From Civil Society to the SocialAuthor(s): Mark NeocleousSource: The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 395-408Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/591848Accessed: 01/11/2010 15:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and The London School of Economics and Political Science are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The British Journal of Sociology.

http://www.jstor.org

Mark Neocleous

From civil society to the social

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to challenge some assumptions made concerning civil society as it appears in the work of Hegel and Marx, a challenge raising questions concerning how one thinks about class, capitalism and citizenship in relation to civil society. It argues that the state-civil society distinction remains throughout Marx's work but that it exists in tension alongside the base-superstructure model. It then seeks to explore how part of Marx's critique of civil society rests on his concept of the social, and the differences between this and the idea of the social as it functions in sociological thought.

The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the tensions within the idea of civil society and the concept of the social. This will be done partly through a critical engagement with some of the points made by Krishan Kumar and Christopher Bryant in their exchange concern- ing civil society (Kumar 1993, 1994; Bryant 1993, 1994). I do not want to comment on their ultimate disagreement, but to use my criticisms as a springboard for some comments regarding Hegel and Marx. In this way I hope to contribute to the wider debates currently taking place concerning civil society and, more ambitiously, to suggest a different reading of the concept of the social in Marx's work.

CIVIL SOCIETY, CITIZENSHIP AND THE STATE

Although the debate over whether it is Hegel who really transformed the category civil society is well-trodden ground it is worth con- sidering some of the key aspects of civil society as it features in his work, aspects inherited and radicalized by Marx. For amidst the current explosion of concern regarding the idea of civil society in the debates around 'new social movements' and 'civil society against the state', both East and West, some key characteristics of civil society

BJS Volume no. 46 Issue no. 3 Scpternber l 995 ISSN 0007-1315 3 London School of Economics l 995

396 Mark Neocleous

appear to be lost, or at least relegated to a position where they can be conveniently ignored.

What is initially noteworthy in Hegel's contribution is that his conception of civil society is an essentially modern one, developed as it is in response to the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, and the emergence of a sphere of social conflict. The French Revolution, for Hegel an event of world-historical import, represented the key problem of the modern age - the political realization of freedom - and yet also contained an explicitly social dimension. The industrial revolution introduced a distinctly modern mode of production, and with it extremes of poverty and wealth, along with a class which because of its poverty relies on its labour. Finally, Hegel is aware that the coming together of private individuals, in a sphere that is neither family nor state, will involve a clash of wills, antagonism and tensions. It is faced with the conceptual problem posed by these developments that Hegel makes the crucial theoretical shift by positing a third dimension, 'civil society', standing between the family and state. As such Hegel recognizes civil society as the hallmark of the modern world. By using the phrase burgerliche Gesellschaft, which in German means both civil and bourgeois society, Hegel seeks to capture the two distinctive features of this new sphere of social relations. First, they are socio-economic as opposed to political relations. That is, the political moment has been abstracted into another sphere. Second, this new sphere of civil society is essentially bourgeois - it is a sphere of atomized self-seeking individuals (Hegel 1991).l It is this that Marx finds so compelling in Hegel's account.

Kumar questions such a 'materialist' interpretation of Hegel (Kumar 1993: 378), but in fact the reason Hegel can and should be read in this way is because he recognizes the essentially capitalist nature of civil society; the very reason Marx follows him in developing the conceptual distinction. In other words, Hegel recognizes what is central to the idea of civil society, a point we shall return to. What follows from this is a wealth of insights into the nature of civil society. For Hegel civil society contains extremes of extravagance and poverty, with the permanent possibility of a large number of people falling below a certain standard of living, losing any feeling of right, integrity and honour; in effect becoming a 'rabble'. Crucially, poverty is a general consequence of civil society and on the whole arises necessarzly out of it. Public authority may alleviate these problems, but cannot overcome them. Hegel can only note despairingly that 'the important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies' (Hegel 1991: para. 244). Marx inherits and radicalizes this insight, noting that the essential feature of wage-labour is absolute poverty (Marx 1973; 1974a). Now, whilst one may not wish to conceptualize civil society in this way, one should at least be sensitive to the actual content of the concept as it has been

From civil society to the soctal 397

utilized by its key proponents in the past. Certainly one of the aspects that is strongest in the account given by Hegel and Marx is precisely the capitalist nature of civil society and all that this entails. What is significant about so many current arguments concerning civil society is that their attempt to be socialist without being anti-capitalist results in this capitalist nature of civil society being conceptualized away (Meiksins Wood 1990).

