new distinction, he explains, is only methodological,

since in reality state and civil society overlap and fuse with each other, as the
integral parts of one single, political society.20
Gramsci’s politicization of the civil society as it appears in this second version
of his conception paradoxically brings him closer to the original liberal
interpretation. It was not a state of mental confusion that made Locke speak of
“civil or political” society: civil government (the “state”) was the natural
political dimension of a civilly constituted commonwealth of free and
responsible men. The difference was that whilst for him (as well as for Ferguson
and many other liberals) class, breeding and education would not permit or
advise the incorporation of the many into the society of the few (as they lacked
the intellectual qualities required for the conduct of public business and
responsibility, i.e., they could not form a “polished” society), for Gramsci class
oppression was not only odious, it was also unacceptable. For Gramsci, as for
the liberals, the state was the political constitution of civil society, separable
only by analysis. Unlike them, however, he thought that it was also the
constitution of class bondage and the essence of modern inhumanity. It was not
a state of civility by any conceivable means. The concept of “hegemony” itself,
again, brings Gramsci formally close to the liberals. Hegemony is not just the
process of indirect domination through the institutions of civil society—
schools, churches, civic and voluntary associations, and the like—but very
especially the moral and intellectual leadership produced by the ruling groups
(or those with a calling and a capacity to rule). Gramsci even contemplates the
possibility that hegemony and democracy can be in some definite ways
compatible “in so far as the ruling groups may express the needs of the ruled
groups and also incorporate some of them (individually, not collectively) into
the leadership.”21 Hegemony therefore entails the “wise” control of civil
society, giving it direction and providing it with the adequate leadership. And
also, save in the case of revolutionary movements, maintaining its class
structure with the least possible amount of direct state violence.
The reception of Gramscian ideas by contemporary Marxist thought has
brought with it a renewed interest in the texture and composition of civil society
and its place within the entire social universe of advanced capitalism, and even
socialism. It is doubtful whether it would be fruitful here to review the several
interpretations to which the notion has lent itself in post-Gramscian Marxism.
By and large, the tendency has been to lump together, under its name, all those
relationships in bourgeois society that cannot be reduced to economic
activity,22 and which fall outside the public and administrative realm of the
state. As a consequence, within this contemporary current civil society appears
as a sector which stands between the state and the economy, that is, between the
overtly political and the sphere of production. It is thus conceived by some as
the locus of class conflict and reproduction. Although the followers of the
Gramscian approach do in several cases see structural changes taking place
within civil society—corresponding roughly to changes in capitalism and in the
evolution of the welfare state—they do not contemplate its eventual disappear-
ance as an identifiable set of private institutions, relationships and laws. They
have thus developed a new Marxian orthodoxy, according to which society is

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best understood by its partition into three spheres: the state, civil society and
the economy.

IV. What Is Civil Society?

Does civil society exist? Has it ever been a recognizable historical entity? Is
the concept itself at all useful? The variations upon the theme of civil society
which have just been examined seem to entirely justify these broad questions:
not only does each interpretation disagree with some of the others on matters of
substance but they all treat civil society with notable imprecision.
The imprecision of the notions used may perhaps be more symptomatic of
the object described by them than a reflection of carelessness on the part of its
interpreters. In stark contrast to the clearly defined boundaries of its “opposite”
entity, the state, those of civil society must always remain unclear. For the state,
demarcation is all, whereas for civil society ambiguity—the ambiguity that
stems from a certain kind of freedom—is all. And, despite the further problems
that the identification of civil society with the realm of individualistic and
competitive freedom raises, civil society as a concept cannot be easily dispensed
with. In the context of the liberal order to which it belongs it cannot be “thought
away” without that order also vanishing from our minds. It is of its essence.
If it is inextricably linked to the rise and consolidation of capitalism,
bourgeois civilization and liberal democracy, one wonders in what sense some
critics can even begin to talk about a socialist civil society.23 Could it be that
they consider the liberal distinction between the public and the private as an
attribute of bourgeois society that would be worth maintaining under
socialism? Or, since such a view would be incompatible with the traditional
socialist conception of the future, are we actually faced with yet another nascent
intepretation of the phenomenon? These questions may best be left unanswered
for the moment. Instead, I shall confine myself to a vision of civil society which
is as incompatible with socialism as it is with oriental despotism, feudalism, or
any other form of inequality and power similarly inimical to liberal democracy.

