CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATE

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Civil society is much talked about, but rarely understood. What is civil society? Civil society is a concept located strategically at the cross-section of important strands of intellectual developments in the social sciences. To take account of the diversity of the concept, CCS adopted an initial working definition that is meant to guide research activities and teaching, but is by no means to be interpreted as a rigid statement:

Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organisations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organisations, community groups, women's organisations, faith-based organisations, professional associations, trades unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy group.

Some may recall that the term was en vogue in the 18th and 19th centuries, but had long fallen into disuse, and became a term of interest to historians primarily. For CCS, the answer is obvious but full of implications. For a long time, social scientists believed that we lived in a two-sector world. There was the market or the economy on the one hand, and the state or government on the other. Our great theories speak to them, and virtually all our energy was dedicated to exploring the two institutional complexes of market and state. Nothing else seemed to matter much.

According to John Locke, a British philosopher, civil society is an arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes, and values. Every human being are born free and equal, they granted all rights and privileges of the law of nature. Freedom and equality are the main point of John Locke theory where human lives with the right of property, life, liberty, and estate. Law and regulation are provided to guard these rights so any conflictions with other human can be prevented. The concepts of civil society  are somehow born from that description of human rights, civil society designed in a manners where people can get protection and socialize, and yet feel safe. Having socialized in civil society where people interacted with one another, they share common desire and interest that they try to pursuit together.  

The concept of civil society was rarely used in American discourse before the late eighties and many people are therefore unfamiliar with it.  Senator Bill Bradley defined civil society as a place where Americans make their homes, sustain their marriages, raise their families, visit with their friends, worship their God, etc. It is a place where opinions are expressed and refined, where views are exchanged and agreements made, where a sense of common purpose and consensus is forged.

            Senator Bill Bradley also gave three representative institutions of civil society in United States and they are family, neighborhood, and religion. The first one is families. In the academic arena, most theorists ignore the family as an institution of civil society. The condition of the American family, recounting a litany of disturbing facts about absent fathers and the prevalence of divorce, births outside of marriage and the proliferation of non-parental child-care.  These critics argue that the family is where Americans start to learn the basic social virtues; it is the foremost seedbed of virtue. Therefore, these phenomena amount to a cultural failure in child-rearing, the results of which can be seen in host of social problems.

The second one is neighborhood. It is a product of interaction between persons. Liberal theoreticians list relations between neighbors in their accounts of civil society, but those relations are normally relevant only insofar as they take place between unrelated individuals within a structured organization, such as a PTA meeting, a neighborhood watch group, a community organization, and the like.  They also structured groups as well, but it also extends the idea of the relevant interaction to include, and often even highlight, adamantly informal meetings, such as gossiping with a neighbor over a fence, exchanging pleasantries about sports or the weather with the lady at the dry cleaners, inviting the neighbors over for coffee, cards or a barbecue. 

Religion is the last one. Whatever one wants civil society to do, it is hard to deny that religious institutions exemplify the concept of an effectively permanent institution formed by the voluntary action of independent yet like-minded individuals. Church attendance and the public standing of religious belief have declined in America over the past generation. This trend is in some sense behind America's cultural crisis.

In our opinion civil society is simultaneously a goal to aim for, a means to achieve it, and a framework for engaging with each-other about ends and means. When these three ‘faces’ turn towards each-other and integrate their different perspectives into a mutually-supportive framework, the idea of civil society can explain a great deal about the course of politics and social change, and serve as a practical framework for organizing both resistance and alternative solutions to social , economic and political problems. Many of the difficulties of the civil society debate disappear when we lower our expectations of what each school of thought has to offer in isolation from the others, and abandon all attempts to enforce a single model, consensus or explanation. This may not deter the ideologues from using civil society as a cover for their own agendas, but it should make it easier to expose their claim and challenge the assumptions they often make.

References :

http://www.infed.org/association/civil_society.htm&ei=

http://www.kltprc.net/books/civilsociety/Chpt_1.htm

http://www.publicpolicy.umd.edu/IPPP/summer98/american_civil_society_talk.htm