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The legend of civil society (2)

From the 13th century onwards, the concept of civil society changed shape gradually in the hands of Western thinkers. It even swung from one extreme to another during the era of the Enlightenment and 18th- and 19th-century political revolutions.

“Was that because your so-called thinkers were getting more enlightened than ever?” Kabsat Kandu asked with just the right pinch of sarcasm.

Actually, no. It was because the economic landscape also started changing towards its present form. Farming became more intensive. Slaves and serfs strained at their yokes. They waged repeated peasant revolts to achieve some degree of emancipation.

Trade became brisker. Machinery and mass production methods turned handicraft shops into capitalist-owned factories. Demographics changed, with millions of landless peasants moving into industrial towns to become wage workers.

The old system of social classes – nobility and commoner, feudal lord and serf, monarch and subject, master and apprentice – was rapidly dissolving. More and more people could no longer live with old feudal practices and beliefs.

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St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) was among the first mainstream Christian thinkers to see the changing signs of the times.

Like Augustine, he insisted that social life outside state affairs (what we now consider civil society, including family life, commerce, etc.) was subordinate to the Church and State as the higher realm of authority. But Aquinas now asserted that this civil society was a natural human condition that evolved on its own – not a product of Original Sin.

Luther (1483-1546) and other Reformation thinkers pushed the idea further. They insisted that the Church was separate from the state, and that all Christians were equal before God whatever their social class. Thus, they began to look at civil society as a private sphere of individuals managing their many social concerns outside state affairs.

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“You’re saying that these Churchmen viewed individual faith, family life, livelihood, business firms, community traditions – even my favorite basketball team and sexy dance group, practically everything else outside the state – as comprising civil society?” asked Kabsat Kandu.

Yes, my friend. The Sexbomb Dancers would have been considered part of civil society, had they been gyrating for a living in a 16th century English whorehouse.

At the same time, the Church, with great reluctance, gradually lost its institutionalized state functions and receded into the political background. This gave the secular state a freer hand to rule over all of civil society.

“That’s impossible here in our country. The bishops are only biding their time before they intervene,” Kabsat Kandu stated with absolute certitude.

Maybe so, my friend, but that’s another story. Let’s get back to the European Enlightenment.

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From the 16th to the early 18th century, the idea and term “civil society” (in its French and English versions societe civile and civill societie) again became widely used in the Western world as synonym for “political society,” or “commonwealth,” or “body politic”.

The decline of feudalism and the growth of free-enterprise capitalism strengthened the idea of civil society as separate from but still comprising the basis of state power.

It was actually similar to the ancient and medieval idea of “all citizens” (that is, excepting slaves and serfs) as political community, as the basis of the state. Only this time, the Enlightenment thinkers agreed that all individuals of whatever social class – including the most threadbare pauper – must be included among the citizenry, enjoying certain universal rights in equal measure as the most bejewelled prince.

The new thinking reflected the rise of European nation-states in the 17th and 18th centuries, first led by absolute monarchs who concentrated power away from localized centers of feudal authority, then later in the form of constitutional democracies that wrested power from absolutist monarchies.

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Early Enlightenment thinkers saw the state as the result of a social contract within civil society. For example, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) granted that all members of society exercised inalienable rights, and on that basis, they entered into a sort of “social contract” to form the state and give it the mandate to rule over all of society.

In Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (written in 1689-90), for the first time, he explicitly discussed civil society as the basis of the state. The underlying economic society, which he called “natural society,” was fragmented into individuals with conflicting interests. But people may agree to bond into civil society to secure their common rights through the state.

“I’m getting bored with your Englishmen thinkers,” Kabsat Kandu cut in with a yawn. “They, sorry to say, haven’t met the likes of GMA. She faked our signatures on the social contract, like Marcos, and now she wants to dictate and notarize a new one.”

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Patience, my friend, we’ll get to that in a while.

Back to the Enlightenment. The three leading Scottish thinkers of that time – David Hume (1711-1776), Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), and Adam Smith (1723-1790) – were also into this civil society stuff. They are an interesting trio because they were actually close friends of each other. They differed in approach, but they helped each other reinvent the concept of civil society and make it compatible to modern capitalist thinking. You could say they sang in three-part harmony.

Hume was the soprano, the hard-nosed practical individualist. According to him, individuals naturally pursue their self-interests. So long as they are reasonable and law-abiding, they eventually advance the interests of society as a whole.

For Hume, public interest is nothing but the sum of individual private interests. Let the state ensure individual freedoms, he said, and everything else will fall into place. Hume’s “civil society” was nothing more than a convenient social device for pursuing everyone’s personal goals.

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Not so, said Hume’s friend Ferguson. In a soothing baritone, he declared that there is innate human capacity for benevolence and sociability, and this is the basis of civil society.

In his An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson conceded the strong human drive for personal gain and self-interest. But unlike Hume, he insisted that people are more often motivated by generosity and group solidarity. Civil society means mutual help leading to mutual benefit, and it has always been the most important trait of human communities, he said.

Adam Smith, booming in a solid bass voice, mostly sided with Hume. In his Wealth of Nations (1776), he described the concept of civil society as a sphere of self-regulating economic activity based on self-interest, not generosity.

In Smith’s merciless world of capitalism, civil society is composed of three components of production – land, labor, and capital – that yield three types of reward: rent, wages, and profits. This realm of civil society was apart from the state but supported by it.

In fairness to Smith, he agreed with Ferguson that civil society is bound together by shared moral values. But these values, he said, are built around economic relationships driven by mutual self-interest.

In short, said this leading 18th century theologian of capitalism, the realm of civil society is the marketplace, and our ethics are perfected through the market.

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At this point, Kabsat Kandu broke into a frighteningly devilish cackle. “By God, this Smith is right on the mark. I thought so too! If some top-600 civil-society coniotic matron approaches me now to sign their pro-GMA petition, I know what to tell her.”

Which is…? I asked.

“That their civil-society petition belongs to the marketplace.”

Marketplace – of ideas?

“No, market wrapper. Para bungon ti tinapa.” #

The legend of civil society (1)
Romancing the sword (2)
Romancing the sword (3)

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