No paradigmatic civil society exists in the “real world,” though some

countries come closer to the ideal than others. There are only several, concrete
civil societies, all different from each other. Some are more mature, some less.
Some lead a precarious life, others flourish. Thus it is often said that England
and the United States possess “strong” civil societies. By contrast modern
Greece, for instance, is often described as a nation with a “weak” civil society.
And many non-Western nations are seen as entirely lacking it. Any definition
must, accordingly, be ideal-typical. The following one, and the five dimensions
that are presented afterwards, must therefore be understood in that sense.
Likewise, and this is crucial for the argument, the definition must be seen to
apply fully only to a historical period during which liberal bourgeois civilization
was at its height, while the welfare state and the other public and private
bureaucracies had not yet substantially affected its essential contours.
Civil society may be defined as an historically evolved sphere of individual
rights, freedoms and voluntary associations whose politically undisturbed

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competition with each other in the pursuit of their respective private concerns,
interests and intentions is guaranteed by a public institution, called the state.
Any mature civil society exhibits at least five prominent dimensions:
individualism, privacy, the market, pluralism and class.24 Each one of them
poses an existential problem for civil society, that is, each dimension in turn
breeds currents that undermine it and that therefore weaken the civil society
itself. Reference to these countertrends in the following discussion is intended
to curtail any idealistic excesses that may be committed in drawing up the civil
society model.
(a) Individualism. The main ontological assumption of liberalism is that the
only and ultimate unit of social life is the individual, and that all social
institutions are no more than associations of discrete individuals. A civil society
is grounded on this belief. (As such, it is an assumption that does not confine
itself to mere methodological individualism: it also entails “realistic” indi-
vidualism.) The individual is the seat of sovereign will. Human reason and
intentions are the supreme judges of the world. Churches, parties, trading
companies, governments, are only collective aggregations of individual wills.
They can be modified, transformed or cancelled by the individual men who set
them up or use them. In so far as the universe of an individualistic civil society
has been successful (and there are no collectivistic civil societies), it has
permitted ontological (and ideological) individualism to thrive. As a seriously
held belief or as an important legal fiction, the assumption of individualism is
then the cornerstone of a civil society.
Initially the chief problem for the advancement of individualism was the
existence of a number of institutions inherited from the past which had to be
abolished, as they were perceived as essentially “supraindividualistic” or
antiindividualistic. Since individualism first developed in Western Europe,
whose past was for the most part feudal, its targets were the guilds, the estates,
the feudal privileges, and the ecclesiastical authority over the secular world. As
these powers fell, or as their force was substantially attenuated, the powers of
individualistically built coalitions (governments, parties, industrial and
commercial enterprises) began to assert themselves in an utterly non-individu-
alistic manner. The specific problem that ontological individualism breeds by
advocating the free formation of voluntary associations is that of their collecti-
vistic autonomy and power vis à vis the individuals that make them up.
(b) Privacy. Civil society is the abode of privacy in a world which has been
divided into two realms: the public and the private. When individual freedom is
defined as the supreme good and non-interference with the life of others is
considered to be a core virtue of civil society, privacy becomes its achievement.
On a more mundane level, privacy is a utopia of the liberal mind which can be
approximated (if not fully realized) by being bought, or by being acquired
through status, privilege, power or social skill. Apart from the not inconsider-
able fact that there are many who are not interested in its systematic practice,
privacy, by being in permanent tension with its opposite, the public life, gives
rise to its own specific problem, the withdrawal from public life. Mass
withdrawal into privacy breeds oligarchy. It facilitates tyranny. Citizenship—a

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virtue of political, rather than civil, society—demands active popular participa-

