E Pluribus Unum
“Civil society,” a term once used by a professor at the University of Berlin in the 1800s (one G.W.F. Hegel), means daily life as it occurs separate from the government or the state. Long dormant, the phrase was resurrected by dissident Eastern European intellectuals raging against their totalitarian states in the 1980s.
Today, the phrase has been co-opted by American intellectuals, politicians and pundits. As political theorist Michael Walzer reminds us, through our “unions, churches, political parties and movements, cooperatives, neighborhoods . . . we have lived in civil society for many years without knowing it.” Yet the path by which we strengthen our own civil society is in dispute. From conservative William Bennett to liberals at Washington’s Brookings Institution, many herald the importance of strengthening domestic civil society. In “A Place For Us,” political scientist and public intellectual Benjamin Barber offers arguments for rebuilding our fraying democracy.
Barber presents the competing notions of civil society found in America today before offering his own version, which he does by drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s civic republicanism as a model. He outlines conservatives’ hunger for a return to a less complicated, nostalgic time when families appeared to be intact and authority-offering institutions like the church seemed to hold society together. He cites communitarians gravitating to a definition of civil society that mimics this nostalgia in their desire for a less contentious world. Others (Barber among them) invest in the notion of civil society because it strengthens democracy and the role of citizenship in an era of global expansion and immense change, even if it brings contention in its wake.
Barber’s definition is simple: “In an ideal civic architecture of free nations, the space that accommodates the mutuality of ‘you and me’ is civil society.” He presents two competing notions of civil society, what he terms the “prince” versus the “merchant.” The latter is civil society embraced by conservatives, libertarians and New Democrats in which the market leads the way. The former is a civil society dominated by a New Deal model of government.
Barber offers a third alternative, a model promoting stronger democracy and social justice. “My premise,” Barber writes, “is that only in the civic terrain lying between the extremes of ‘Prince and Merchant,’ of big government and wholly private commercial markets, can we mediate between public and private, between community and individual, and between the power of public communities and the liberty of private individuals. The idea of civil society can democratize our ‘princes’ and thus relegitimize government at the same time that it civilizes and thus tames our merchants.”
To make his point, Barber discusses three recent White House projects: President Clinton’s and Colin Powell’s bipartisan effort to renew voluntarism in America begun last year with a volunteer weekend in Philadelphia; Americorps, which is Clinton’s national service program; and the Apparel Industry Partnership being promoted by the White House as a tripartite effort by government, industry and unions (including concerned citizens) to close sweatshops at home and abroad.
Regarding the volunteer summit, Barber is critical and rightfully so. Barber supports conflict as a way to strengthen democracy and therefore shuns the trend toward bipartisanship. “ ‘Bipartisan’ and ‘apolitical,’ supposedly virtuous adjectives in the language of civil society, may suggest something laudable in an era as skeptical about politics as ours, but they also suggest tokenism and insipid efforts to avoid real problems,” Barber warns.
Where Clinton has succeeded, according to Barber, is in projects like Americorps, in which Clinton’s “distinctly democratic rhetoric of service and volunteerism . . . treats service volunteers and the people they serve, too, as citizens.” The fact that this program is a target of the Republican budget cutters in Congress should put to rest the notion of building bipartisan support for a civic culture that nurtures the responsibility of the citizenry, which Clinton desires and Republicans apparently do not.
In an otherwise intriguing discussion of how consumer and public pressure can weigh on business to do the right thing, Barber mistakenly cites the work of the Apparel Industry Partnership as completed. In fact, the White House continues to lobby for a completed document upon which labor, industry and government can agree to raise standards, but agreement without contention is proving to be difficult. In today’s global marketplace, there is no consensus between unions and industry on issues like the rights of workers to a decent standard of living. Barber is right, though, to hope that ongoing discussion can move toward a consensus.
Actually, the Clinton presidency is the perfect laboratory to debate these varying definitions of civil society, because Clinton is so intent on defining a new kind of politics and a new kind of Democrat. But when Clinton leans too much toward the merchant, in opposition to the prince--and if he forgoes a third way--the contradictions become apparent.
For instance, isn’t it ironic that a president who has given so much verbal and symbolic attention to restoring public space talks about the American people having “hired” him to do a job? Why not use the proper term, “elected”? Perhaps Clinton is leaning too much toward mercantilism, endangering his own self-professed--and worthy--project of strengthening civic involvement. The goal for civil society is to enrich the role of the citizen. It is not enough merely to reinvent government. Nor is it enough merely to promote a volunteerism that, as Barber argues, promotes “independence,” when the goal should be “interdependence.”
Much is at stake today. As Barber argues, multinational corporations know no loyalty to community or nations, only to corporate shareholders. Barber relies heavily here on his previous book, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” in which he put forward two opposing world views of a raw capitalism versus a raw tribalism, in which the symbol of Coca-Cola or Disney reigns in the former Eastern bloc or even war-torn Bosnia and in which Americans, too, fall prey to the power of the corporation as it strips away all loyalty to community or nation. Barber expands on some of his earlier themes by outlining a scenario for more corporate responsibility and more consumer activism. Indeed, his prescription appears to be working, in the apparel industry, for example, where, building on his earlier discussion of the White House effort, he advocates enhancing “corporate responsibility by using the demand side, the consumer side, to modify corporate behavior.” Recent polling by Marymount University in Virginia showed that more than half of consumers polled want to know that the clothes they buy aren’t made in sweatshops. Some, though not all, manufacturers are trying to improve the working conditions in their factories, partly responding to growing consumer pressure.
Barber’s ultimate hope for strengthening civil society is certainly desirable. He pragmatically observes that “the economic reality of jobs vanishing at the very moment when we are reaffirming the ideology of work, calling the work ethic our core value in the politics of welfare reform” presents a problem. “In our civilization, work has thus endowed human life with meaning, dignity, and status. Since economic health has been a condition for, as well as a consequence of, the growth of democracy, work has also been seen as undergirding the virtues of a free society. This link is manifest in the classical connection between the Protestant lionization of industry, thrift and work and the growth of capitalist democracy.”
Today’s global economy includes technological advances that increasingly make many forms of work scarce. As work disappears, Barber argues, we must look to new ways to define ourselves. Making ourselves good citizens is the perfect route. “Democracy depends on leisure, on time to be educated into civil society, time to participate in deliberation, time to serve on juries, occupy municipal magistracies, volunteer for civic activities,” he writes.
Barber applauds efforts of the present socialist French government to reduce the workweek as an elixir against unemployment. He advocates job sharing in the United States. But he warns that unless we “find new ways to distribute the fruits of nonlabor-based productivity to the general population, whether or not they work for their living, more citizens will become poor in economic and social terms and the system itself will be undermined and destroyed by political instability, new forms of class war, and--most ironic of all--by not enough income-earning consumers to buy all the goods in this labor-free world.” Indeed, the French experiment is a bold one, which we should examine. Yet we are already at risk from increasing inequality between the rich and the working poor. Barber is correct to warn about future risks as work is restructured.
We are so far from a time when displaced workers can enjoy the fruits of citizenry that much of Barber’s argument sounds utopian. We can only hope, for the sake of our democracy, that this book is less a utopian tract and more a textbook for our future.