Society [addendum]
Toward the end of the twentieth century, while earlier discussions of holism versus individualism did not die out, the interplay among three different but related notions of society—civil society, the corporation, and cosmopolitan society or the society of nations—an interplay adumbrated in the last two paragraphs above, began increasingly to dominate philosophical inquiry. The development that, more than any other, propelled the notion of civil society back into greater prominence late in that century was an ever more publicly articulated dissatisfaction with the totalitarian nature of the political regimes and their corresponding societies in Eastern Europe. It was widely contended that the suppressed elements of "civil society" in those countries needed to be regenerated and kept independent of the state. Hence the eventual, generally peaceful dissolution of the governments in question was seen as a triumph of the ideals of civil society.
As in the past, so in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, understandings of the meaning of "civil society" (as well as of "society") have varied widely. Some philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, have wished to exclude from the scope of civil society important aspects of the economic institutions that were so central to Hegel's use of the term and to focus on its informal, less easily quantifiable "life-world" elements. For others, the increasing power, in a world characterized by ever-accelerating "globalization," of transnational corporations—"sociétés anonymes à responsabilité limitée" in French or "Gesellschaften mit beschränkter Haftung" in German—with their essentially capitalist economic purposes and typically nondemocratic structures poses a threat to the viability of political, cultural, and other components of individual (national) civil societies; therefore, according to this line of thinking, corporations need to be treated as focal points in the philosophical analysis of the concepts of both "society" and "civil society." In addition, some have identified, and found great significance in, an emerging global civil society, exemplified especially by large transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are not essentially profit-oriented, as well as by more informal institutions and practices with similar global concerns.
Global Society?
The idea of a global civil society implies that of a global, or cosmopolitan, society as such, contrary to the previously mentioned Parsonian insistence on "boundary maintenance." Resistance to the idea of a global society stems from both methodological and ethicopolitical considerations. John Rawls, for instance, explicitly took the self-contained "closed society"—that is, the nation-state or something similar—as the appropriate abstract entity within which to develop his original theory of justice, which advocates unequal distribution of goods only to the extent to which such distribution will benefit the least advantaged member of that society. This intentional limitation of scope was a methodological preference of his, as it had been of so many of his predecessors in social theory; but it also helped enable him, when he later undertook to analyze international issues in his The Law of Peoples (1999), to reject the application of his principles of justice to the world as a whole and to refrain from endorsing cosmopolitanism as a desirable or viable ethicopolitical ideal. (Rawls did, however, introduce the somewhat novel term "Society of Peoples" to refer to those existing "peoples," by no means all, who observe the principles and ideals specified in his book.) Others have used Rawls's theoretical framework in order to develop a more cosmopolitan viewpoint than his own, one that regards "global society" as the name of an emerging contemporary reality, its parts linked by the Internet and other technological innovations, its fate bound up with newly identified shared risks, such as global warming, that some of these innovations have exacerbated, and its extreme imbalances of wealth and poverty perpetuating injustice and instability.
In sharpest reaction to globalizing tendencies and their corresponding theories have been ideologies of resurgent nationalism and religious fundamentalism. The former have, by definition, insisted on the preeminence of individual societies characterized, most frequently, by a perceived common ethnic identity. But considerations of history and genetics alike indicate to how great a measure such perceptions are the products of a particular, time-limited collective imagination, rather than reflections of some underlying truths of social ontology. As for the religious fundamentalist notion that "societies" can be differentiated according to common religious beliefs, a notion shared by some Western writers who subscribe to the vague notion (with constantly shifting boundary definitions), of a global "clash of civilizations," the existence of numerous "warring sects" within the major world religions, combined with basic questions of hermeneutics (that is, how are the sacred scriptures to be interpreted?), casts strong doubt on this way of viewing and intellectually segmenting the world.
It was a British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, rather than a professional philosopher, who is famously reported to have asserted, "There is no such thing as society." This seems a rather extreme claim concerning a supposed reality with references to which so many conversations in ordinary language are replete. It is rather the case, it would seem, that "society" is an exceptionally complex and multivocal term, the complexity and multivocity of which analyses by sociologists, such as Habermas's formalist, structuralist opponent in the broad Parsonian tradition, Niklas Luhmann, and by life-world- and praxis-oriented philosophers such as Habermas himself, the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, and Jean-Paul Sartre in his late-life contribution to social theory, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1976), have served to underscore and articulate.
Civil Disobedience; Cosmopolitanism; Multiculturalism; Postcolonialism; Republicanism.
Bibliography
Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. London: Polity, 1999.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by K. Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Cohen, Jean, and Andrew Arato. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by W. Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Jarvie, Ian Charles. Concepts and Society. London: Routledge, 1972.
Keane, John. Global Civil Society? Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Luhmann, Niklas. The Differentiation of Society. Translated by S. Holmes and C. Larmore. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, translated by A. Sheridan-Smith. London: New Left Books, 1976.
Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967.
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