The Idea of Civil Society

As the countries of East-Central Europe struggle to create liberal democracy and the United States and other Western nations attempt to rediscover their own tarnished civil institutions, Adam Seligman identifies the neglect of the idea of "civil society" as a central concern common to both cultures today. Two centuries after its origins in the Enlightenment, the idea of civil society is being revived to provide an answer to the question of how individuals can pursue their own interests while preserving the greater good of society and, similarly, how society can advance the interests of the individuals who comprise it. However, as Seligman shows, the erosion of the very moral beliefs and philosophical assumptions upon which the idea of civil society was founded makes its revival much more difficult than is generally recognized. Seligman argues that the conjoining of individual and public interests as the mutually validating bases upon which civil society depends rests on a synthesis of reason and revelation that began to unravel in the modern West even before it was fully realized. The belief in a transcendent morality or a naive notion of moral sentiments, so central to the idea of civil society from John Locke onward, owed much to the heritage of Christian individualism and thus to an ethos that resists contemporary translation. However, according to Seligman, these ideas did indeed find expression in the social and political reality of one nation - eighteenth-century America. There, what Robert Bellah would later call the American "civil religion", a unique vision of individualism, liberty, and belief in the perfectibility of humankind was created through a synthesis of natural lawdoctrines and the heritage of Puritanism. But, as Seligman argues, by the nineteenth century, this ideal became distorted by the problems associated with the demands of modern citizenship and, in Europe, the rise of socialism. Paradoxically, every new elaboration of citizens' rights, whether in the extension of the franchise in the nineteenth century, or in today's increasing demands for entitlements, has diluted the very communality upon which civil society is based. As writers across the political spectrum are returning to the idea of civil society, Seligman shows that trust, expressed both in individual relationships and in the design of social institutions, remains the most elusive, yet most vital ingredient, without which efforts to revive this concept are doomed to fail.