Civil Society by Michel Foucault

What is civil society? Well, all in all, I think the notion and analysis of civil society, the set of objects or elements that are brought to light in the framework of this notion of civil society, amount to an attempt to answer the question I have just mention: how to govern, according to the rules of rights, a space of sovereignty which for good or ill inhabited by economic subjects? How can a reason, a rational principle be found for limiting, other than by right or by the domination of economic science, a governmental practice which must take responsibility for the heterogeneity of the economic and the juridical? Civil society  is not a philosophical idea therefore. Civil society is, I believe, a concept of governmental technology, or rather, it is a correlate of a technology of government the rational measure of which must be juridically pegged to an economy understood as process of production and exchange. The problem of civil society is the juridical structure ( economie juridique) of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure (economie economique).


And I think that civil society – which is very quickly called society, and which at the end of the eighteenth century is called the nation – makes self-limitation possible for governmental practice and an art of government, for reflection on this art of government and so for a governmental technology; it makes possible a self-limitation which infringes neither economic laws nor the principles of rights, and which infringes neither the requirement of governmental generality nor the need for an omnipresence of government. An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of rights, and a government which nevertheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the  social.

Homo aeconomicus and civil society are therefore two inseparable elements. Homo aeconomicus is, if you like, the abstract, ideal, purely economic point that inhabits the dense, full, complex reality of civil society. Or alternatively, civil society is the concrete ensemble within which these ideal points, economic men, must be placed so that they can be appropriately managed. So, homo aeconomicus and civil society belong to the same ensemble of the technology of liberal governmentality.

You know how often civil society has been invoked, and not just in recent years. Since the nineteenth century, civil society has always been referred to in philosophical discourse, and also in political discourse, as a reality which asserts itself, struggles, and rises up, which revolts against and is outside government or the state, or the state apparatuses or institutions. I think we should be very prudent regarding the degree of reality we accord this civil society. It is not an historical-natural given which functions in some way as both the foundation of a source of opposition to the state or political institutions. Civil society is not a primary and immediate reality; it is something which forms part  of modern governmental technology. To say that it belongs to government technology does not mean that it is purely and simply its product or that it has no reality. Civil society is like madness and sexuality, what I call transactional and transitional figure realities. That is to say, those transactional and transitional figures that we call civil society, madness, and so on, although they have not always existed are nonetheless real, are born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything that constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed. Civil society, therefore, is an element of transactional reality in the history of governmental technologies, a transactional reality which seems to me to be absolutely correlative to the form of governmental technology we call liberalism, that is to say, a technology of government whose objective is its own self-limitation.

A few words, now, on this civil society and what characterizes it. I would like to try to show, at least in principle, because we are now coming to the end of the lectures, how this notion of civil society may indeed resolves the problems I have just tried to indicate. So, to start with, I will make a deplorably banal remark about civil society, namely, that the notion of civil society completely changed during the eighteenth century.

Practically until the start of the second half of the eighteenth century, civil society designated something very different from what it will subsequently designate. In Locke, for example, civil society is precisely a society characterized by a juridical-political structure. It is society, the set of individuals who are linked to each other through a juridical and political bond. In this sense, the notion of civil society is absolutely indistinguishable from political society. In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, chapter 7 is entitled : ‘Of Political or Civil Society.’ So, until then, civil society is always characterized by the existence of a juridical and political bond. It is from the second half of the eighteenth century, precisely at the time when the questions of political economy and of the governmentality of economic processes and subjects are being addressed, that the notion of civil society will change, if not totally, then at least in a significant way, and it will be thoroughly reorganized.

Of course,, the notion of civil society is presented from different angles and in various forms throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. To simplify matters, I will take the most fundamental, almost statutory text regarding the characterization of civil society. This is Ferguson’s famous text, translated into French in 1783 with the title Essais sur l’histoire de la societe civile, and which is very close to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the word ‘nation’ in Smith, moreover, having more or less the same meaning as civil society in Ferguson. We have here the political correlate, the correlate in terms of civil society, of what Adam Smith studied in purely economic terms. Ferguson’s civil society is actually the concrete, encompassing element within which the economic men Smith tried to study operate. I would like to pick out three of the four essential characteristics of this civil society in Ferguson: first, civil society understood as an historical-natural constant; second, civil society as principle of spontaneous synthesis; third, civil society as permanent matrix of political power; fourth, civil society as the motor element of history.

