On Civil Society: Why Eastern Europe's Revolutions Could Succeed

When the dissident East European intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s were trying to imagine what kind of community they wanted in place of communism, they turned back to the concept of civil society, an archaic term rooted so far back in the Enlightenment that most West European intellectuals had forgotten its meaning. Instinctively, however, East Europeans knew what it meant: the kind of place where you do not change the street signs every time you change the regime.

The teachers, writers, and journalists of the Czech underground, the shipyard workers and intellectuals of Poland's Solidarity, and the pastors and laymen who met in East German church crypts did more than dream of civil society. They sought to implant one in the very womb of communist society. The philosophical study groups in basements and boiler rooms, the prayer meetings in church crypts, and the unofficial trade union meetings in bars and backrooms were seen as a civil society in embryo. Within those covert institutions came the education in liberty and the liberating energies that led to 1989. In the revolutions of that year -- in Hungary, Poland, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics -- civil society triumphed over the state.

In the communist utopia, true community would transcend all human divisions. In civil society, however, division and diversity, checks and balances, are of the essence. Political power is fenced off from cultural power and economic advantage, officeholders do not enrich themselves from office, power does not confer cultural authority, and social position does not entail cultural or political influence. A free society, acting through the press and its elected representatives, restrains the state, and the law restrains both. Needless to say, no civil society has ever lived up to this goal, and the tension between the formal promise of bourgeois society and its often sordid practice has served civil society's totalitarian enemies well. Yet the formal promise is more than hypocrisy: it remains the standard against which civil society judges itself and from which it finds renewed impetus to reform.

Civil society may be a flawed ideal, but in one central aspect there is no gulf between promise and performance. In a civil society, no paradise beckons. Church and state are divided; no civil religion is enforced or endorsed. Protected by a web of mutually restraining institutions, individuals are free to pursue their own private visions of paradise. The chief attraction of civil society to East European intellectuals was that it renounced an enforceable vision of the good life toward which unhappy souls could be force?marched.

Since the 1980s, the renewed East European interest in civil society has returned West European intellectuals to a concept they had forgotten. Ernest Gellner's book is not the first to observe this phenomenon, but it is certainly the most penetrating and profound. Gellner is a Czech?born, British?trained philosopher, anthropologist, and social theorist, formerly a professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University and now director of the Center for the Study of Nationalism at the Charles University in Prague. His new book brings together insightful East European thinking about civil society, an anthropologist's interest in non?European points of comparison, and a real grasp of the political theory of the Enlightenment. The book will fascinate both students of social theory and policymakers and journalists concerned with the mechanics of transition in Eastern Europe.

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

The idea of civil society emerged in the European republic of letters in the eighteenth century as philosophers and historians sought to come to terms with the capitalist modernity emerging all around them.ffi They realized that market economies were rapidly bursting the state's integument of mercantilist regulation. They also saw that this transnational market economy had emerged in tandem with a bourgeois society that was also self?regulating. The idea of the invisible hand sought to capture what was distinctively self?acting and self?correcting about market and society alike. The great Scottish philosophers -- Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and David Hume -- called this new social formation a "civil society" to distinguish it from the "savage and barbarous" tribal societies observable in the New World. A "civil" society was civilized and ordered by the rule of law. Unlike tribal society, it was also large?scale and held together by impersonal bonds of interest rather than ties of kin and blood. The Scottish thinkers could see that it was a highly segmented society, with a division of labor and a class system. It was also, to a degree some found frightening, a self?correcting mechanism in which the selfish actions of myriad individuals, brought together only by the rule of law, managed to produce an orderly and dynamic accumulation of prosperity unprecedented in human history.

A civil society, as the eighteenth?century theorists understood it, was not necessarily a democratic society. The ancien régime in France was not a democracy, yet it enjoyed a vigorous civil society. What a commercial economy absolutely required, Hume maintained, was not democratic government, but "regular government," that is, the rule of law. And while a civil society was inconceivable without a market, it was not a creature of the market. Indeed, the reverse was the case. As the Scottish philosophers believed, it was civil society -- especially the pressure of its public opinion -- that determined how free, efficient, and honest a market would emerge.