Conceptualizing Civil Society from the Bottom Up: A Political Economy Perspective

Abstract

Regardless of how civil society is actually defined, the idea of civil society has been approached in a variety of ways. Most recently, it represents a goal for newly democratizing countries, one that the established liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America have achieved. Historically, however, the approach was more empirical and descriptive (although certainly not without normative overtones), and civil society was “discovered” rather than predicted or sought after (Black 1984; Ferguson 1966; Tocqueville 1969). Either way, this goal is often a normative one, suggesting that “civil society” is the product of a unique Western cultural heritage that, grosso modo, is essentially liberal in nature (Seligman 1992). This is one reason why the concept was both slow to be applied to Latin America and had to be transformed in the process (Avritzer, this volume).

The idea of “civil society” has increasingly become a central topic in research on democratization since the 1980s, when it was rediscovered in the social mobilization against Communist regimes in Eastern Europe that literally captured the imagination of the world, not to mention social scientists. Although the literature on democratic transitions in Southern Europe and Latin America had emphasized the role played by civil society in bringing an end to authoritarian governments (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986), the literature’s focus on elite-led processes and outcomes often overshadowed this dimension in its conclusions. The sudden collapse of Soviet-style communism further fed a growing optimism that resurgent civil societies would carry this new “revolution” toward the inevitable end of free-market economies and consolidated political democracies. As Carlos Waisman (in this volume) has shown, this “double transition” has proven far more problematic for civil society than initially anticipated.