First, civil society as an historical-natural constant. For Ferguson, in fact, civil society is a given beyond which there is nothing to be found. Nothing exists before civil society, says Ferguson, of if something exists, it is absolutely inaccessible to us, so withdrawn into the depths of time, so anterior, so to speak, to what gives man his humanity, that it is impossible to know what really could have taken place before the existence of civil society. Whether this non-society is described in terms of solitude and isolation, as if there could be men scattered in nature without any union or means of communication, or whether it is described, as in Hobbes, in an endless war or of a war of all against all, in any case, all this –solitude or war of all against all- should be located in a sort of mythological background which is of no use in the analysis of the phenomena which concerns us.

Human history has always existed ‘taken in groups,’ Ferguson says on page four of the first volume of his Essay on the History of Civil Society. On page six he says society is ‘as old as the individual,’ and it would be as idle to imagine men not speaking to each other as it would be as idle to imagine them without feet or hands. Language, communication, and so a certain relationship between men is absolutely typical of the individual and society, because the individual and society cannot exist without each other. In short, there was never a moment, or anyway it is pointless trying to imagine a moment when we passed from nature to history, or from non-society to society. The nature of human nature is to be historical, because the nature of human nature is to be social. There is no human nature which is separable from the very fact of society. There is no human nature which is separable from the very fact of society.

Ferguson evokes the kind of myth or methodological utopia which was often taken up in the eighteenth century: Take a group of children, he says. Who have been left to bring themselves up outside any other form of society. Imagine some children put in a desert and left to fend for themselves from the youngest age, and to develop all alone without instruction or guidance. Well, what will we see if we return five, ten or fifteen years later, provided, of course, that they are not dead? ‘We would see the members of this little society eating and sleeping, herding together and playing, developing a language, dividing and quarreling,’ striking up friendships and forsaking their own self-preservation for the sake of others. So, the social bond develops spontaneously. There is no specific operation to establish or found it. There is no need of the institution or self-institution of society. We are in society anyway. The social bond has no pre-history. Saying that the social bond has no pre-history means that it is both permanent and indispensable. Permanent means that however far back we go in the history of humanity, we will find not only society, of course, but nature. That is to say, there is no need to look somewhere else for the state of nature sought by philosophers in the reality or myth of the savage, we can find it right here. We will find the state of nature in France as well as at the Cape of Good Hope, since the state of nature requires man to live in a social state. Society studied even in its most complex and developed forms,  society with the greatest state of consistency will always tell us what the state of nature is, since the state of nature requires us to live in society. So, the state of nature is permanent in the state of society, and the state of society is also indispensable for the state of nature, that is to say, the state of nature can never appear in the naked and simple state. Fergusson says: ‘In the condition of the savage, as well as in that of the citizen, are many proofs of human invention.’ And he adds this phrase which is characteristic, not because it is sort of point of origin, but because it points to the theoretical possibility of an anthropology: ‘If the palace be unnatural, the cottage is so no less.’ That is to say, the primitive cottage is not the natural and pre-social expression of something. We are not closer to nature with a primitive cottage than with a palace. It is simply a different distribution, a different form of the necessary intertwining of the social and the natural, since the social is part of the natural and the natural is always conveyed by the social. So, we have the principle that civil society is an historical constant for humanity.

Second, civil society assures the spontaneous synthesis of individuals. This returns us to what I have just said: spontaneous synthesis means there is no explicit contract, no voluntary union, no renunciation of rights, and no delegation of natural rights to someone else; in short, there is no constitution of sovereignty by a sort  of pact of subjection. In fact, if civil society actually carries out a synthesis, it will quite simply be through a summation of individual satisfactions within the social bond itself. ‘How,’ Ferguson says, ‘can we conceive a happy public if its members, considered apart, are unhappy.” In other words, there is a reciprocity between the whole and its components. Basically, we cannot say, we cannot imagine or conceive an individual to be happy if the whole to which he belongs is not happy. Better, we cannot even assess exactly and individual’s quality, value, and virtue, we cannot attribute a coefficient of good or evil to the individual unless we think of it the coefficient in the reciprocity, or at any rate unless we think of it on the basis of the place he occupies, the role he performs, and the effects he produces within the whole, and the effects he produces within the whole. We can say that a man is good, that he is fine only insofar as he is right for the place he occupies and, Ferguson says ‘produces the effect it must produce.’ But conversely, the value of the whole is not absolute and is not to be whole: ‘it is likewise true, that the happiness of individuals is the great end of civil society.’

