Civil Society in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century: Between Democratic Deepening, Social Fragmentation, and State Crisis

Abstract

Civil society is a concept that was bound to the West until the beginning of the third wave of democratization (Cohen and Arato 1992; Keane 1988). The concept of civil society emerged in the nineteenth century, around 1820 (Riedel 1984:132), as a dualist concept capable of expressing two changes brought about by Western modernity: the differentiation between the family and the economic sphere caused by the abolition of bondage and the differentiation between state and society. In this context, social differentiation meant that “… the state is not the state if it always merges with civil society and that the latter is not society when it is political society or the state” (Riedel 1984:133). In its first formulation civil society is a dualist concept which expresses the beginning of a process of state and society differentiation in the West. It has also found at least two other formulations in the nineteenth century: the Scottish enlightenment formulation and the Tocquevellean. In the former, civil society is linked to the development of a market economy and the market is deemed as fulfilling a civilizing mission. Civil society in this version is linked to the pacification of social spaces and the introduction of new habits fostered by a market economy (Ferguson 1995). Last but not least, civil society assumed a collective action dimension with Tocqueville. For him, “… the most democratic country in the world now is that in which men have in our time carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires and have applied this new technique to the greatest number of purposes” (Tocqueville 1969:514).