tion in public life. An excess of privacy depoliticizes the state.25
(c) The Market. If individualism and privacy are the moral justification of
civil society, the market is its most salient structural feature. As the civil
society’s organizing principle, the relatively unhampered market allocates
resources, honour, authority, goods and services through a spontaneous and
ultimately anonymous process of countless transactions (contracts) among free
individuals and their associations. In a sense, the market is institutionless. At
the economic level, from which it gets its name and at which it is most clearly
seen, the market produces equilibrium through aggregate forces of supply and
demand. A similar process operates in the intellectual, the ideological and the
political market places. The wider, generalized market, however, is not an
extension of the economy: it is a competitive but essentially peaceful locus for
the production of social life. Any public institution interfering with the several
market places by imposing an extraneously determined allocation of goods and
resources is bound to weaken and even destroy the social arrangements which
emerge from them and which are precisely those of civil society.
“Competitive” and “peaceful” are contradictory terms. Permanent efforts at
the restoration of market freedom (in some cases stemming from the state itself
in its role as protector of the civil society) are therefore necessary and are often
not enough. More seriously, monopolistic and oligopolistic tendencies in the
economy, and oligarchic tendencies in the polity, are generated by the very
logic of a mature or maturing market society, thus leading to serious problems
in its hypothetically unhampered functioning. Nevertheless, the usual remin-
ders about the limitations of markets and the impossibility of perfect
competition conditions ought to be accompanied by parallel reminders about
the key role played by real markets (no matter how imperfect) in the
spontaneous regulation, without outside intervention, of the economic,
political and cultural markets. The real scope of markets may be limited, but
their continued existence has had massive effects in the creation of viable liberal
civil societies.
(d) Pluralism has been one of them. It has two dimensions. On the one hand it
entails the diffusion of power throughout society which is then vested
differently upon individuals, communities, associations and institutions. They
then become relatively autonomous from each other, they have their own
spheres of competence where other entities—even the state—dare not
penetrate with impunity. On the other hand, pluralism is also a culture,
whereby a wide range of beliefs, conceptions and attitudes coexist freely and are
equally freely fostered by their proponents. From a more sociological
standpoint, it is the legitimation and recognition of the actual fragmentation of
certain societies into varying patterns of class, race, belief, ideology and
religion, as well as of the groups to which their combination and overlap give
rise.
As in the case of the market, with which it is intimately related, pluralism
always appears as a far cry from its own ideal type. The asymmetric distribution
of power and influence amongst all the units that form a pluralistic order is thus
the norm. This is not only true of those units which directly compete with each

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Praxis International 257

other for the same goods (firms within the economy, or parties struggling over
the same sections of the electorate) but especially of those associations which
confront each other for the distribution of income and labour, as employers and
trade unions do. But these features must only be seen as curtailments of civil
society in its “pure” form, not as its obliteration. It is the effective measure of
pluralism that matters in each case, not its manifest limitations.
(d) Class. Civil society is a class society. Class is to a large extent the
unintended consequence of citizenship. If citizenship is the political institu-
tionalization of the individual within liberalism, and liberalism is based in turn
on the competitive allocation of goods, resources and power, then it follows that
society must be made up of unequal people, though perhaps not of people
unequal before the law, at least not in principle. From this alone, of course, it
does not follow that class reproduction through time must necessarily occur.26
Hypothetically, the entrenchment of social class through family privilege,
patronage and the transmission of property does not necessarily arise from an
established civil society. The least that can be said, however, is that civil
society, relying as it does on “spontaneous” contractual processes, lacks any
institutional apparatus to redress class bias. Nor is any such task contemplated
by its moral constitution. For that, people must rely on egalitarian movements
and on government policies and intervention. Yet in classical liberal times the
state did little or nothing against class bias, and was not expected to do anything
in particular against it. This is precisely the reason why, as was shown earlier,
some observers were able to describe the state as a mere excrescence of civil
society, embodying little more than the will and the interests of its ruling
classes. Later, when state intervention for the attenuation of the injuries of class
inequality began to appear, it did not leave intact the fabric of civil society.
From the standpoint of liberal orthodoxy, state intervention in favour of civil
society can only exist in the form of deregulation, denationalization, and the
dismantling of state agencies. Strictly speaking, state intervention ought to
exist only as withdrawal and abstention, though government intervention
against crime or in order to uphold the law and keep the peace was never ruled
out by the liberal conception. Interestingly, in this context, liberal (i.e., con-
servative) parties and movements cyclically attempt to return to this venerable
orthodoxy even when in power. Most efforts, under the changed conditions of
our age, have so far yielded only limited results.
Individualism, privacy, the market, pluralism and class are the dimensions
that provide some substance and realism to the abstract definition of civil
society provided earlier. The picture that has arisen differs in various ways from
the main traditional images and theories of civil society, though it owes much to
every one of them. Any attempt to draw up a new model must inevitably reject
or play down certain aspects of the several classical interpretations while
accepting or stressing others. Thus liberal ignorance of the close relationship
between civil society and class inequality, or its blindness to its unpalatable
facets, cannot be sustained. Nor can the neo-Marxist tripartite division between
the economy, civil society and the state be upheld. Things are not that neat in
the contemporary world, if they ever were.
Our perspective takes the risk of an apparent confusion of realms. It sees civil

