from John Ehrenberg's "Civil Society & Marxist Politics," *Socialism & Democracy*, Vol. 12, Nos. 1-2, 1998...article is based on his recently published _Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea_... any listers read it? Michael Hoover 'The contemporary obsession with "civil society" began with the attempt of dissident East European intellectuals to develop a credible theoretical grounding in the early 1980s. As they began to describe the crisis of Soviet-style communism as "the revolt of civil society against the state," it became clear that they understood "civil society" as the anti-communist opposition organized in forums, associations and similar bodies. Two sets of claims came to characterize the period. They drew on classical political economy, Tocqueville, and liberal republicanism, and were indebted to the Cold War's literature on mass society and totalitarianism. At an immediate level, the following charges were typical: "Actual existing socialism" has degenerated into a bureaucratically-driven commitment to central economic planning for its own sake, systematic stifling of initiative, hypocritical claims of service to the working class, and a grasping state apparatus which crushes all authentic movement emerging spontaneously from "society." Socialism in power is little more than a state-driven strategy of planned industrialization. At a more basic level, Marxism itself came under attack, on the grounds that its explicit intention to "transform" civil society expresses an inherent disposition toward statist totalitarianism. Correspondingly, Marxism's claim that the state can represent the general good gives rise to its volunteerism, lack of limits, tendency to politicize everything, indifference to the content of socialist democracy, contempt for privacy, and suspicious disposition to crush, direct or absorb democratic initiatives which originate in civil society. This anti-statist skepticism about politics spread to Western Europe and then to the United States, where it has now achieved near-canonical status. Marxism, we are assured, is an outmoded ideology, socialism a dangerous fantasy, and the centrality of the working class a remnant of a vanished "Fordist" past. Authentic democratic activity can be rooted only in informal networks, voluntary associations, and local communities which constitute civil society. But Marx cannot be dismissed quite so easily, for his conception of civil society is deeply rooted in liberal political economy and the recent history of capitalir societies has made it more resilient than expected. His understanding of civil society has a distinguished lineage which drew on the insights of both classical political economy and Hegel's sweeping theory of the state. Adam Smith first articulated the classic bourgeois understanding that civil society is a market-organized sphere of necessity which is driven by the self-interested motion of individual proprietors, but this position drew heavily on earlier views that civil society is constituted by property, labor, exchange, and consumption. Hegel built his theory of the state and civil society on this understanding and on his analysis of the French Revolution, and Marx's development of Hegel continues to inform the thinking of much of the left.'
