Pai 713 Governance and Global Civil Society - Edwards’ Civil Society

Civil Society

Patrick S Boyd Sr

PAI 713 Governance and Global Civil Society

21 September 2015

Professor Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken

Civil Society

        Edwards’ Civil Society – like any good introductory text on a large subject - made me feel like I understood civil society less than I had previously believed I understood it and in the process expanded the scope of my understanding on the topic. Previously, my understanding of civil society was limited to what he terms “associational life.” Trade unions, NGO’s, and other voluntary citizen’s groups were the extent of my imagining of civil society. Edwards’ expanded that idea in the book, demonstrating that among theorists civil society contains a more diverse set of ideas.

The first major idea Edwards contributed to my understanding was that of civil society as the “good society.” This denotes a society in which ideals are worked into societal norms; the good society is the society we want to live in. Edwards asserts that norms differ slightly from culture to culture and over time, but have “common denominators” such as “tolerance, non-discrimination, non-violence, trust and cooperation…along with freedom and democracy so long as these are not defined exclusively in Western terms. (42)” (He does not, however, tell the reader how Eastern definitions of “freedom” and “democracy” differ from Western definitions.) The idea that a pursuit of Utopia was in fact “civil society” was a new facet to my understanding.

The second major contribution to my understanding of the term civil society was the idea that the public sphere itself embodied “civil society” – that the public space in which open debate takes place is civil society itself. Edwards presents Habermas’s theories on a “discursive public sphere” in which citizens can “talk about common concerns in conditions of freedom, equality and non-violent interaction” (58), and discusses the historical views of John Keane on the subject. Most interestingly, Edwards says that “theories of the public sphere demand a return to the practice of politics, not as an elite occupation in which some of the public take part once every four or five years through elections, but as an ongoing process through which “active citizens” can help to shape both the ends and the means of the good society. (59-60)” This idea of the necessity of the citizenry becoming part of governance and not just the politics of elections – or even that of people making donations to organizations was enlightening.

Also in this section, Edwards brings up the idea of both the toleration of dissent in discussion and the “willingness to argue without quitting the debate when other, more persuasive, voices take the stage (59). I believe that I have always felt that this was an important part of democratic society, but I do not think that until I read it, I had ever articulated it as such. It was educational to see it as a part of “civil society” as a whole.

Edwards’ larger argument in the book was essentially that none of the three presented forms of civil society – associational life, the good society, and the public sphere - could adequately effect change or fully explain the idea of civil society by itself. Instead he proposes that all three viewpoints should be embraced so that one can shore up weaknesses in the other as explanations for what civil society is – and as a vehicle of change.