The concept of “civil society” gained epic popularity in the past few decades. The discourse of civil society entered dramatically into the global political and academic scene in the 1970s with the advent of the Polish Solidarity movement. We in the West watched with amazement and tears of joy as the power of the human spirit confronted totalitarian state power in country after country.

First in Poland, then spreading to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, and the former Soviet Union (including Russia and her former satellites).

The Polish rebellion has been accurately described as “civil society against the state.” The Solidarity leaders assumed that their own people would not use terror to repress them; in turn, they could not succumb to violent forms of action. To press their claims, they created self-governing associations and publications under the nose of the party-controlled institutional framework to give themselves some breathing room and reflective learning space.

Excitement abounded. A social space influenced by but not completely absorbed into the state and economy appeared to exist, resonant with potential to topple tyrannical states. In this poignant moment, Vaclav Havel affirmed that the powerless have within themselves the power to obstruct normality, to embarrass the authorities, to point to the possibility of living life differently—to live according to the values of trust, openness, responsibility and solidarity. Persons could refuse to do power’s bidding. But they had to agree that some things were worth suffering for and that they had to be prepared to say out loud what others thought in solitude.

This implausible political discourse didn’t take long emigrating into western academia. It is veritable cottage industry these days. During the 1980s the vocabulary of civil society pervaded the social science literature. By the 1990s, the disciplinary study of adult learning had begun to host this conceptual stranger, working its emergent understanding of social learning in terms of this new orientation to understanding the dynamics of social life and struggle. The scholarly world soon recalled that the discourse of civil society had an ancient pedigree. Since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one can see that the idea of a social space, not under direct tutelage of state power, has been emerging in western consciousness and erupting in many different parts of the world. Now, social emancipation could no longer, for historical and philosophical reasons, be understood as an essentially economic question.

Simone Chambers (“A critical theory of civil society,” in S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka [Eds.], Alternative conceptions of civil society [2002]) argues compellingly that Habermas believes that one can use “liberal institutions”—the public sphere, equal citizen rights, and constitutions—to break out of authoritarian and bureaucratic modes of domination. One can both identify how the lifeworld (civil society is the lifeworld as it is expressed in institutions) is colonized by power, money, and domination and contains discursive possibilities.

Unless citizens struggle together to understand the world they inhabit, develop an alternative vision of the new world order and begin to lay its foundation, no change in the unjust economic and political order is even conceivable. The new world has to be imagined before it can appear.

Chambers (2002) is admirably clear on the centrality of the public sphere in deliberative democracy. She urges us to consider what elements must be present in cultural and political life for the public sphere to be an “arena of critical autonomous debate.” Ian Angus (Emergent Publics: an essay on social movements and democracy 2001) insists, with considerable gravity and urgency, that the vitality and openness of the public sphere is the basic way we can determine whether a society is authentically democratic. When people are excluded from voice in the public sphere, he contends, their powerlessness and misrecognition breed violence and hatred.

For her part, Chambers (2002) believes that the “malaise of modernity” is rooted in our lack of political efficacy. This assertion emerges out of Chambers’ perceptive discussion of “bad civil society.” Often idealized by its exuberant proponents, civil society can go bad; anti-progressive social movements, full of mean-spirited people, can occupy the (un)civil terrain. Chambers provides some sobering historical illustrations of how a well-organized civil society—she cites the Weimar Republic for illustration—can foster some very bad outcomes. She acknowledges that associations, clubs, churches, and families can be illiberal in outlook and non-democratic in their own internal life.

Too much hatred and anger spills out these days into everyday and political life. We can’t talk with each other anymore. Speechless, we toss firebombs at our enemies. Many of the protests around the world reveal that few are listening to anybody else. Nobody appears to consider the kind of world we want to build after the ruins of Neo-liberalism and smouldering Molotov cocktails. Social movements, for instance, lose their emancipatory potential when they are internally non-democratic.

A creative, evolving civil society learning infrastructure is challenged to find ways to build a path for those who are vulnerable and least likely to speak strongly to those with privilege and voice. When segments of society are quarantined from others—perhaps the riots in 2005 in the banlieues of Paris and the deep eruptions of the Arab Spring (M. Welton, “Subjects to citizens: adult learning and the challenges of democracy in the twenty-first century, in T. Nesbit and M. Welton, Adult Education and Learning in a Precarious Age: The Hamburg Declaration revisited [2013]) are evident examples selected from hundreds of possible examples—violence may explode, as those refusing to see or listen are targeted for hostile actions.

Thinkers as diverse as Havel, Giddens and Habermas himself agree that communicative reason is “history’s stubborn presence” (Jeffrey Isaac). Human beings have moral power to resist tyranny. The powerless have more power than they ever imagine, and moral acts of the person may reach beyond the isolated self—resonating deeply with those who are oppressed. Our oppressive conditions, be they South African apartheid, brutal communist regimes, Middle East and corporate dictatorships, or the soft coercion of consumerism, never totally exhaust us. We always possess the capacity to resist indignities. Take a look at the flames and chaos on many streets in the world: from Paris to Santiago to Barcelona to Beirut. The rage against unfulfilled needs, once bottled up, has exploded everywhere in the world. Who knows where this will lead.

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Written by Michael Welton
Image: CC
Publication date: November 7, 2019

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