What also follows from the understanding of civil society in Hegel and Marx is that one cannot conceptualize civil society without the state; to talk of civil society without the state is an absurdity. It is not just that there has to be some form of state through which 'collective' decisions are reached or contractual relations regulated. It is that civil society is actively shaped and ordered by the state. For Hegel state and civil society are structurally integrated with each other in a series of interlocking mechanisms. Thus whilst state and civil society are held apart conceptually they are simultaneously pulled together through a dual mechanism, each element of which operates in the opposite direction to the other: the police and corporations represent the penetration of the state into civil society, whilst the Estate assembly represents the penetration of civil society into the state. This interpre- tation of state and civil society follows from Hegel's understanding that the system of needs does not and cannot exist in a vacuum free from 'interference' by public authority. Its capitalist nature means that it must be politically ordered and publicly regulated. Hegel accepts Smith's principle of a hidden hand only in an oblique fashion. Even if it were the case that the collision of producers and consumers could re-establish itself automatically, 'it's adjustment needs to be con- sciously regulated by an agency which stands above both sides'. It is to this end that the police exists, charged with the task not just of enforcing the law, but with street-lighting, bridge-building, the price of daily necessities, public health, education, welfare and the founding of colonies. In other words, the problems generated by the capitalist system of needs within civil society requires administrative regulation by the state (Hegel 1991: paras. 189, 236, 23948).

Although Marx follows Hegel in arguing that the capitalist nature of the system of needs in burgerliche Gesellschaft makes state authority a necessity, for Marx this necessity lies in the fact that the civil society is persistently on the verge of being torn apart by class antagonisms. Despite both Kumar's suggestions that Hegel's civil society contains classes, and the fact that the Estates are often (mis)interpreted as classes, Hegel's work on the state is notable for its absence of anything approaching a class analysis. Two features stand out in Hegel's three-fold division of the Estates of civil society (agricultural, indus- trial, bureaucracy). First, there is no place within this distinction for the working class (let us say, and estate of wage-labourers). Second, Hegel does not use the category 'class' for the Estates, but reserves it

398 Mark Neocleous

precisely for those engaged in wage labour. He suggests that the sphere of needs and the manner of production in modern society give rise to the division of labour, in turn giving rise to a class which is tied to work. It is only in referring to workers that Hegel uses the term Klasse, rather than Stand which he uses when otherwise dis- cussing 'social classes' (Avineri 1972). Given that for Hegel the Es- tates are precisely the socio-economic 'classes' of civil society this must mean that the working class is not of civil society.

Since each of the estates is a different sphere of need, not being an Estate must mean that the working class is outside the recognized sphere of needs. But not being a member of an Estate means that that person is nothing, nobody. 'When we say that a human being must be somebody we mean that he must belong to a particular Estate; for being somebody means that he has substantial being. A human being with no Estate is merely a private person and does not possess actual universality'. Not having an Estate thus excludes an individual from society; not being an Estate excludes the working class from civil society. As such it is excluded from participation in ethical life. And it is only by being a member of civil society that an individual has rights and claims in relation to it. Moreover, whilst it may appear that the working class are part of civil society through their membership of the industrial Estate, this is not in fact the case. Hegel distinguishes between Gewerbsmann, which can be translated as either Corporation member (Knox) or tradesman (Nisbet), and day- labourers, a distinction consolidated by Hegel's description of the former as 'masters', hardly a description of working-class day- labourers (Hegel 1991: paras. 207, 238, 252; Cullen 1979).

