Civil society in a democratic world

The origin of the term 'civil society' can be traced through the works of Cieero and other Romans. It derived its sustenance during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and with the demand for liberty during the French and American revolutions.

But the language and idiom of 'civil society' hit the current discourse with the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland.

With the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the resultant emergence of a number of new independent sovereign nations and after the end of the Cold War, intellectuals and political activists around the world invoked the image of civil society to mobilise citizens against repressive states.

This gave a fillip to dissident leaders to assert their rights to free speech and carve out a social place for themselves, creating unfathomable scope for citizen activism and ever-increasing romance for all-round democratisation.

In fact, the term 'civil society' is the symbol of all that is implied in the concept of democracy as understood in its wildest possible connotation and it serves as an inspirational source to all those struggling to emphasise the supremacy of individual initiative against the authority of the state.

Obviously, then, a book on civil society and democracy should concern itself with an analysis of the various dimensions of the relationship between civil society and democracy.

Carolyn M. Elliott attempts such an analysis in this edited volume containing nearly twenty essays written by distinguished scholars drawn from all over the world including well-known writers like Charles Taylor, Andre Beteille, Mark Robinson, and Lloyd Rudolph.

The volume acquires added significance in so far it also contains selected papers written by both academics and officials of voluntary agencies and presented at a conference on voluntary action and civil society.

The essays in the book present an excellent account of the diverse connotations of civil society presented to us since its articulation in the West which developed at the hands of Bentham, Monteoque, de Tocqueville, and later Marx, Gramsci, and others, and still later by Jurgen Habermas. This account includes both the structural and the normative approach to civil society.

It also concerns itself with the theorising of civil society in the light of the realities that have existed in Eastern Europe, the Third World, Latin America, and elsewhere.

The papers included in the book are by far among the best pieces written on civil society and published anywhere in the world.

In their totality, these papers present a comprehensive picture of civil society and democracy from divergent perspectives, emphasising the central theme of civil society being an alternative way of accomplishing common goals.

This theme is bound to have a great appeal to those who find democracy not being so effective. The book can claim comprehensiveness of the subject covered in so far as it deals with practically every aspect of civil society, ranging from the meaning of civil society, its conflictual relationship with the state, the interface between the civil and the political, the inspirations drawn from the civil society and the expectations from it, and the limitations of civil society as perceived through the prism of experiments in civil society.

However, a major weakness of the book is its failure to go into the question of either the ideological trappings that are fast engulfing civil society or of the role of the self-seekers who find civil society a convenient tool to use voluntary organisations for their personal gains.

If democracy means the supremacy of individuals and the sanctity of their equal rights, civil society has to address itself to a more meaningful relationship with democracy.

It has to take cognisance of the relevance of the moral factor which alone can provide stability to civil society as a factor contributing to democracy.

For this it was necessary to cast the book in the Gandhian framework. It is inconceivable to talk about either civil society or democracy outside a Gandhian framework. Indeed, it is unfortunate that the book totally lacks a Gandhian perspective.

There is of course one full article on Gandhi. But the book as a whole has no Gandhian orientation as such. What is even more deplorable is the fact that even this full article has been written, jointly, by two Americans and none of the six Indian contributors has referred to Gandhi at all.

The result is that the book remains a mere collection of excellent essays written under Western-dominated orientation.

But these excellent essays, together with an even more excellent introduction, provide welcome freshness to the academically mephitic atmosphere surrounding the ongoing discourse on civil society, a significant contribution to theoretical enrichment and conceptual clarity.

Civil Society and Democracy

Edited by Carolyn M. Elliott
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003
Pages: xii+508
Price: Rs 695