Was ‘Civil Society’ Robbed? (Part I)

As I have mentioned in my previous column, the main task of this piece is to discuss the keyword, CIVIL SOCEITY, with reference to the contemporary social-political affairs, in our country.  Since it has openly been mentioned by many critics that the term of civil society has been ruthlessly misused in the recent past, I think it is important to revisit (or rather to retake) the ‘use of this term’ not only as a concept in the political vocabulary but also as a tool in contemporary political practices. Thus, questions that we should be asking includes, how this term means to us in our day today affairs, what impact it has placed on us in understanding the political situation in our times, and most importantly, what is the role that the civil society plays in larger social settings such as the State mechanism and its apparatus. 

According to the text that I have discussed in my previous column, Keywords for Today: A 21 Century Vocabulary, the term CIVIL has derived from Latin and French, then later started to be used in English with varied meanings. That different meanings vary from words such as ‘polite’, ‘courteous’, ‘not rude’ up to ‘Rights’ related meanings in political theory. It further mentions that, in terms of political theory, the meaning of word Civil has been changed dramatically from one end to another. For example meaning of the term CIVIL starts  ‘accepting the State by limiting the power of monarchy’ and goes to the level of ‘limiting the State by accepting the rights of the individuals’. It should be noted here that this change has not happened overnight in a quick manner but it took a long journey starting from English (rather Scottish) philosophical tradition beginning with John Lock up to the Continental European thinking which was developed mainly based on Germen enlightenment. It was in this development that we could see Hegel’s famous definition of it, which says that “civil society means a space of activity by citizens who belong neither to family nor to the state!” This is the definition that was used by classical Marxism to analyze the role of this phenomenon (Civil Society) as part of the bourgeois society.

Dr. Charitha Herath

Senior Lecturer at the University Of Peradeniya

Writer can be reached via charith9@yahoo.com

Sunil Khilnani, a prominent scholar on South Asian History, in the book which he co-edited with Sudipta Kaviraj, Civil Society: History and Possibilities, argues that the concept of Civil Society did not receive significant attention until the late post second world war era, though the term was used by many different philosophers such as Lock, Hegel and Marx in their texts. Khilnani argues that it was taken back into mainstream political discussions in post-war period from two lines of thoughts. One thinking was based on new theoretical interventions aimed to defend the liberal values and individual liberty from the political authority. The other one was based on the re-reading the process of Marxist revolutionary strategies which was inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s thinking. More prominently, Khilnani says, this new intellectual movements based on the political Left and the Right ‘reinvented’ the use of the word civil society in Political Theories in late 1950’s. If we look at the liberal argument further, we could see that it was initiated with the Isaiach Berlin’s famous essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty” where he argues that the demarcation between private life and the public authority should be drawn in order to protect the liberty and freedom. And, it was further argued that recognizing the variety of levels of personal and collective endeavors (civil collectives) out side the state would be important in this regard.

As a new development of Marxist theory, Gramscian concept of hegemonic power and his analysis on how such hegemonic influences formed a   superstructure of the society has become one prominent way of defining this term.   Gramscian’s argument could be viewed as relocating the Marxist scheme of thoughts on revolution. In this argument he emphasized that the decisive struggle for defeating hegemonic power belongs to the capitalist class and it is inherently important in the revolutionary politics.

These two theoretical readings of civil society play a crucial part in introducing this concept into post colonial countries like in Sri Lanka. As commonly accepted, the ‘order’, which has been absorbed by the post colonial-subjects mainly driven from the West regardless of its theoretical base whether it comes from Liberal right or Marxist left. Issues of introducing the term Civil society into postcolonial countries have been discussed by many academics. It is important to mention here that the situation that a post-colonial social setup face in redefining the word civil society was well analyzed by Partha Chatterjee’s in his excellent paper on this subject under the title of “On Civil and Political Society in Post-Colonial Democracies”. 

In terms of an academic observation, it can be argued that the introduction of Civil space into Sri Lankan society, in the western terms, has also shown very complicated and unclear picture.  In my opinion there are three stages that we could take in to account as important segmentations of the work with regard to civil society in Sri Lanka. The first stage starts from colonial administration and ends with the 1977/78 social-constitutional changes. The second stage starts from 1978 and ends with the political change in 1994. The third stage of my calculation starts from 1994 and goes up to now.

I will discuss these three stages in my next column.