Now, despite his trenchant critique of Hegel, and the centrality of a universal class with radical chains to this critique, Marx uncritically inherits from Hegel the belief that the working class is a class but not 'ofn civil society. In his 'Introduction' to his critique of Hegel's Philos- ophy of Right he suggests the possibility of emancipation lies 'in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not of civil society'.2 And in The German IdeologCy he writes of the class that bears the burdens of society and none of its advantages, and which consequently is 'ousted from society' (Marx 1975b: 256; 1970: 94) Despite his distance from Hegel, Marx accepts the exist- ence of a class outside of civil society. Following Hegel, he fails to envision the inclusion of the working class as a class of civil society and the state. This failure is partly a product of the heritage of political thought; Hegel and Marx are far from alone in thinking of the working class in this way.3 It is also a product of historical circum- stances. At this period in history the working class stood in a contra- dictory position to both civil society and the state, being half outside and half inside both (Adorno 1989). But it is also a product of Marx's revolutionary politics; for the whole point for Marx is that there

From civil society to the soczal 399

never could be a space within birgerliche Gesellschaft for the working class.

Kumar claims that the term burgerliche Gesellschaft makes no distinction between the sphere of the bourgeois and the sphere of the citoyen. In fact the issue is more complex than this. Although in German the citizen is the Burger and the origins of citizenship tied to the emergence of a Burgertum (bourgeoisie), thereby giving Burger a semantic field that includes private members of civil society as well as citizens of the state, it is significant that when Hegel begins to develop the distinction between state and civil society, in his lectures on natural law (1817-18), he resorts to the French citoyen and bourgeois. This allows him to claim that in civil society the Burger is a bourgeois but not a citizen (van Horn Melton 1991; Turner 1993). This is partly why Marx points to the isolated, bourgeois, nature of man's existence in civil society, and the way citizenship is abstracted into the political community (Marx 1975c). Thus the assertion of revolutionary will is the attempt to regain this lost citizenship. Kumar is therefore right to question Bryant's assumption that civil society means, literally, a society of citizens; such assumptions are clearly intended to lend weight to the concerns of 'new social movements' and the idea of using 'civil society against the state', but it is not at all clear that the assumption holds true for either Hegel or Marx. For NIarx it is precisely the demand for working-class recognition, that is, to become fully fledged citizens and simultaneously regain the unity of social and political life, that is revolutionary. Such a demand for universal citizenship would be the enzl of burgerliche Gesellshaft, instituting a new socialized society. For this argument to hold Marx depends on the concept of the social.

THE IDEA OF THE SOCIAL

Marx moves beyond Hegel not, as is commonly assumed, by turning to Feuerbach, but by developing the category of the social. This allows him to move beyond Feuerbach and Hegel simultaneously. This also poses difficulties for the claim that Marx's conceptual schema allows 'no place for an independent and distinctive realm of the social' (Kumar 1993: 37>80; Keane 1988). Such a claim is common, but based on a misunderstanding of the nature of civil society and the social found in Marx. First, such a claim assumes that Marx works with only the base-superstructure model rather than state-civil society. 'Base' is then read as 'economy', thereby allowing the accusation of economic reductionism. Second, Marx does have a category of the social, but it is a category of critique rather than the designation of a particular sphere. It is this that also distinguishes Marx from the discipline of sociology.

400 Mark Neocleous

In a significant moment in the development of Marx's own theoretical approach to the state beyond his critique of Hegel he notes that many of the mediating organs in Hegel's account are in fact organs of the state rather than civil society. The 'police', the 'judiciary' and the 'administration' are not the representatives of civil society which administers its own universal interests in them and through them; they are the representatives of the state and their task is to administer the state against civil society. (Marx 1 975a: 1 1 1 )

This is one of Marx's most fundamental insights yet, despite its presence throughout his later writings, he does not develop it. For this insight is instantly overtaken by Marx's positing of civil society, or, rather, the struggles within it, as the real driving force behind history. When Marx declares that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle it is within the sphere of civil society that these struggles take place. The premises of materialist method, the socio-economic relations of civil society, provide the basis from which 'legal relations and political forms' are to be comprehended.