So you can see we are not dealing with a mechanism or system of the exchange of rights. We are dealing with a mechanism of immediate multiplication that has in fact the same form as the immediate multiplication of profit in the purely economic mechanism of interests. The form is the same, but not the elements and contents. And this is why civil society can be both the support of the economic process and economic bonds, while overflowing them and being irreducible to them. For in civil society, that which joins men together is indeed a mechanism analogous to that of interest, but they are not interests in the strict sense, they are not economic interests. Civil society is much more than the association of different economic subjects, although the form in which this bond is established is such that economic subjects will be able to find a place and economic egoism will be able to play its role within it. In fact, what links individuals in civil society is not maximum profit from exchange, it is a series of what could be called ‘disinterested interests’ What will this be? Well, Ferguson says, what links individuals to each other in civil society is instinct, sentiment, and sympathy, it is the impulses of benevolence individuals feel for each other, but is also the loathing of others, repugnance for the misfortune of individuals, but possibly the pleasure taken in the misfortune of others with whom one will break. This, then, is the first difference between the bonds that bring economic subjects together and those that bring together individuals belonging to civil society: there is a distinct set of non-egoist interests, a distinct interplay of non-egoist, disinterested interests which is much wider than egoism itself.

The second, equally important difference that we see emerging by bringing in these elements I have just been talking about is that the bond between economic subjects is, if you like, non-local. The analysis of the market proves that the multiplication of profits will ultimately be brought about through the spontaneous synthesis of egotisms over the whole surface of the globe. There is no localization, no territoriality, no particular grouping in the total space the market. On the other hand, in civil society the bonds of sympathy and benevolence between some individuals are, as I was saying, the correlates of contrary bonds of repugnance and the absence of support for or benevolence towards others. This means that civil society always appears as a limited ensemble, as one particular ensemble among others. Civil society does no coincide with humanity in general; it exists in the form of ensembles at the same or different levels which brings individuals together in a number of units. Civil society, Ferguson says, leads the individual to enlist ‘on the side of one tribe or community.’ Civil society is not humanitarian but communitarian. And in fact we see civil society appear in the family, village, and corporation, and, of course, at higher levels, reaching that of the nation in Adam Smith’s sense, [in the sense given to it] a more or less the same time in France. The nation is precisely one of the major forms, [but] only one of the possible forms, of civil society.

Having said this, you can see that the bond of economic interest occupies an ambiguous position in relation to these bonds of disinterested interests which take the form of local units and different levels. On the one hand, you see that the economic bond, the economic [process which brings economic subjects together, will be able to lodge itself in this form of immediate multiplication which does not involve the renunciation of rights. Formally, therefore, civil society serves as the medium for the economic bond. But the economic bond plays a very strange role within civil society, where it finds its place, since while it brings individuals together through the spontaneous convergence of interests, it is also a principle of disassociation at the same time. The economic bond is a principle of disassociation with regard to the active bonds of compassion, benevolence, love for one’s fellows, and a sense of community, inasmuch as it constantly tends to undo what the spontaneous bond of civil society has joined together by picking out the egoist interest of individuals, emphasizing it, and making it more incisive. In other words, the economic bond arises within civil society, is only possible through  [civil society], and in a way strengthens it, but in another way undoes it. Thus, on page nineteen of the Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson says: the bond between individuals is never stronger when the individual has no direct interest; it is never stronger than when it is a question of sacrificing oneself for a friend, for example, or of staying with one’s tribe rather than seeking abundance and security elsewhere. It is very interesting that this corresponds exactly to how economic rationality is defined. When the economic subject sees that he can make a profit by buying wheat in Canada, for example, and selling it in England, he will do so. He does it because it is o his advantage, and furthermore it will benefit everyone. However, the bonds of civil society mean that one prefers to stay in one’s community, even if one finds abundance and security elsewhere.. So, its ‘in a commercial state where men may be supposed to have experienced, in its full extent, the interest which individuals have in the preservation of their country  .  .  . that man is sometimes found a detached and solitary being: he has found an object which sets him in competition with his fellow-creature. Consequently, the more we move towards an economic state, the more, paradoxically, the constitutive bond of civil society is weakened and the more the individual is isolated by the economic bond he has with everyone and anyone. This is  the second characteristic of civil society: a spontaneous synthesis within which the economic bond finds its place, but which this same economic bond continually threatens.

