Economic, cultural, and political developments over the last five years do not bode well for the theory and practice of civil society. In most parts of the world, communities are increasingly divided and fragmented. Violence, intolerance, and inequality are on the rise. Authoritarians and populists of different stripes have gained a foothold even in advanced democracies. Restrictions on freedom of speech and association are increasingly common. Trust in charities has declined as a result of well-publicized recent scandals. And public spheres – privatized, commercialized, hollowed out and distorted by “filter bubbles” on social media and accusations of “fake news” – seem thoroughly incapable of addressing these problems and concerns. As the writer Amanda Ripley put it in a 2018 article for the Solutions Journalism Network, “In the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations.”¹

Does this mean that civil society no longer serves any purpose as a framework for understanding the world and changing it for the better? My answer is no: as this new edition aims to show, these ideas can shed a great deal of light on what is happening, why, and how we might respond. Images of civil society as a sphere of peace and harmony were always somewhat limiting and romantic; perhaps what has brought them into sharper focus is the fact that this romance is being challenged in the United States and Europe – the home of much civic thinking and innovation – and not just in China or Venezuela or Egypt. So it is certainly legitimate to question the relevance of civil society theories in the light of contemporary developments and to critique the ways in which these theories have been applied in practice by governments, politicians, voluntary associations, donor agencies, and the media. Therefore, mounting threats to civil society and how to meet them – with polarization front and center – form the overriding theme of my revisions to the fourth edition of this book.

As in previous editions, my approach is not to see civil society as the solution to problems in and of itself (except in very limited circumstances) but to look to it for frameworks through which we can understand what is happening and explore what might be done. Rejecting the tendency to argue for one particular interpretation of this concept over all the others, the book explores a range of different theories and traditions that fall into three major categories: civil society as a part of society in chapter 2 – the world of voluntary associations; civil society as a kind of society in chapter 3 – marked out by positive social norms such as reciprocity and cooperation; and in chapter 4, civil society as an arena in which these norms are worked out and tested, otherwise known as the “public sphere.” Each of these theories illuminates a different set of questions and suggests its own avenues for action, so rather than choosing one or the other, my approach is to see how they fit together both conceptually (in chapter 5) and in practice (in chapter 6). This approach generates a much richer set of insights across the boundaries of geography, history, and culture.

Nevertheless, analyses of civil society always take place within a particular context, so understanding those contexts is an essential step forward in making sense of what is undoubtedly a complex set of ideas. Over the last five years, four interrelated trends have emerged to shape the contexts in which civil society is analyzed in these pages: the spread of authoritarian populism, rising cultural and political polarization, the deepening privatization and commercialization of the public sphere, and the increasing bureaucratization of NGOs and other nonprofit organizations. Taken together, these trends pose a serious threat to the health and vitality of civil societies everywhere and to the values, principles, and mechanisms that underpin them.

The widespread resurgence of authoritarianism has curtailed civic space and freedom of expression in many parts of the world, including in countries like Brazil, Egypt, India, and the United States which were previously seen as sites of great promise for civil society development. ICNL and CIVICUS, two NGOs that monitor this situation, report that more than 120 laws constraining freedoms of association and assembly have been proposed or enacted in sixty countries since 2012, with just 3 percent of the world’s population now living in countries where civic space is defined as “fully open.”² The criminalization of dissent and the imprisonment or murder of activists like Berta Caceres in Honduras in 2016, and journalists such as the Saudi-American Adnan Kashoggi in Turkey, Kateryna Handzyuk in Ukraine, and Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta (all in 2018), are especially chilling examples of this curtailment, but there are many “softer” strategies like the imposition of restrictions on the registration and receipt of foreign funding by NGOs, the rise of state surveillance under the guise of fighting terrorism, voter suppression and intimidation under gerrymandering and other similar tactics, attacks on the press as “enemies of the people,” and the closure or forced removal of independent institutions like the Central European University in Budapest. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was unequivocal about his intentions: “you can be sure there will be no money for NGOs,” he said during his election campaign, “Those useless people will have to go to work.”³ The end result of these developments is to erect higher barriers to civic participation and to weaken independent advocacy, activism, and accountability – precisely the opposite of what’s required to promote a healthy and democratic civic life.