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society as a sphere of activity encompassing economic, political and cultural

kinds of human behaviour falling outside the field of “the official,” though
sometimes sanctioned by the official. The private and the public, the economy
and the polity, public opinion and government doctrine, are thereby neither
confused nor jumbled together. Civil society is not understood as an
institutional network, though it does contain one. It is rather conceived as a
social space. In it specialization, the “spontaneous” division of labour and the
analytical mind, can develop relatively unhampered. At the time of its early
historical development civil society already exhibited an inner affinity to the
analytical mind. It was essential to the civilization that gave rise to civil society
that separations in the various realms of action and thought could be effected
successfully. The separation and insulation of one aspect of social life from
another has a very long history in the West: its roots can be found in the
distinction between fas (religious law) and ius (human, profane law) of the early
Romans. It developed in a hazardous and difficult manner through the
centuries. The distinction between the state and civil society is an achievement
of this process.
The nature of these demarcations is essentially cultural. They serve certain
important purposes in the economic and political spheres, however, which are
buttressed by powerful legal fictions and arrangements. Everyone knows that
absolute social cleavages and specializations are well-nigh impossible. Class,
power, privilege, belief, and the economy have always penetrated both the state
and civil society with few problems caused by barriers or demarcations. But the
fiction has held. The question is whether it still does today.

V. Civil Society In Peril?

There never was a golden age of civil society, but there was a time when,
buttressed by a state zealous of its autonomy and underpinned by class
inequality, it thrived practically unmolested in a few significant countries while
its features slowly spread to others. Historically, this situation was relatively
brief.
Signs that all was not well with civil society and that its life was more
precarious than it looked to some were already easy to perceive well before the
Second World War, and not only in countries where Fascism had put a swift
and violent end to it, or in those, like Russia, where it had perished ingloriously
at the first onslaught of revolution because it had always been extremely weak.
There were a number of trends at work in several advanced industrial countries
which were secretly eroding some of the foundations on which traditional civil
society rested. They became more apparent after the war, paradoxically at a
time when civil society, helped by a powerful new cycle of capitalist prosperity
and protected by the victorious constitutional and liberal states, enjoyed
exceptional material and ideological reinforcements. But by then the subterra-
nean currents against it had already surfaced. These forces, essentially inimical
to civil society in its classical form, are well known. Some of them are not
entirely extraneous to the logic of civil society itself; on the contrary, they are
often the expression of trends fostered by liberal civilization in its early stages

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which have now outgrown, as it were, and even rejected, the world that made
them possible in the first instance. They can be grouped under four mutually
related processes: corporatization, state expansion, congestion and technocul-
ture:
(a) Corporatization points to the rise of what may cautiously be called a
“corporate” society. Corporatization appears as the continuation of secular
trends in bureaucratization, occupational specialization, and the proliferation
of formal organizations in every field of endeavour. Such organizations (or
“corporations” in the more generic sense of the word) often mediate between
traditional forms of class conflict, and possess a restraining effect upon the
capacities of individuals to compete freely with each other or to form coalitions
which might threaten the competence and power of the existing ones.27
Bargaining and negotiation were patterns of collective behaviour perfectly
acceptable to traditional civil society, but were not understood as necessarily
occurring between groups possessing an “official” status despite their private
nature. The corporatist management of the economy clearly challenges this
conception; besides, the institutionalization of the three-cornered relationship
between employers, government, and the unions has entailed a major
encroachment upon the market, and has called forth further state intermedia-
tion, while strengthening the respective monopolistic or oligopolistic powers of
labour and management organizations.
The consolidation and proliferation of corporations and associations has led
to the progressive displacement of other units of social life to a position where
the latter—classes, communities, publics—must either express themselves
through such associations or take the more hazardous path of an “alternative”
social movement, challenging the new order. Although corporatization has not
exhausted all the available social space, the scope of corporations is much
greater than it ever was earlier. Corporate saturation might not have arrived—
and perhaps never will, as long as the strained pluralist universe survives—but
advanced corporate density is a fact in many countries. It now effectively
challenges the basic tenet of civil society whereby any group of individuals can
form an association of its own accord and free will in order to pursue their
interests jointly. Thus stated, this might have only been part of the liberal
utopia. Yet, empirically observed, there appears to have been a steady decline
in the possibilities opened everywhere in advanced industrial societies for the
successful establishment of new associations in areas where others have already
established themselves. The crystallization of groups into firms, associations
and corporations, and subsequent mergers, takeovers and syndications points
towards the development of a network of mutual dependencies and recogni-
tions which makes the fluidity of the civil society as it was originally conceived
quite problematic. The rules that generally characterize oligopolistic
competition—diffidence, caution, and agreed costs and prices, rather than
market-determined ones—become those of the new order.
(b) State expansion has involved its metamorphosis into a welfare state. The
penetration of the state into every sphere of social life—as educator, manager of
public services, producer and consumer of armaments, entrepreneur, investor,
and so on—has transformed the relationship which traditionally obtained