The third characteristic of civil society is that it is a permanent matrix of political power. How does power come to a civil society which in a way plays the spontaneous role of a social contract, of the pactum unionis? What is the equivalent of the jurists’ pactum subjectionis, the pact of subjection, which obliges obedience to certain individuals? Well, just as there is no need of a pactum unionis to join individuals together in civil society, so for political power to emerge and function within civil society there is no need of a pactum subjectionis, of the surrender of certain rights and the acceptance of someone else’s sovereignty. There is a spontaneous formation of power. How does this come about? It is brought about quite simply by a de facto bond which links different concrete individuals to each other. In fact, these differences between individuals are expressed, of course, in the different roles they play in society and in the different tasks they perform. These spontaneous differences immediately give rise to divisions of labor in the collective decision-making processes of the groups; some give their views, others give orders; some reflect, others obey. ‘Prior to any political instruction whatever,’ says Ferguson, ‘men are qualified by a great diversity of talents, by a different tone of the soul, and ardor of the passions, to act a variety of parts. Bring them together, each will find his place. They censure or applaud in a body; they consult and deliberate in more select parties; they take or give an ascendant as individuals.’

That is to say, in civil society the group’s decision appears to be a decision of the whole group, but when we look more closely at how this takes place we see that the decisions were taken, Ferguson says, ‘in more select parties.’ As individuals, some have assumed authority and others have allowed these to acquire authority over them. Consequently, the fact of power precedes the right that establishes, justifies, limits, or intensifies it; power already exists before it can be regulated, delegated, or legally established. ‘We follow a leader, before we have settled the ground of his pretensions, or adjusted the form of his election: and it is not till after mankind have committed many errors in the capacities of magistrate and subject, that they think of making government itself a subject of rules.’ The juridical structure of power always comes after the event or fact of power itself. So it cannot be said that men were isolated, that they decided to constitute a power, and then they are living in a sate of society.

This was, roughly, the analysis made in the seventeenth and at the start of the eighteenth century. But neither can we say that men join together in society and then [think]: Wouldn’t it be good, or convenient, or useful to establish a power and regulate its modalities. In actual fact, civil society permanently, and from the very start, secretes a power that is neither its condition nor supplement. ‘ It is obvious,’ Ferguson says, ‘ that some mode of subordination is as necessary to men as society itself.’ You recall that Ferguson said that we cannot conceive of a man without society. We cannot conceive of a man without language and communication, no more than we can conceive a man without hands and feet. Thus man, his nature, his feet, hi hands, his language, others, communication, society, and power all constitute an interdependent whole characteristic of civil society.

The fourth characteristic of civil society is that it constitutes what could be called – using a word from much later which to some extent is now discredited but which it seems to me may find a first point of application here-the motor of history. It is the motor of history precisely because, if we take up the two elements I have been talking about – on the one hand, civil society as spontaneous synthesis and subordination we have the principle, or theme, or idea, or hypothesis that we are dealing with a stable equilibrium. After all, since men are spontaneously brought together by bonds of benevolence, and since they form communities in which subordination is established by immediate consent, then  it should not change and consequently everything should remain in place. And, in actual fact, there are a number of communities which appear with this first aspect of, I would say, if you like, a functional equilibrium of the whole. On page 86, describing North America savages, or reporting observations of American savages, Ferguson says: ‘Thus, without any settled form of government, or any explicit bond of union, and by an effect in which instinct seems to have a greater part than reason [ the families of these North American savages] conducted themselves with the intelligence, the concert, and the force of a nation. Foreigners, without being able to discover who is the magistrate always find a council with whom they may treat. Without police or compulsory laws, their domestic society is conducted with order.’ So, there is a spontaneous bond and spontaneous equilibrium.

However, precisely inasmuch as within this spontaneous bond there is another, equally spontaneous, but dissociative bond, then disequilibrium is introduced as a result, either spontaneously or by virtue of the economic mechanism. Sometimes Ferguson refers to pure and simple egoism: ‘He who first ranged himself under a leader’, he says, ‘did not perceive the pretense of which, the rapacious were to seize his possessions, and the arrogant to lay claim to his service.’ So, there is a mechanism of dissociation which is due simply to the egoism of power. But more frequently and regularly Ferguson invokes actual economic interest and the way in which economic egoism takes shape as the principle of dissociation of the spontaneous equilibrium of civil society. This is how – and here I refer you to the famous texts – Ferguson explains how civil society regularly passes through three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

