HIST 407/507

Seminar: Democracy and Civil Society

Ian F. McNeely – University of Oregon – Fall 2002

http://www.uoregon.edu/~imcneely

If any one term of art can be said to encapsulate the convergence in intellectual interests among students of democracy since the fall of Communism, that term is civil society. The concept of “civil society” arose at the very dawn of the modern age, as a theory of political economy and market capitalism in the writings of Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and Hegel. After Marx subsumed it under his analysis of “bourgeois society,” a linguistically identical term in German, the concept remained bound to its evil twin from then until the 1980s. Scholars then revived and redefined it, drawing on Habermas’ account of the public sphere and Tocqueville’s analysis of the voluntary association. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and Foucault’s concept of discourse, both popular in the 1970s and 1980s, had pointed a way out of Marxism by drawing attention from economics to culture as the central locus of contestation and power in civil society. Meanwhile, the rise of gender studies—perhaps the most consequential site of scholarly innovation into the 1990s—offered a host of ways to embed civil society’s history in private life and public ideologies. Today, interest in civil society forms a cornerstone of the new interdisciplinarity, embracing historians, sociologists, and political scientists working on all regions of the modern world.

The main catalyst to civil society’s revival came from outside the universities. Leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and public intellectuals like Vaclav Havel in the former Czechoslovakia, cast themselves—and have since been seen by others—as having heroically vindicated the power of civil society, of free association and self-organization, to topple oppressive regimes. Ironically, a period of hope in Eastern Europe was followed by a burst of cultural pessimism in the United States, connected with the purported decline of civil society in this country. Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol warned that the eclipse of our historic Tocquevillean civil society had reduced Moose and Elk lodge memberships to dangerously low levels and consigned us to “Bowling Alone.” They have been joined by critics like Russell Jacoby and Richard Posner, who lament the disappearance of the Habermasian public intellectual amidst increasing scholasticism in our universities and an imperfect marketplace of ideas. Ironically, all this talk of America’s purported civic decline coincided with the larger phenomenon of economic and cultural globalization along the American model. Much more interesting, then, is civil society’s appropriation by scholars and activists working in the so-called “developing world,” where the term has been invoked to explain everything from Tienanmen Square to the Zapatista rebellions, from ecological movements in Tanzania to NGOs working for women’s empowerment in India. Here is where the concept’s enduring importance lies, not as an academic fad, but as a robust comparative paradigm that bids to replace “modernization,” the Cold War catchword of the 1960s and 1970s, as a fundamental analytical tool in understanding modern democracy.

This seminar introduces advanced students in history, sociology, political science, and anthropology to the concept of civil society. It provides a set of analytical skills for understanding democratic movements and other emancipatory transformations in a variety of historical and geographic settings. While it presumes general knowledge of modern history, no special preparation (of the type found in 300-level survey courses for example) is required. Readings include political and social theory along with case studies in political history and historical sociology. Students’ work for the course will culminate in a 15-page term paper focusing on a particular civil society movement, or theorist, anywhere in the world. I’ll provide bibliographic aids and ample research help along the way. Class participation counts 30% of your final grade; an initial contract outlining your research project, due during week 4, counts 10%. A full rough draft, which will be graded on content and count 30%, is due in class during week 9; the final draft, also counting 30% but graded more on organization and style, is due December 10.

Where to find the readings

The books by Ehrenberg, Higonnet, and Havel are availble at the UO bookstore. These, together with the books by Koven & Michel, Skocpol & Morris, and Chatterjee are also available on reserve at Knight library. All the remaining readings are on e-reserve; hard copies of these are on reserve at Knight, too.

1. Introduction to the course

Discussion of sample research topics

2. What is civil society?

John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999), intro., skim chs. 1-3, read chs. 4-5

3. Citizenship and political culture: the French Revolution

Ehrenberg, Civil Society, ch. 6 (skim 144-160 only)

Patrice Higonnet, Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)

4. Identity politics and social movements: nineteenth-century maternalism

Ehrenberg, Civil Society, ch. 6 (160-169 only)

Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (eds.), Mothers of a New World (London: Routledge, 1993), introduction plus two essays of your choice by Sklar, Sachße, Pedersen, and Koven

5. The public sphere and the state: the fall of Communism in the 1980s

Ehrenberg, Civil Society, ch. 7

Václav Havel, Summer Meditations (New York: Knopf, 1992), 1-59

Jeffrey Isaac, “The Meanings of 1989,” Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 150-179

6. Capitalism and the voluntary association: Neo-Tocquevilleanism in the 1990s

Ehrenberg, Civil Society, ch. 8

Theda Skocpol, “Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files”, The American Prospect 7 no. 25 (March 1996) and (optional) “How Americans Became Civic,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina (Washington: Brookings/Russell Sage, 1999), 27-80

George Soros, “The Capitalist Threat,” Atlantic Monthly (February 1997), 45-58

7. Globalization and Americanization: civil society outside the West?

Ehrenberg, Civil Society, ch. 9

Craig Calhoun, “Elites and Democracy: The Ideology of Intellectuals and the Chinese Student Protest Movement of 1989,” Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform, ed. Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 285-318

William F. Fisher, “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 439-464

8. Nationalism, modernization, and development: the case of twentieth-century India

Partha Chatterjee, “The Moment of Manoeuvre: Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society,” Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 85-130

Gurcharan Das, “Modern vs. Western,” India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 291-309

Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India”, originally published in The New York Review of Books 44 (1997): 55-64

9. Discussion of student projects

10. Writing clinic