Many of the commentaries on Marx's work, both Marxist and non- Marxist, regard the state-civil society model as relegated in favour of the base-superstructure model. In part this has its roots in Marx's con- cerns in his later work, and his comments on this work, not least the notorious 1859 Preface, where he describes his shift in concerns from civil society to the key to its anatomy, political economy.4 Much has been lost in the focus on the base-superstructure model to which Marx appears to shift. The crude economism this model has frequently been taken to consist of has been a straitjacket rather than an aid to Marxist theory, a straitjacket that has its roots partly in the concern with de- veloping a critique of political economy. From the suggestion that the key to the anatomy of civil society lay in political economy it was pre- dictable that the focus for analysis would not be civil society itself, nor the relation between state and civil society, but political economy. It is a commonplace now to say that this is why Marx never developed the analysis of the state that he always intended. The point here though is that Marx appears to have abandoned the analysis of civil society as a whole. Alvin Gouldner describes it as becoming a residual concept once Marx begins to develop the critique of political economy, the out- come of which is that any analysis of social structures has to be assimi- lated to the mode of production (1980: 363). But rather than aban- doning the analysis of civil society as Gouldner maintains, Marx actually shifts his focus in such a way that the state-civil society model appears to play a secondary role at best. Thus, in much the same way that the state remains untheorized in Marx's later work, so does the state-civil society relation. However, the appearance that Marx has shifted his focus entirely on to a political economy, and his suggestion

From civil society to the social

401 that the key to the anatomy of civil society lies in political economy, has made it too easy for others to read Marx as conceptualizing civil society as the economic system, wherein civil society becomes equated with the capitalist economy rather than bourgeois society. In fact, Kumar is guilty of the very crime he accuses Avineri of committing on Hegel. Just as Avineri is wrong to read Hegel's civil society as nothing more than the market mechanism, so Kumar is wrong to suggest that Marx dissolves civil society into the economic base; likewise Keane is wrong in claiming that Marx conflates civil society with the 'mode of production' and devalues other institutions such as hospitals, churches and households (Kumar 1993: 377-9; Keane 1988: 32, 58). Kumar and Keane are here restating the classical criticism of Marxism, that it 'reduces' everything to the 'economic'. But this criticism rests on obscuring the continuation of the state-civil society model in Marx's work. In fact, Kumar and Keane's search for an 'independent' realm of the social is doomed to failure. It is hardly reductionist to point out that however 'social' an institution such as a hospital is, it too is subject to the demands of capital. Indeed, despite his criticisms of Marx's 'reductionism' Keane rests his own argument for a socialzst civil society on the grounds that it would be a civil society 'no longer dominated by commodity production and exchange' (1988: 63; cf. Meiksins Wood 1990).

Marx does not dispense with the state-civil model, nor, pace Kumar (1993: 380; 1994: 128), does he replace civil society with 'society'. The state-civil society model remains throughout Marx's work, but consti- tutes a tension within it. None the less, it needs to be maintained alongside base-superstructure; indeed, it is only through retention of the state-civil society couplet that one can avoid the over-simplified and turgid understanding of base-superstructure common within Marxism. Hunt has traced the development of the concept civil society in Marx's work through three stages (Hunt 1990). He suggests that in the early stage it is central to his analyses, counterposed to the state and part of his critique of Hegel. In the transitional stage Marx begins to distance himself from the concept, tending to consider 'social relations' in general, but has not developed the categories to fully reject it. In the final stage, from the late-1850s, the concept 'civil society' disappears from his work, at the same time as he distinguishes labour from labour-power. This final shift is said to be captured in the 1859 Preface where he suggests that the key to the anatomy of civil

* * . * a soclety les ln po ltlca economy. The problem with such a formulation is that there is too much

continuity in Marx to fully sustain it. Hunt draws attention to the way the final draft of 'The Civil War in France' differs from the last draft because 'civil society' has been replaced by 'society'. The problem with this is two-fold. First, it suggests that Marx had not completely abandoned the use of civil society after the late-1850s. If in 1871 he

402 Mark Neocleous

was still using it, albeit in first draft, he was hardly rejecting it outright. Second, the replacing of 'civil society' with 'society'5 should be read not so much as a rejection of the former in favour of the latter, but as the search for an expression to capture the distinction between the state and its 'other'. That is, such changes are part of the tension surrounding the state-civil society model in Marx's work rather than

. . . S .

