Civil Society

Abstract

Civil society is often understood as a defense against excessive state power and atomized individualism, which otherwise threatens to create conditions for authoritarianism. The term can be traced to Roman juridical concepts ( ius civile ), but its contemporary use to describe contractual relations, the rise of public opinion, representative government, civic freedoms, plurality, and “civility” first appeared in seventeenth and eighteenth‐century political philosophy. Thomas Hobbes's theory of the sovereign state (Leviathan) was premised on the existence of two branches of society – political and civil – tied by a “social contract” between subjects and the state. Surrender of sovereignty to the state protected society from the war of all against all. Although the political system was the dominant part, the civil and political were mutually sustaining systems, in which private activity, while governed by sovereign laws, was otherwise bound only by conscience and the rules of civic association. Disputing Hobbes's negative views of human nature, John Locke further enhanced the status of civil society as a space of association, contract, and property regulated by the law. When, for Locke, subjects entered a commonwealth of property they contracted authority to the state for their self‐protection, but they did so conditionally, and political rule is answerable to law derived from natural rights that inhere in civil society.