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between itself and civil society. The transformation has entailed the gradual
approximation of the state to the citizenry29 through welfare services,
militarization, universal taxation, education, and increased surveillance by
police, justice, health, and fiscal agencies. At best, all this represents an erosion
of what was once considered an inviolable sphere; at worst, it blurs the essential
distinction between the public and the private, and between the state and civil
society.30 A process which began only with some unavoidable curbs upon the
old patrimonial conception of property as ius usum adque abusum now curbs
individual autonomy in a systematic manner. Arguably, it often does so
precisely in order to protect certain freedoms and spheres of autonomy for
individuals and associations and its rationale continues to be the same as that
behind earlier official interference with privacy or private concerns. However,
the scope and intensity of protective surveillance and interference is now much
greater.
(c) Congestion is to a large extent the cause of this particular contradictory
situation. There is institutional congestion due to corporate and bureaucratic
density, legal congestion in the form of overregulation, and physical congestion
due to population increase, mass participation in formerly restricted areas of
endeavour—the “democratization” of social life—and the rapid exhaustion of
no-man’s land. Civil society assumed the possibility of infinite resources,
endless expansion, and permanent growth. The intimate affinity between
expansive progress and the civilization of civil society hardly needs to be
explained. Interestingly Marx, along with other critics of the bourgeois
conception of civil society, not only did not question the assumption of the
infinitude of resources but even made it a cornerstone of his own conception of
progress.
Congestion has changed our perception of the limits of social space. While we
are trying to make out the kind of world into which we are entering, equipped as
we are with preconceptions of progress which do not quite fit it, inflationary
tendencies in laws, regulations and by-laws seriously begin to interfere with the
“spontaneous” development of life in the traditional arena of civil society. Each
new wave of events—increased unemployment, deindustrialization, fiscal
crisis, new “generations” in weaponry, rising crime, pollution—forces another
new wave of legislation upon a sphere which by definition was considered as
inherently free of regulation from external bodies. Externalities have always
existed: but sometimes man could free himself from their noxious effects by
moving elsewhere. Thus the ruthless Ricardian search for and opening up of
virgin lands reflected an escape from the pernicious externalities of capitalist
expansion, and not just a desire for the increase in profits. The problem today
seems to be that of the rapid diminution and exhaustion of the available virgin
spaces—i.e., spaces out of the reach of constraining or negative externalities—
upon which a thriving, ever expanding civil society once depended.31
(d) Technoculture is the phenomenon that is perhaps least rooted in the
historical logic of civil society. The transformation in the meaning of knowledge
and information, the rise of information technology, robotization and, above
all, artificial intelligence appear to be the really new phenomena of the age. It is
an open question whether they will eventually show themselves to be

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compatible with the inherited—albeit reformed—liberal society. For the

moment it looks as though technological manipulation and control, combined
with information technology, computerization and artifical intelligence are far
more compatible with advanced corporate management and with the environ-
ment of a corporate society than with the moral universe and personal freedoms
fostered by certain aspects of traditional civil society.32
Despite these developments, the demise of civil society has not yet occurred.
Not only that, but a close analysis of the situation reveals important facts that
seem to run counter to any such demise. The subtlety of the situation is rich in
paradox. The state itself, in some senses civil society’s worst enemy, has
become in the capitalist parliamentarian countries one of its safeguards. Not
only can it not free itself from civil society, but rather, it depends on its
relatively healthy existence in order to continue functioning in its present form.
The contemporary state attempts to keep civil society under its active tutelage
and tight control. However, the existence of this, and other similar contradic-
tions, must not make us blind to deeper, more far-reaching, and slower currents
in the historical process.