. ]1S reJeCtlOn 0t lt. Likewise there is a problem over the use of'bourgeois society' in

translations of texts such as Capital. Hunt draws attention to the rendering of birgerliche Gesellschaft in one translation as 'civil society', compared to 'bourgeois society' in another. The same is true of the Grundrisse. Moreover, there are slippages from one translation to another in the same text.6 But if this is a problem then it is one of trans- lation alone. Marx is using burgerliche Gesellschaft for the same reason as Hegel - because it means both bourgeois society arwd civil society. In the later works, where he is discussing 'bourgeois society', Marx equally means 'civil society'. If one translates biBrgerliche Gesellschaft as civil society rather than bourgeois society as some have suggested (Arthur 1970: 5 ), then the later works are replete with the concept.

Finally, Marx's occasional use of quotation marks around 'civil society', such as in the Grundrisse. are in danger of over-interpretation. Not only is the term 'civil society' on the first page of the Grundrisse in some translations rendered 'bourgeois society', as has just been mentioned, but the quotation marks are intended to alert us to the problematic nature of this concept. As Hunt suggests, this indicates a transition from a rather uncritical use to a critical use in which its limitations are recognized. It also suggests that Marx has not dispen- sed with the concept.

The focus on base and superstructure also shifts attention away from another of Marx's categories: the social. Kumar's claim that Marx's tendency to dichotomize leaves no room for an independent and distinctive realm of the social seeks to impose on Marx a sociological understanding of the social which, if successful, would be the end of Marx's critique. With the distinction between state and civil society the possibility emerges of disciplines in which 'political' and 'social' relations are studied separately. The 'political' and the 'social' become objects of enquiry in their own right. Sociology and political science develop as independent disciplines; the sphere of the social becomes the concern of sociology. As Goran Therborn writes: 'the rise of Sociology was a crucial part of the increasing prominence and the intellectual discovery of burgerliche Gesellschaft- in the sense of both bourgeois and civil society' (Therborn 1980: 210). The problem then becomes a question of how these spheres of the political and the social relate to each other; do social science and political science have any integral relationship? At the same time the economic sphere becomes isolated as a third element. The state-civil society distinction is

From civil society to the soczal 403

transformed into the problem of spheres, and of how these spheres interact, if at all.

Now, in Marx's work the sphere of the social is fundamental, but it is fundamental not only because he inherits it from Hegel (and, it should be said, Saint-Simon), but because he uses the concept of the social, (man as a social animal), to make some of the fundamental breaks that he is renowned for. Thus, for example, Marx overcomes philosophi- cal idealism not by a polemical shift to philosophical materialism, but through a focus on the social nature of human existence. Rather than replace idealism with materialism in a Feuerbachian manner he criticizes both idealism and materialism by developing the concept of 'human sensuous activity, practice', 'human society or socialized humanity', a materialist idea of social humanity which he makes a point of distinguishing from the 'old materialist' 'standpoint of civil society' (Marx 1975d,e; Clarke 1991: 57-8).

This concept of the social also distinguishes Marx from the discipline of sociology. For although sociology utilizes the concept of the 'social' the role it plays there is very different. Weber is right to point out that 'the social', used interchangeably with 'society', is construed so widely that it is taken to include the whole of reality, masking the complexity of cultural, economic and political action (Weber 1949). This can be seen in the work of sociologists where 'the social', like 'society', is used as a category against which something else can be played off.7 However, Marxism has specific concepts with which to grasp given elements of society - state and civil society to name but two.8 More importantly, in Marx's work the social is used as the fundamental category in his critique of bourgeois society. In this sense 'the social' as it functions in Marx's work operates not as a descriptive category, but as a fundamentally critical one, pointing as it does to the alienated nature of human relations within bourgeois society. Thus Weber's criticism is of sociology rather than Marxism. Despite the apparent similarities and overlap of categories, sociology and Marxism remain separate, Marxism distinguishing itself from sociological thought by utilizing the social as a central category of critique absent from its usage elsewhere.9

These differences between Marx and both philosophical ma- terialism and sociology indicate the importance of Marx's conceptual move, illustrated in the rest of his work. For example, Marx's critique of 'political emancipation' is based on the need to transcend the separation between private man in civil society and political life into a new 'social' totality.

