The State and Civil Society: Revisiting the Past, Assessing the Present

From absolutism to liberalism and from liberalism to mass democracy, the modern Western state has been characterised by a special relation of concern and exchange with its people, at first as its subjects and eventually as citizens and members of civil society. In turn, the operation of modern civil society has been marked by a progressively active engagement with the state. Normative studies of the relations between government and society have a long tradition, especially strong in the second postwar period. More recently, studying the so-called quality of democracy, in order to strengthen it, has become a cottage industry, recruiting a large number of scholars. Quality democracies are unquestionably democracies formally and de facto guaranteeing freedom, the rule of law, political participation, political equality, competition, vertical and horizontal accountability, and responsiveness (Diamond and Morlino 2004). Unquestionably, all of these qualities have to do with two aspects of the government-society pairing. They have to do with the proper set-up of each, and with the proper set-up of their relations. Without a doubt, in sum, proper government, proper society and proper relations have been at the core of what makes a democracy authentic. So much for norms and aspirations. Who would not agree? But there is a complication. Each of these norms and aspirations is broadly stated and therefore lends itself to different interpretations. Further, there is an unprecedented difference in the way in which norms were interpreted until the close of the last century, and the way they are understood today by a number of national and international systems of governance. This essay is interested in the impact of these differences upon present national democracies. Historically, how did matters stand, in norms and aspirations, and in practice? And how do they stand today?

I begin with the present day; I will then go back to the past. Speaking of proper government, proper society, and proper relations as understood today and practiced in the West, I wish to recall the often quoted statements which two major democratic leaders issued toward the closing of the last century. In 1981, in his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan declared, 'In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem'. On September 23rd, 1987, the British magazine Woman's Own, in an interview with Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister since 1979, reported the following statement by the prime minister, '[People] are casting their problem on society. And you know what, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families [...] and people must look to themselves first'. Thatcher repeated the statement almost verbatim in her speech at her party's annual conference of the same year. Placed side by side, the two statements by Reagan and Thatcher converge in impeaching democratic government, civil society and their close, long-standing interaction as understood and operating since their very inception. They offer a completely different, deconstructing perspective on what had been considered and practiced as proper in all three aspects. Reagan's and Thatcher's were emphatically resonant statements, but uttered by two world political leaders they were more than mere rhetoric. In fact, they announced the final entrance of so-called neoliberalism in the life of advanced democratic states and their citizens. As a set of beliefs – anthropological, social and political as much as economic – neoliberalism goes back to the immediate postwar period. As practiced by international organisations, in programmes of international assistance and in the restructuring of dependent and peripheral states, neoliberalism became operative sometime before the 1980s. But it is only in the last thirty years or so that neoliberalism has come to display the full range of its ambitions and achievements: its pervasively 'creative destruction' of the politics and collective life of advanced democracies.

Certainly, the paths to neoliberalism have not been uniform, sequential and ordained; its geographical development has been uneven; different traces and combinations of it are found in different countries, in domestic and global organisations. An unmitigated cogent display of its achievements and ambitions is found among Western democracies, and more so in the United States than in the UK. Hence, this essay will devote progressive attention to the United States as an exemplary case of what is at stake. The essay does not study the history and global causes of neoliberalism. Rather, it wishes to observe its operation, its capacity for destructive creation, and the construction of its appeal. As to the external causes of neoliberalism, I limit myself to the observation that neoliberalism, not just as a doctrine but more importantly as an active political movement and a system of governance, developed from a concerted reaction to the objective crisis of advanced global and financial capitalism of the 1970s. With the help of David Harvey (2005), who offers a synthetic but well-documented analysis of the earlier developments in the global politics of neoliberalism, I buttress the observation with a 'history in time' remark. The stagflation of the 1970s came at the end of a half-century stretch during which, in the United States, the income of common people grew, while the share controlled by the highest earners fell and remained restrained after the war and the economic expansions that followed it. Harvey comments,

While growth was strong, this restraint seemed not to matter. To have a stable share of an increasing pie is one thing. But when growth collapsed in the 1970s [...] then upper classes everywhere felt threatened [...] [I]n the 1970s [the control of wealth by the top 1 per cent] plunged precipitously [...] The upper classes had to move decisively. [...] (Harvey 2005: 15)

And move they did; reversing, with the decisive assistance of developing neoliberal policies, their decline. Blyth (2002) offers in this regard a comparative analysis of the 1930s' and 1970s' great transformations and the contrasting interests (labour vs business) they respectively mobilised and served.

But the unfolding of neoliberalism following the 1970s came, more significantly, from the construction of powerful alternative ideas pushing to replace the Fordist consensus with a new narrative. It is to this narrative aspect, and to its intellectual pedigree, that I will devote special attention throughout, because narratives can act, and did act in the case of neoliberalism, as...