VI. Some Concluding Remarks

In the societies where civil society was once born it has now undergone
several modifications. The chances are that further changes will take place in
the future until it eventually acquires a purely vestigial character. The greatest
inroads of étatisme and corporatization into its fabric have taken place at the
structural level, as distinct from the cultural one. Thus, though the spread of
corporations (economic or otherwise) has put an end to the fluidity of past
arrangements, the very needs of the modern polity and economy have upheld
the ethos of individualism in some of its dimensions, especially those which are
useful for fostering occupational competitiveness within organizations. The
shift from entrepreneurial competitiveness to the newer, occupational kind has
meant that personal qualifications and entitlements to privacy and autonomy
have been respected in significant ways by the powers that be. The corporate
economy is the first to benefit from the existence of a private pool of skills,
talent and expertise. A defence against the class injuries of this market-like
arrangement (human capital has a counterpart, the human market, as
subscribers of the “human capital” theory in economics are well aware) is the
unionization of the labour force. In the circumstances, however, it may become
also a form of working-class corporatization, especially under closed-shop
conditions.
Social structure evolves faster than culture. The new, reformed, civil society
promotes a new culture, but the contemporary social structures must live in the
midst of a receding one, that of inherited bourgeois conceptions. Interestingly
enough, a great part of the culture of the old civil society, now conveniently
redefined, is still very useful for the maintenance of modern forms of class
inequality and political power. There has occurred a transition from the
possessive individualism of the past—based on private property—to the
positional individualism of the present, based on occupation and power within

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the organization. We must come to understand how certain components of the

culture of bourgeois society are still necessary for the functioning of the
corporate order of today if we wish to explain the puzzle posed by its
antinomies.
The old liberal framework, now recast, is not only necessary for the
maintenance of inequality and for the adequate recruitment of qualified
personnel into the positions of each corporation, but also for the neutralization
of dissent. In this latter respect, the old culture of tolerance has reached new
heights in the form of so-called permissiveness, while the more institutional
aspects of society go unperturbed on their own, divergent, ways. Corporations
do not feel threatened by that culture: people may now advocate the
implementation of genuine socialism, unilateral disarmament, the abolition of
racial and sexual discrimination, distributive justice, or any other goals, no
matter how outrageous. They will be met with tolerance, indifference, or
efforts at accomodation with existing arrangements. No wonder that, con-
fronted with this, some critics have produced a theory of “repressive tolerance”
in order to explain this seemingly intractable question. Unfortunately, the
theory is flawed by a rejection of those elements of the liberal creed which stem
from the more universal aspects of human freedom and that have been
appropriated by it. The theorists of “repressive tolerance” seem to forget that
only the relative tolerance they themselves enjoy may make possible the
eventual development of a “non-repressive” kind of tolerance. It is, to say the
least, problematic that totalitarian regimes unwittingly prepare the way for
liberty. If this be the cunning of history, it is a very low cunning indeed.
These comments express the necessity to achieve a balanced view in these
matters. If we are to acknowledge the crisis of civil society we must begin by
establishing its limits. Thus far I have shown that, rather than a breakdown, it
has undergone some far-reaching modifications, and that these are closely
related to the new class structure of the corporate society as well as to the
continued development of the state apparatus. The reformed civil society has
become entrenched in the political realm as the official ideology of pluralistic,
parliamentary democracies. This ideology buttresses the now embattled realm
of citizenship. It precariously protects the life of voluntary associations and
autonomous social movements, and the survival of minimal market conditions
through such means as anti-trust laws and regulations against unfair competi-
tion. It is therefore an essential part of the culture of our troubled times. On the
whole, however, it tends to appear on the defensive, though occasional
transitions of dictatorial regimes into parliamentary democracies—as have
occured in Southern Europe in 1974 and 1977—may be deemed exceptions to
this broad trend. They represent important advances of the liberal formula for
civil society in countries hitherto largely deprived of its benefits.
Societies controlled by technobureaucratic, single parties and their states, by
contrast, confront entirely different problems. The aim of their democrats and
civil rights campaigners cannot be to fight the erosion of an already existing civil
society: their aim is rather its re-instatement or its reconstruction, for in those
countries the civil society has been most successfully and brutally abolished by
political means. The problem in them is that, in fact, there is no civil society at