Only when man has recognized and organized his 'forces propres' [his own forces] as socialforces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed. (Marx 1 975c: 235).

404 Mark Neocleous

It is for this reason that Marx champions the Paris Commune, restoring as it does political power to society. By breaking the power of the state the Commune showed that the working class could develop its own forms of political existence that would equally be a new form of social existence in which the 'normal' functions of the state were performed by members of society itself. In theoretical terms this meant the 'reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it' instituting a new form of social organization (Marx 1974b: 206 -10; 1974c: 250).

It is in this concept of the social that the strength of Marx's critique of political economy lies. The fetishism involved in bourgeois re- lations, in which the social bond is exchange value and where the social character of activity 'appear[s] as something alien and objective', results in social relations assuming 'the fantastic form of a relation between things'. This is juxtaposed to the vision of a future society of 'universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich]relations, are ... subordinated to their own communal control'. And in Capital after describing the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation as leading to the transformation of capitalist private property into social property, he asks that we 'imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force'. The point of course is that communism would involve the reproduction of individuals as social individuals where wealth is 'the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces'. The key to understanding alienated labour then that it is not fully social; likewise the key to understanding alienated society is that it has not been fully socialized (Marx 1973: 157, 162, 488,832; 1976: 163-7,929-30).

In many ways it is the social rather than the proletariat that features as the universal in Marx's work. Marx inherits the concept of the universal class from Hegel, and replaces the bureaucracy with the class with radical chains that will be the redemption of humanity. But a closer reading of Marx's discussion of the universal class also yields an implicit concept of the social as the underlying universal. Marx criticizes Hegel's use of the bureaucracy as the universal class and his suggestion that anyone can become a civil servant thus

What is crucial in the true state is not the fact that every citizen has the chance to devote himself to the universal interest in the shape of a particular class, but the capacity of the universal class to be really universal i.e to be the class of every citizen. Hegel starts with the assumption of a pseudo-universal class, of universality fixed in a particular class. (1975a: 112).

From civil societ to the soczal 405

Here Marx appears to expand the concept of the universal class to be inclusive, at least poteniially so, of every citizen, the whole social body. This would of course involve the radical expansion and transform- ation of citizenship. The point is that by organizing all the conditions of human existence on the basis of social freedom the class emanci- pates all the other spheres of society ( 1 975b: 254 65). Thus whilst the working class alone is a really revolutionary class, and therefore the only class to fit to accomplish the task of universal emancipation, this emancipation, once it has been achieved, is of indivzduals from the division of labour and class itself. The depth of Marx's acceptance of the structure of Hegel's thought is apparent here. For the triadic conceptualization of the social, civil society and the universal class of the proletariat is analogous to Hegel's state, political state and bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in Hegel is a particular class, but its aims are universal and as such are identical with the aims of the state. The proletariat in Marx is a particular class but its aims are universal and as such are the aims of society. However, whilst Hegel's universal class can only mediate the separation of state and civil society, is designed to protect civil society from its own revolutionary potential by transforming social struggle into administrative mechanisms, Marx's universal class is intended to overcome this duality, to realize revolutionary potential and institute a new social order in which the social has been politicized and politics has been socialized. Thus Marx's project can be construed as the socialization of the universal and the universalization of the social, an ongoing socialization of the political and politicization of the social in a struggle to acheive 'socialized freedom'.l°

The purpose of tracing the idea of the social in this way has been to draw attention to the fact that, like those who seek to use civil society as part of a radical democratic politics, Marx too is concerned with transforming the division between the state and civil society. However, because his concern rests on a concept of the social fundamentally at odds with that found in much contemporary social and political thought, there is a significant division between the projects entailed, a division of both theory and practice. At the sharp edge of this division lies the conceptualization of civil society. For Marx, it is the very nature of civil society that is the problem, its essence, its form as much as its content: hence Siirgerliche Gesellschaft. The intention then is not to alter the content, in the sense of a 'socialist civil society', but of transforming that form. It is to this end that the critical category of the social functions in his work.

