Abstract
The civil society concept is popularly multidisciplinary in utility and reference, yet, modernity has witnessed its worst misapplications and abuse, so much that it is controversially contended to be both something and nothing. This historical exploration of its origin and founding values had discovered the point of departure and distortions to its pristine virtue and its eventual abuse. It is argued that the pristine civil society maintained a Pareto elite/mass balance until the tragic rise of feudalism and the Church in socio-political calculations of the middle ages. The ensuing scenarios ensured the tragic crippling of the civil society; the triumph of the elite and the inconsequentiality of the masses. The elite have since consolidated on the post Westphalian and Industrial Revolution gains to redefine and manipulate the concept, firstly, towards the continual political ignominy of the masses, and, secondly, for perpetual elite dominance of the state, and the academia have been duped into complicity with the elite. The case is thus made on the imperative of a proper conceptualisation that would fine-tune the modern state in line with the progressive minds of the classical statesmen that fashioned the original civil society.
Highlights
What else could be seemingly enigmatic than a highly subjectivised concept whose hyperinvocations and multipronged popularity have subjected it to critical intellectual rigmarolling, inquisitions and misapplications
The omnibus concept of civil society has been one of the most contested in social discourses
Adam Seligman, the globally renowned sociologist had worriedly pointed to the problem of defining civil society and concluded that “the resulting picture is one of great ambiguity and not a little confusion” (Seligman, 1992)
Summary
What else could be seemingly enigmatic than a highly subjectivised concept whose hyperinvocations and multipronged popularity have subjected it to critical intellectual rigmarolling, inquisitions and misapplications. The civil political society is composed of the governing elite or government individual(s), and the governed civil mass, otherwise referred by Ernest Gellner as "the social residue that is left behind when the state (government) is subtracted” (Gellner is cited in Encarnación, 2006). Edmund Burke had perhaps wrongly believed that the revolutionaries in France and the British radicals of his day, who were calling for universal voting rights and an end to the monarchy, had a misguided faith in reason and abstract ideas He disapproves of any destructive revolutionary change for his above stated reason that the civil society is best led by its elite. Probably broken hearted and ignominiously in Florence later that year at 58, a nonentity of the civil mass
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