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

The moral scandal of such a society, as pointed out first by Bernard Mandeville in his 1715 classic The Fable of the Bees, was that its members were brazenly and unapologetically in the service of those sins of greed and avarice that Christian teaching had always condemned. A civil society was, in Gellner's words, a profane society, a society that explicitly sought to put the lowest of human desires to productive uses. Mandeville's paradox -- private vices make public virtues -- naturalized the profane by demonstrating that capitalist individuals were more likely to promote the public good when they looked exclusively to their private interest. In modern commercial society, said Hume and Smith, the poorest laborer was better housed and clothed than in the more egalitarian and possibly more virtuous tribal societies of the past. In other words, a civil society could also be a moral order without anyone intending it to be.

It was a moral order, however, without traditional moral tutelage. In a civil society, church and state were separated, as in the United States, or, as in England, religious nonconformity coexisted with an established church. Toleration and religious pluralism were the necessary preconditions of the spirit of free inquiry that inspired its capacity for innovation and sustained its political liberty.

A civil society is committed, to use Sir Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction, to "negative" rather than "positive" liberty. Freedom is freedom from interference and concentrations of arbitrary power, and freedom's guarantee is a set of negative checks and balances designed to prevent unjust accumulation of influence. Liberty in civil society is essentially negative because there cannot be, in principle, agreement among human beings about the positive ends of political communities, beyond the protection of the liberties of the individuals who compose it. If people seek to overcome their own alienation and separateness, they can do so only as individuals or in voluntary groups. Society offers no salvations, only protections.

Throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers and historians struggled to evaluate the moral reality of the emerging capitalist order with the language of public virtue inherited from republican Rome. Adam Ferguson, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy, published an "Essay on the History of Civil Society" in 1773, which, while welcoming the wealth and liberty of the modern capitalist world, also observed that in this new society, "many of the establishments which serve to defend the weak from oppression, contribute, by securing the possession of property, to favor its unequal division and to increase the ascendant of those from whom the abuses of power may be feared." Here in embryo was Karl Marx's critique of bourgeois law. Other critics of capitalist modernity, led by Jean Jacques Rousseau, insisted that obsession with private interest would lead to neglect of public duty. Amid such neglect, despotism might thrive, and both public virtue and private liberty would be corrupted.

The young Marx, writing between 1842 and 1844, married this Rousseauian critique to a Hegelian theory of alienation. Civil society's supposed division of political, economic, and ideological power was a sham. The state was the executive committee of the ruling bourgeoisie, and law was its chosen instrument of oppression. Inspired by Hegel and the early socialists, Marx began to envision a utopia that would overcome and transcend the opposition between private and public interest. The result: a vision of paradise, beyond division, beyond "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right."

Judged from the standpoint of the twentieth century, of course, the consequences of Marx's intellectual breakthrough in 1844 can only be described as catastrophic. His contempt for bourgeois legality led inexorably toward a Leninist contempt for legality altogether. By cruel yet necessary irony, the doctrine that the bourgeois state was merely the executive committee of civil society helped to legitimize the creation of a Leninist state that abolished society altogether.

The consequences of Marx's contempt for civil society are well known. What Gellner adds is the insight that Marx remained the captive of both the classical republican and early Christian disdain for the profane. For all his attempts to rid his doctrine of any taint of mysticism or spirituality, Marx's thought remained permeated by the religious vision of man as a fallen creature, profaned by avarice and greed but capable of redemption in a community of plenty and justice. Like most German romantics, he believed that our true nature was artistic: that humankind released its suppressed potential in making and shaping rather than in huckstering and bartering.