How is savagery characterized? The characteristic feature of savagery is precisely and above all a certain way of fulfilling or effectuating the interests of economic egoisms. What is savage society? It is a society of hunting, fishing, and natural production, without agriculture or cattle-rearing. It is therefore a society without property in which some elements, the beginnings of subordination and government are found. And then, with economic interests and egoism coming into play, with everyone wanting their own share, we move to barbaric society. As a result we have – I was going to say a new mode of production – we have new economic-political institutions: herds belonging to individuals, pastures belonging either to communities or to individuals. Private society begins to be established, but private society which is not yet guaranteed by laws, and at this point civil society take on the form of relations between patron and client, master and servant, family and slaves, and so on. You can see that in this we have a specifically economic mechanism which shows how, starting from civil society and from the economic game which it harbors within itself, so to speak, we move on to a whole series of historical transformations. The principle of dissociation is also a principle of historical transformation. That which produces the unity of the social fabric is at the same time that which produces the principle of historical transformation and the constant rending of the social fabric.

In the theory of homo aeconomicus which I talked about last week, you recall how the collective interest arose from a necessarily blind interplay between different egoistical interests. Now you find the same king of schema of an effect of totality, of a global reality arising through the blindness of each individual, but with regard to history. The history of humanity in its overall effects, its continuity, and its general a recurrent forms – savage, barbarous, civilized, and so on- is nothing other that the perfectly logical, decipherable, and identifiable form or series of forms arising from blind initiatives, egoistic interests, and calculations which individuals only ever see in terms of themselves. If you multiply these calculations over time and get them to work, the economists say, the entire community will enjoy ever increasing benefits; Ferguson, however, in the name of civil society, says there will be an endless transformation of civil society. I do not mean that this is the entry of civil society into history, since it is always in history, but that the motor of history is civil society. It is egoistic interest, and consequently the economic game which introduces the dimension through which civil society is inevitably and necessarily involved in history. ‘Mankind,’ he says on page 122, ‘in following the present sense of their minds, in striving to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, and pass on, like other animals, in the track of their nature, without perceiving its end. .  .  . Like the winds, that come we know not whence, and blow withersoever they list, the forms of civil society are derived from an obscure and distant origin.’ In short, the mechanisms which permanently constitute civil society are therefore the same as those which permanently generate history in its general forms.

With this kind of analysis – which, once again, is only one example of the many analyses of civil society in the second half of the eighteenth century, or anyway, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century- we are, I think, at an important crossroads, since, [first] we see a domain opening up of collective and political units constituted by social relations and bonds between individuals which go beyond the purely economic bond, yet without being purely juridical: civil society is characterized by bonds which are neither purely economic nor purely juridical, which cannot be superimposed on the structures of the contract and the game of rights conceded, delegated, and alienated, and which, in their nature if not their form, are also different from the economic game. Second, civil society is the articulation of history on the social bond. History is not the extension, like a pure and simple logical development, of a juridical structure given at the start. Nor is it a principle of degeneration producing negative phenomena which obscure the original transparency of a state of nature or original situation. There is never-ending generation of history without degeneration, a generation which is not a juridical-logical sequence but the endless formation of new social fabric, new social relations, new economic structures, and consequently new types of government. Finally, third, civil society makes it possible to designate and show and internal and complex relationship between the social bond and relationships of authority in the form of government. These elements – the opening up of a domain of non-juridical social relations, the articulation of history on the social bond, in a form which is not one of degeneration, and government as an organic component of the social bond and the social bond as an organic feature of the form of authority – are what distinguish the notion of civil society from (1) Hobbes, (2) Rousseau, and (3) Montesquieu. It seems to me that we enter into a completely different system of political thought, and I think it is a thought or political reflection internal to a new technology of government, or to a new problem which the emergence of the economic problem raises for techniques and technologies of government . . .

Does civil society really need a government? This is the famous question posed by Paine at the end of the eighteenth century and which will haunt English politics at least until the twentieth century: Could not society exist without government, or at any rate, without a government other than the government it has created spontaneously and without need of institutions which take charge of civil society, as it were, and impose constraints which it does not accept? Paine’s question : We should not, he says, confuse society and government. “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness .  .  . the one encourages intercourse, the other created distinctions. The first is a patron ( i.e. protector), the last a punisher.’ [. . . ]

 

Whether it is German philosophers, English political analysts, or French historians, I think you will always find the same problems of civil society as the major  problems of politics and political theory.