Civil Society

The economic life and economic foundation of society that condition the political life and the ideology of the State.

The concept of “civil society” can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Its most basic meaning is “city-state”. It was later widely used by the representatives of classical German philosophy such as Kant and Hegel.

The founders of Marxism used the concept of “civil society” to refer to the bourgeois society on the one hand, and to the economic foundation governing the political, intellectual and cultural life of society on the other.

The concept of civil society has a profound European intellectual origin, which can be traced back to the unique political thought of the city-states in the ancient Greece and Rome, which refers to the state of life of the political community. The concept of civil society in the modern sense originated from the doctrine of Locke. Locke regarded civil society as a political society formed through the conclusion of a contract from the state of nature, and that civil society and political state are overlapping or even equivalent. After that, modern bourgeois economists, historians and philosophers commonly used this concept; for example, Smith, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and other thinkers had profound expositions on it. They usually used this concept to express the then economic relations and property relations in social life, and used the symmetrical “political society” to express the political relations such as the State and the law, and they all had different views of the relationship between civil society and the political state. Dissatisfied with Locke’s equation of civil society with the political state, Hegel made a strict distinction between the state and civil society and launched a critique of civil society. According to Hegel, civil society is the battleground of individual self-interests, the arena of conflict between private interests and public affairs, and is opposite to the higher outlook and system of the state. In a word, civil society is a society of particular self-interests, while the State is the representative of the universal interests and the highest stage of development of reason. Therefore, the State is higher than civil society, and civil society must be overcome in “its higher outlook”. Hegel has described the separation, opposition and conflict between civil society and political state. It can thus be seen that his theory of civil society has embodied a certain dialectical nature, but it was idealistic. As Marx pointed out that Hegel has inverted the relationship between the state and civil society, that is not the State that determines civil society, but civil society determines the State.

Marx’s thought of civil society had a process of formation and development. In the early period of Marx’s thought, in his works such as the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, On the Jewish Question and The Holy Family, he has criticized the abstract and mystical nature of Hegel’s concept of civil society. He understood civil society in the sense of modern bourgeois society, and through the political-economic analysis of civil society, saw that the foundation of the existence of civil society as the result of modern political revolution is private property. He held that to overcome the contradiction between public interests and private interests, the state has to abolish itself. Meanwhile, Marx, through his critique of Hegel’s idealism, clearly put forth the materialist conclusion that “civil society conditions and regulates the state” and revealed the determining impact of property relations on the state. With the gradual formation of Marx’s historical materialism, a modification took place in the meaning of the word civil society in The German Ideology: it was generally understood in terms of the relations of production, the forms of intercourse, and the relations of intercourse of society, and, for the first time, Marx and Engels clearly elucidated the fundamental principle of historical materialism that the productive forces determine the “forms of intercourse”, and that the “civil society” determines the superstructure. “The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society.” “This civil society is the true source and theatre of all history.” Thus, they pointed out that the materialist conception of history “depends on our ability to expound the actual process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis.” Regarding the change in the meaning of the concept of “civil society”, Marx said: “The word ‘civil society’ [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relationships had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organization evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name.”

Later, Marx recalled that in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher issued in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the conditions of material life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of British and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term ‘civil society’; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.” Here, Marx’s classic definition of civil society is “the totality of conditions of material life”.

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels also scientifically explained his thought of civil society, pointing out that in “modern history at least it is, therefore, proved that all political struggles are class struggles, and all struggles by classes for emancipation, despite their necessarily political form—for every class struggle is a political struggle—turn ultimately on the question of economic emancipation. Therefore, here at least, the state—the political order—is the subordinate factor and civil society—the realm of economic relations—the decisive element… in modern history the will of the state is, on the whole, determined by the changing needs of civil society, by the supremacy of this or that class, in the last resort, by the development of the productive forces and relations of exchange.” Here, Engels has particularly emphasized the “economic relations” in civil society, which is logically the same as Marx’s account. It can be said that Marx and Engels have critically inherited and creatively developed Hegel’s concept of civil society. The historical evolution of their concept of civil society is also the process of the founding of historical materialism. They profoundly revealed the essence of civil society from historical materialism. Of course, in most of Marx and Engels’ later works, the concept of “civil society” was rarely used, and was replaced by the direct use of concepts such as economic structure, economic foundation and mode of production.