Authoritarianism both encourages and thrives on polarization and fearmongering as a way of stoking up support for leaders who claim to be defending “the nation” or “national values” against inside or outside threats and enemies – most notably in the contemporary context, immigrants. The apparent depth of this polarization in the United States after the election of President Donald Trump, in the United Kingdom around the Brexit vote to leave the European Union, and in the nationalist agendas of politicians in countries like Hungary, Italy, and France, has taken many people by surprise, but the signs of such schisms were visible well before 2016 for those whose eyes were open enough to see them. For example, Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol’s careful analysis of the US Tea Party found that much of this movement was an authentic expression of disaffection among conservatives, especially white rural Americans who began to mobilize against what they saw as the domination of politics and culture by disdainful liberal elites in the cities.⁴ Other research uncovered a consistent pattern of resentment that was making its way into politics as the Republican Party moved rightwards,⁵ though the “culture wars” that divide “red” and “blue” America stretch back much further in time, through President Bill Clinton’s battles with House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s to the rupture that emerged around Roe v. Wade in 1973. These divisions have since grown to seemingly unbridgeable levels, morphing into the rise of right-wing hate groups and networks of white nationalists on the right and the arrival of sometimes violent counter-protests on the left.

Many commentators have lamented the erosion of civility and the breakdown of public norms that has taken place as a result of these developments. Senator John McCain’s funeral in 2018, for example, was full of eulogies to a man who seemed to embody the virtues of America’s unifying “civic religion” under threat from partisans, captured beautifully in McCain’s own posthumously published “farewell letter.”⁶ But the low-grade civil wars that are unfolding in the United States and in other countries can also be read as an incomplete process of civil society development in which certain visions of the good society have been marginalized, while others have been privileged. This has always been the case with minorities and other non-dominant communities; the difference now is that groups that are in some ways privileged are also organizing around their own resentments. Sorting through these divisions in order to build a civil society that is both genuinely diverse and holds together sufficiently to prevent a slide into permanent conflict is an urgent task. Easier said than done of course, but as the examples given in chapter 6 show, the most powerful way to get people to stop demonizing each other is to encourage them to meet, talk, and work together. Just as a weak democracy can only be strengthened through more democracy, the answer to problems in civil society lies through more civil society.

Traditionally, civil society theorists have seen polarization as something that can be managed through an active and democratic public sphere which enables common ground to be negotiated across the lines of difference, but when the structures of communication are themselves privatized and fractured, this is obviously more difficult. One of the most alarming features of politics and organizing in the United States today (and to a lesser extent elsewhere) is that public spheres have ceased to operate, or perhaps even exist, as people of different views imprison themselves in mutually exclusive social media bubbles and information sources. Traditionally independent and citizen-controlled media have also been outcompeted by much larger and wealthier commercial platforms such as Facebook which have contributed to the problem.

In the third edition of this book I took the view that the “digital age” was both a threat and an opportunity for civil society in equal measure, but during the last five years I think the “negatives” have started to outweigh the “positives.” The rise of authoritarianism and state surveillance, increasing polarization and the widespread closing of open minds, and the speed and superficiality that seem to go along with digital cultures are in danger of closing off the opportunities that exist to use information technology to promote greater unity, equality, and thoughtfulness in civic interaction, as well as greater innovation in modes of organizing and association. The revisions to this edition therefore take a more critical view, arguing for a rediscovery of face-to-face engagement while remaining open to the advantages that virtual connections can bring.

Face-to-face engagement is important for another reason too: the need to re-democratize the world of associational life so that it becomes less dominated by technocrats, bureaucrats, and wealthy donors and more responsive to the concerns and priorities of ordinary citizens. The decline of membership-based organizations and the rise of professional advocacy and service-providing groups has been an important feature of recent civil society history. This process has produced mixed results in the struggle against inequality and discrimination, but one development is clear and unambiguously damaging: the disappearance of opportunities within civil society for people of different political views and identities to debate, strategize, and organize together. This is a significant factor behind the rise of cultural and political polarization.

It would be unfair to say that this problem has been caused by the “professionalization” of the nonprofit sector and the rise of billionaire philanthropists with unprecedented spending power like Bill Gates and the Koch brothers, but it is certainly true that popular influence over the direction of the voluntary sector has waned over the last 30 years, and that the ecosystems of the nonprofit sector in most countries have become increasingly unbalanced as resources have flowed overwhelmingly to larger charities and more established causes.⁷ There is a pressing need to rebuild broad-based, nationally federated, independent, and internally democratic networks and associations that can act as meeting grounds and conduits for grassroots voices, leadership development, and accountability from the bottom up.

The furore surrounding alleged sexual harassment and abuse at Oxfam, Save the Children, and other international charities that exploded in the United Kingdom in the spring of 2018 was seen by some commentators as evidence that large nonprofit bureaucracies cannot be trusted to live out their values just because they claim the mantle of civil society rather than government or business, especially when they see themselves as competitors in a global market for humanitarian assistance.⁸ Any human endeavor that is commercialized will lose its ability to reshape human beings and their relationships in any terms other than money, growth, and organizational self-interest. As with social media in chapter 4, therefore, I have revised the treatment of civil society and the market in chapter 3 to take account of a growing body of research and experience which suggests that the costs of internalizing market values and practices are starting to outweigh the benefits.

Taken together, these four trends pose major challenges to the theory and practice of civil society in all of its guises, though they also open up some important opportunities – in the shape, for example, of new social movements that have arisen in response to the strengthening of nationalist political forces, or the increasing dissatisfaction with the condition of associational life that one sees among many younger activists. I explore these opportunities in chapter 2. It is also clear that these trends feed off each other: authoritarianism and polarization are natural bedfellows which both benefit from and accentuate the fracturing of the public sphere. The decline of voluntary associations which bring people of different views and backgrounds together is a consequence of that fracturing but also another cause. The more civil society is eroded, the less it can do its job; and the less it does its job, the weaker it becomes. Faced by these interlocking and deeply entrenched problems and developments, what can be done?

If civil society isn’t “the problem,” it cannot be “the solution,” at least in any simple or straightforward sense. But all of the issues outlined above contain an important civil society dimension, and adopting a tripartite analysis of associational life, the good society and the public sphere can help us to understand how these different dimensions interact with one another to bring solutions closer. Take rising cultural and political polarization as an example. Theorists who follow the associational school of civil society look to the decline and revival of certain kinds of organization as the key to understanding and addressing this problem – particularly groups that bring together people of different backgrounds and ideologies in common projects. But organizations are usually reflections of much deeper loyalties that are anchored in contrasting visions of social and political values and priorities. Unless those deeper divisions can be aired and mediated in some way, changes in the physical infrastructure of civil society are unlikely to have much effect. And the only way to mediate them – to sort through such differences and reach some common ground as the basis for policy and action – is by protecting and enhancing the communications structures of the public sphere so that people can talk honestly to each other. In isolation, no one school of thought is satisfactory, but taken together they can build on each other’s strengths and weaknesses to reveal opportunities for action of a kind that might actually produce results. Chapter 6 explores these opportunities, and each of my other chapters has been adjusted to take account of contemporary developments. As in previous editions, I have also updated the examples and references used throughout.

Carried over from 2003, however, when the first edition of the book was written, is a strong element of advocacy for civil society as something that is philosophically and practically distinct from government and business. Indeed, it is this difference that makes the difference to democracy and social change. There must be spaces and opportunities that are not dedicated to making money or accumulating power if civic values and relationships are to take root and flourish – places where we can meet each other for conversation and shape a collective course of action in line with our own democratically derived priorities. It is that possibility that is threatened by current trends. It may seem a truism to say that the future of civil society depends on us – on the members or constituent parts of the civil sphere and not on wealthy donors or politicians. But this observation is important: prioritizing democracy and mass participation over bureaucracy and oligarchic dominance is a vital step forward in recovering a more powerful vision of civil society and its possibilities. This doesn’t mean standing still or pretending that we can go back in time to a romanticized civic past, but it does require that we hold onto some foundational principles even as we search for new ways to put them into practice.

Reviving civil society in the face of repression, polarization, and inequality is both a personal and a political (or institutional) challenge. Do we want to build an authentic civil society or not? If we disagree on what that means, do we want to be part of a democratic dialogue to find out? And since dialogues at present are neither civil nor democratic, are we at least committed to building the conditions in which everyone can participate so that we can start a different conversation with each other instead of shouting from our separate bunkers? Anything that brings people closer together rather than forcing them apart will help; anything that generates honest conversation instead of fake news and propaganda can move us forward; and anything that enriches the quality of life rather than diminishing it deserves our attention. These are all ways to build a civil society that’s worthy of the name. The rest is up to us.

My thanks go to all those who have provided feedback on the third edition of Civil Society since its publication in 2014, and who have supplied me with a rich array of additional references, case studies, and other source material. Naturally, responsibility for all errors and omissions in the book remains mine. I have received excellent support and guidance from Jonathan Skerrett and Karina Jákupsdóttir at Polity Press in Cambridge, while three anonymous reviewers made valuable suggestions on an earlier draft. The revisions for this book were completed at our home in upstate New York, where my wife Cora is blazing a trail for true democracy and decency in government. As my own “civil society,” this book continues to be dedicated to her.

Michael Edwards

Swan Hill

March 2019