(Date accepted October 1994) MarkNeocleous Department of Government

Brunel University

406 Mark Neocleous

NOTES

1. I am working with the recent translation by H.B . Nisbet (Hegel 1991), but will refer where necessary to the older translation by T.M. Knox (Hegel 1952). I will provide paragraph rather than page-references to facilitate cross

.

reterenang.

2. Interestingly, the category Marx uses here is Stand rather than Klasse.

3. For example, see Kant's comments on the necessity for a citizen to be his own master (as well as adult and male), a necessity which excludes those whose labour is made use of by others (Kant 1991: 78). See also the discussion of John Locke in MacPherson (1962: 227, 248). For Marx's failure in following Hegel here see Cohen (1982: 61) and Rundell (1987: 90-1).

4. Notorious because it is now so common to present this work as the standard account of the materialist method that it is easily forgotten how 'non-Marxist' the Preface is: it makes no mention of classes or their struggles, for example. 5. The relevant sections are in Marx

(1974b: 208, 210; 1974c: 24S7). 6. The specific examples can be

found in comparing Marx (1954: 133, 141) with Marx (1976: 231, 240). In the latter case one finds 'civil society' then 'bourgeois society' respectively. On the Grundrzsse compare Marx (1973: 83) with Marx (1975f: 48). Hunt gives yet another example. See also the 1859 Preface. 7. To take one example, in Bryan Turner's work on 'the body and society' (1984), the concept society appears interchangeable with 'the social' and serves as a general agency responding to needs which appear somehow pre- social. When this problem is put to him in an interview Turner appears to vacil- late, suggesting, in the fashion of Baud- rillard, that perhaps the idea of 'society' is becoming increasingly redundant (Turner 1992: 22940). Other sociologists are also aware of this problem with 'society' and seek to overcome in it various ways. Giddens for example seeks to use instead the

categories 'nation-state', 'intersocietal system' and 'time-space' edges (1985: 21, 172; 1986: 163-69,244; 1990: 12). Like- wise Bauman suggests that a sociological theory of postmodernity ought to re- place 'society' with 'sociality' (1992: 190). Finally Wallerstein seeks to replace it with 'historical system' (1987:309-24). I am not convinced that any of these are successful, losing as they do the necess- ary conceptual distinction between state and civil society as categories of analysis, with the social as a crztical concept. Wallerstein, for example, admits that replacing'society' with historical system' is a mere semantic substitution, but rids us of the need to link 'society' to 'state'(p.317). Likewise Giddens' attempt to use 'nation-state' is based on his rather confusing suggestion that civil society refers for the most part to the countryside and that with the rise of the modern nation-state 'civil society' dis- appears (1958: 21). 8. Whilst it may be true to say that so-

ciology has examined the civil society it considers Marxism to have forgotten (Gouldner 1980: 370; Kumar 1993: 380), this has often resulted in the nonchalant expansion and use of 'society' or 'the social', as discussed above, or it has re- sulted in attempts to force Marxism and sociology together. For example, Turner suggests that in the absence of a theory of social relations per se, the analysis of civil society functions as a sociology inside Marxism (Turner 1993: 16). 9. For example, Foucault's rejection of the state-civil distinction results in his expansion of the category of the social (or the social body) to incorporate all relations. Likewise Laclau and Mouffe's conception of the political, seen as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations, sim- ply dissolves the political into the social. 10. The phrase 'socialized freedom' is taken from Ernst Bloch (1971: 49). Ben- habib discussed the socialization of the universal and the universalization of the political (1986: 39). For the socialization of the political and politicization of the social see P. Osborne (1991).