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all. As a Soviet civil rights activist puts it: “One of the peculiarities of the Soviet
system is an impotent society which faces an omnipotent state or, to be more
precise, the absence of civil society.”33 Thus, efforts by “dissidents” in Russia
and the Ukraine, by democrats in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, more
successfully perhaps, in Poland since 1980 have been towards the creation,
sometimes ex nihilo, of a civil society. Their chances of success, when they exist,
still remain highly uncertain. Therefore the fate of civil society under state
“socialism” is very different from its fate elsewhere. It is only in the very last
instance that the issues at stake resemble each other in East and West.
The relative relegation of the sphere of civil society to the cultural and
ideological realms and to that of a privatized and fragmented citizenry would
spell in the long run its final demise. Deprived of the protection afforded by
both the traditional circumscribed state and by its own institutional underpin-
nings in free and competitive association, it could not last, and a long and
perhaps painful agony would await it. Any such shift would embody a
movement towards a world devoid of the features of civil society, although not
entirely devoid of private institutions; these will, however, have lost their role
as protagonists of social life. Whatever autonomy they possess will be under the
tutelage and regulation of large public or pseudo-private corporations.
The state itself will come to an end if civil society finally expires. This follows
logically from the very nature of the old division between the two com-
plementary spheres. They were a function of each other, mutually endorsing
their respective concerns. This does not mean that the apparatus of the public
administration will itself wither away. What is bound to die is the “sovereign”
state of today. Contemporary interdependence, dependence, and world-
systemic relationships are already gnawing at the supreme powers of this
resilient public institution. Some states, of course, continue to be more
sovereign than others, and even manage to curtail the autonomy of subordinate
powers: Russia, for instance, within its Soviet empire, is one of them, though its
rule there is not untroubled; the United States is another, within the late
capitalist world, others, especially Western European ones, have already
embarked on the hazardous voyage towards the recognition of limited
sovereignty. They are reluctantly transferring it to higher federal bodies, slowly
yielding to the pressures of the internationalization of the economy and the
polity. World-state visionaries notwithstanding, the end of this uneven road
will not exactly be a larger state—states can only exist in relation to other
states—but a complex, stateless network of trans-national managing bodies:
agencies of large-scale imperative coordination in the fields of demography,
ecology, energy, goods distribution, research and development, and regulatory
law generally. There will be a withering away, but certainly not the one
envisaged in the noble hopes of our forefathers. Or at least this is what is bound
to happen if developments continue along their present course.
No doubt events may take a different turn. It would be naive to suppose
otherwise. What is clear is that for them to follow a different path, some drastic
changes in étatisation and corporatization would have first to take place.
Moreover, we do not have enough evidence that such qualitative transforma-
tions are at hand. (Unless, that is, moves towards an “extraparliamentary

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opposition,” towards “workers’ self-management” or autogestion are given a

weight and a scope they do not yet possess. In the case of the “extraparliamen-
tary” oppositions especially as it briefly developed in Germany in the early
1970s, it revealed more about the weakness of civil society rather than about its
reconstruction.) For the moment, social movements of a truly transformational
kind have failed. When they have turned sour, they have frequently degener-
ated into militant lunacy or terrorism, that is, precisely into phenomena that
further strengthen the repressive and “law and order” powers of the state.
There is no contradiction here, for it is not only the state that is reinforced, but
also very much the international agencies for the control and repression of
terrorism, thus reinforcing the supranational trends just mentioned.
All this does not imply that extraparliamentary citizens’ movements, nuclear
disarmament campaigns, demands for industrial self-management or sexual
and racial equality, have found no response when expressed outside the
corporatist order of the contemporary polity. The highly systemic or even
cybernetic quality of this polity is not insensitive to such pressures: hence its
relative capacity for its own re-equilibration and for ecological preservation,
pollution control, further social reform, and charitable aid to the poor at home
and to those suffering spectacular penury and starvation abroad. Though never
neglecting the imperious exigencies of the war machine and of foreign
intervention, these measures have served the purpose of assuaging extreme
demands and of keeping dissent within manageable bounds. They have thus
ensured the untroubled progress of the social order of the future under the
dismal terms set by the conditions of today.
In the foregoing discussion I have tried to show that civil society may now be
beginning to disintegrate and that, although at a much slower pace, so may the
state. I have argued that civil society has now been redefined mostly as a legal,
cultural and ideological sphere, though an increasingly small range of relatively
autonomous institutions is still allowed to thrive. I have also shown how, for the
time being, the traditional distinction between state and civil society continues
to be crucial, albeit in a different manner, for the maintenance of the political
order of the West. In the longer term, however, the thorough corporatization of
civil society can only mean its own quiet demise.
That demise ought to have consequences for social theory. Traditional
Marxian—including Gramscian—notions of civil society are bound to become
increasingly outdated. They may soon be as outdated as those cherished by the
nostalgic neoliberal thinkers of today already are. (Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony, however, may fare better, for it is a sophisticated view of
domination and of the legitimation of inequality.) Accordingly, those who still
subscribe to these views would do well to use them only to understand bygone
situations. Confined to the past, they will no doubt continue to prove most
enlightening.
Some observers have noted that, under the pressures of economic and other
crises, the capitalist societies of today are being forced to give up their own
crucial distinction between state and civil society.34 This may be so, but the
distinction is not surrendered easily, for civil society, even under the pressures
which beset it in its present, receding stage, is a resilient, complex, creation. It

