Civil Society: Definitions and Descriptions.

Author(s): O’Connell Brian

Source: Non profit and Voluntary Sec tor Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3, September 2000, p.471-478.

Brian O’Connell is founding president of Independent Sector and professor of public service at the Lincoln Filene Center of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University.

At the very time that there is so much worldwide attention to civic engagement and so much interest in this country about civil society, there is a contradictory debate swirling in higher education about whether schools and universities should teach citizenship and civil society. Some do not think the subject scholarly enough. When that disturbing notion was surfacing in the 1980s, I was invited to give the keynote address at the American Association of Higher Education’s national conference, and I took the opportunity to say the following:

The United States is the longest-lived democracy in the history of the world. This democracy has provided almost all of us with greater freedom and opportunity than any nation of human beings has ever known. Among the crucial factors that foster and preserve this democracy and those freedoms are active citizenship and personal community service. No leader or leadership institution - particularly no educator or education institution - can presume that fostering active citizenship to pro -long our democracy to extend those glorious freedoms for those who come after us is someone else’s business. (O’Connell, 1985).

Any hope of achieving awareness of civil society depends on our ability to make it strikingly visible and manifestly consequential. That begins with a solid understanding of just what civil society is and does. However, providing a crisp definition is com pounded by major differences in the way scholars view civil society. Barber (1996) says, “The more the term civil society has been used in the recent years, the less it has been understood.”

To try to make the message as clear as possible, I am going to be fairly definite about what I believe civil society is, based on almost half a century of promoting citizen service and influence.

I find that clarity on the topic has to start with correcting two common misperceptions: that civil society is synonymous with the voluntary, independent sector and that civil society is synonymous with civility. Civil society includes both the independent sector and civility but also a great deal more.

The most common agreement about civil society is that it represents the balance between rights granted to individuals in free societies and the responsibilities required of citizens to maintain those rights.

Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte (1992, p. viii), in Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, locate the primary territory of civil society as “The public spaces, in which ordinary people become participants in the complex, ambiguous, engaging conversation about democracy: participators in governance rather than spectators or complainers, victims or accomplices.”

The central argument of this book is that particular sorts of public places in the community, what we call free spaces, are the environments in which people are able to learn a new self-respect, a deeper and more assertive group identity, public skills, and values of cooperation and civic virtue. (Evans & Boyte, 1992, p. 17).

Even with these very helpful indicators, it is still a struggle to describe and place civil society in a way that causes students and leaders to respond, “I’m finally really getting it.” After repeated failures at communicating the “it,” I believe I am at least getting closer to what and where I have learned civil society to be. Acknowledging all the complexity, let me try to provide a manageable description.

Civil society begins with self, the individual, and our private lives. Too many descriptions, although acknowledging the balance between rights and obligations, leap into the duties before being sure that an individual really understands the enormous personal benefits derived from a healthy civil society. Although there is cooperation and generosity in almost all of us, there is also a lot of self-interest. We need to acknowledge it before we can move to the levels of collective self-interest and altruism. To diagram it, civil society starts with the individual, represented by the inner core - the circle (see Figure 1).

From our private lives, I move to community, where almost every element of our private lives depends on the quality of our immediate surroundings - including neighborhoods, congregations, associations, clubs, parks, muse -ums, hospitals, and local government - and where the quality of those inter -connections depends on collective obligation and performance (see Figure 2).

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