From civil society to the social 407

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, T. 1989 'Society' in S. Bronner and D. Kellner (eds) Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, London: Routledge. Arthur, C. 1970 'Editor's introduction' to K. Marx and F. Engels 'The German Ideology, London:Lawrence and Wishart. Avineri, S. 1972 Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Z. 1992 Intimations of Post- modernity, London: Routledge. Benhabib, S. 1986 Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Stiy of the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Bloch, E.1971 On Karl Marx, New York: Herder and Herder. Bryant, C. 1993 'Social Self-Organi- sation, Civility and Sociology: A Com- ment of Kumar's "Civil Society"', British Journal of Sociology 44 (3): 397401. Bryant, C. 1994 'A Further Comment on Kumar's-"Civil Society"' Brztish Journal of Sociology 45 (3): 497-9. Clarke, S. 1991 Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber, London: Macmillan. Cohen, J. 1982 Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxtan Critical Theory, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Cullen, B. 1979 Hegel's Social and Political Thought: An Introduction, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Giddens, A. 1985 The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Los Angeles: University of California. Giddens, A. 1986 The Constitution of

Society, Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. 1990 The Consequences of

Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Gouldner, A. 1980 The Two Marxisms, London: Macmillan. Hegel, G.W.F. 1952 Hegel's Philosophy of

Right, trans. T.M. Knox Oxford: Claren- don Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1991 Elements of the Philos- ophy of Right, translated by H.B.Nisbet and edited by A.Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, G. 1990 'The Development of the Concept of Civil Society in Marx' in BJessop and Malcolm-Brown, (eds) Karl

Marx's Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments Vol IV, London: Routledge. Kant, I. 1991 Political Writings, Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. Keane, J. 1988 'Despotism and Democ- racy' in J. Keane (ed.) Civil Society and the State, London: Verso. Kumar, K. 1993 'Civil Society: An In- quiry into the Usefulness of an Historical Term', British Journal of Sociology 44 (3) 375-95. Kumar, K. 1994 'Civil Society Again: A Reply to Christopher Bryant's "Social Self-Organization, Civility and So- ciology" ' British Journal of Sociology 45 (1) 127-31. MacPherson, C.B. 1962 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K.1954 Capital, Volume I, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. 1970 The German Ideology, C.J.Arthur, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. 1973 Grundr2sse, London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. 1974a 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' in The First International and After, London: Penguin Books, in associ- ation with New Left Review. Marx, K.1974b 'The Civil War In France' in The First International and After, Lon- don: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. 1974c 'First Draft of "The Civil War in France"' in The First International and After, London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. 1975a 'Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State' in Early Writings, London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Mark, K. 1975b 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction' in Early Writings, London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. 1975c 'On theJewish Question' in Early Wrztings, London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. 1975d 'Concerning Feuerbach'

408 Mark Neocleous

inEarly Writings, London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. 1975e 'Economic and Philo- sophic Manuscripts' in Early Writings, London: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review. Marx, K. 1 975f Texts on Method, translated and edited by T.Carver,Oxford: Black- well. Marx, K. 1976 Capital, Volume 1, London: Penguin Books and New Left Books. Meiksins Wood, E. 1990 'The Uses and Abuses of "Civil Society" ' Socialist Register, London: Merlin. Osbolne, P 1991 'Radicalism Without Limit? Discourse, Democracy and the Politics of Identity' in P. Osborne (ed.) Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, Lon- don: Verso. Rundell, J. 1987 Ongins of Modernity: The Ongins of Social Theotyfrom Kant to Hegel to Marx, Cambridge: Polity. Therboln, G. 1980 Science, Class and Society, London: Verso.

Turner, B. 1984 The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Turner, B. 1992 Regulating Bodies: Essays inMedicalSociology, London: Routledge. Turner, B. 1993 'Contemporary Prob- lems in the Theory of Citizenship' in B. Turner (ed.) Citizenship and Social Theory, London: Sage. van Horn Melton, J. 1991 'The Emerg- ence of "Society" in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Germany' in PJ. Corfield (ed.) Language, History and Class, Oxford: Blackwell. Weber, M. 1949 "'Objectivity" in Social Science and Social Policy' in The Method- ology of the Social Sciences, New York: Free Press. Wallerstein, I 1987 'World-System Analysis' in A. Giddens and J.H. Turner (eds) Social Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity.