Dylan Riley in Sidecar:
Among the many lessons of Trump’s return to the White House, a crucial one concerns civil society: a mushy and frustrating, but nevertheless inescapable, concept. Taken up from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – where Bürgerliche Gesellschaft referred ambiguously to both the emerging realm of market exchange and the late medieval Stände – Marx sought to lay bare its underlying structure and laws of motion. But in making this intellectual breakthrough he lost something of the political and cultural importance of the sphere of associations and interest groups that characterized this ‘second level of the superstructure’, wedged, as Gramsci pointed out, between the productive economy and the state. (True, in his analysis of Bonapartism Marx returned to this earlier meaning, counterposing the overweening late-absolutist French state to civil society).
A separate lineage runs from De Tocqueville through Durkheim to contemporary political sociology and political science. It focused on the virtues of intermediate structures (recalling in some ways Montesquieu’s intermediate powers) whose main function was to contain the excesses of modern democracy – a regime which, De Tocqueville claimed, could be made compatible with liberty on the condition of the existence of a flourishing associational sphere (functional substitute for the great appanage families of the old regime). It was Arendt who fused the Marxian and De Tocquevillian traditions in her account of modern totalitarianism (although there is no evidence that she had read Gramsci). For Arendt, the key precondition for totalitarianism was the pulverization of civil society, which produced the isolation of mass society, full of disoriented individuals available for demagogic mass movements.
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