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finds unexpected and equivocal friends even in conservative quarters. Right-

wing populist revivalist movements, often strengthened by successes at the
polls, attempt to stem the tide of corporatization in their own way, as if the
reimposition of a more naked, old-fashioned, form of class domination and
entrepreneurial rule were still feasible. Such efforts represent only temporary
and ultimately futile swings of the reactionary pendulum, but they are
significant. More importantly, the civil society finds firmer friends among
democrats for whom the defence of its autonomous institutions is an essential
task in their conception of freedom. Yet the men of power throughout corporate
society and its political apparatus no longer believe in it, though they are forced,
constitutionally as it were, to pay their public respects to some of its tenets. In
the contemporary world many of those who still proclaim the need for a civil
society actively help the advent of a universe in which, were they to succeed,
there would be no need whatsoever for it.

NOTES
1 This essay does not attempt a detailed account of all the vicissitudes and ramifications
undergone by the notion of civil society throughout its history. I shall confine myself to
conveying some of the most important meanings attributed to it.
2 F.A. Hayek (1979), pp. 139-141.
3 J. Locke (1970), Book II, Ch. VII “Of Political or Civil Society,” pp. 154-178, and passim.
4 For instance in Ch. XI (“Of the Extent of the Legislative Power”) where the legislative is
seen as charged with the “preservation of the society. . . and every person in it” (p. 183).
Cf. pp. 183-192, ibid.
5 D. Hume (1969) Book III, “Of Morals,” Part II (“Of Justice and Injustice”), Ch. VII (“Of
the Origin of Government”), and ff., pp. 585-619.
6 A. Ferguson (1980), passim.
7 J. Locke op. cit., Ch. II (pp. 118-124).
8 For later liberal thinkers such as John Dewey and Ernest Barker the state appears as the
juridical organization of civil society. The latter, together with the family, “provide the
institutional framework within which individuals, socially aggregated by the necessities of
competition and collaboration, pursue their particular, i.e., private, ends.” S.I. Benn and
G.F. Gaus (1983), p. 51.
9 A.S. Walton (1983), p. 251.
10 Ibid., p. 255
11 These and the following references to Hegel are in G.W.F. Hegel (1975), pp. 94-97.
12 A.S. Walton op. cit., pp. 256-258.
13 For a discussion of Hegel’s and Marx’s notions of civil society and the conceptual problems
to which they give rise, cf. L. Kolakowski and S. Hampshire eds. (1974), pp. 18-44.
14 This often quoted passage is here taken from Z. Jordan (1967), p. 39. My interpretation
owes much to his. Cf. also K. Vergopoulos (1983), pp. 35-36.
15 K. Marx (1971), p. Vol. III, p. 791.
16 K. Marx (1971), “Early Texts,” pp. 189-190.
17 Ibid., p. 190
18 A. Gramsci (1973), p. 12
19 A. Gramsci (1949), p. 122, and M.A. Macciocchi, p. 163.
20 A. Gramsci (1949), pp. 29-30, and M.A. Macciocchi, p. 163.
21 A. Gramsci (1949) (1966 edition), p. 160 (“Egemonia e democrazia”), and p. 161 (“Società
civile e società politica”)

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22 Cf. A. Gouldner (1980), especially the chapter “Civil Society in Capitalism and Socialism.”
23 Cf. C. Offe (1984), Introd. by J. Keane, pp. 31-32.
24 Each one of these traits of a liberal order gives rise to sets of issues about which there is a
considerable literature. For obvious reasons they are left unexplored here.
25 This is so pace those latter-day apologists of political apathy who claim that it has salutary
effects for democracy, since it makes it more “stable.” Political theorists who embrace this
view seem to assume that a very active popular participation within the framework of liberal
democracy and relative pluralism must inevitably lead to mass frenzy, Stimmungsdemokratie
and other evils of mass politics. Cf. S. Giner (1976).
26 There may therefore be greater affinity between citizenship, on the one hand, and social
class, on the other, than T.H. Marshall seems to assume. They are not in every sense,
mutually antagonistic trends of advanced societies. Cf. T.H. Marshall (1950).
27 For an account of these trends of cf. P.C. Schmitter and G. Lehmbruch (1979), and S. Giner
and M. Pérez Yruela (1979).
28 W. Fellner (1949).
29 R.M. Unger (1976).
30 R. Sennett (1977).
31 F. Hirsch (1977).
32 S. Giner (1984).
33 B. Weil (1981), p. 101.
34 C. Offe (1978), p. 37.

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