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By Root 1509 0

citizens temporarily holding office are metamorphosed by power into “professionals” out of touch with their constituencies, while citizens are reduced by their impotence to whining antagonists of the men and women they elect to office or to sulking clients of government services they consume without being willing to pay for. For peoples so cynical about their own democratic institutions to recommend democracy to cousins in transitional states or to conceive of a global democracy in the world beyond sovereign borders is problematic at best. For today’s half-baked citizens recommend democracy without trusting it: they abdicate their own majority powers in favor of term limits, constitutional amendments, and supermajorities. Likewise, they recommend markets without believing in them: without being persuaded for an instant that markets can secure citizenship or civic liberty or much of anything beyond the material goods that no longer satisfy their yearning spirits.

To envision a democratic civic entity that empowers citizens to rule themselves is then necessarily to move beyond the two-celled model of government versus private sector we have come to rely on. Instead, invoking the traditional language of civil society, we need to begin to think about the domains people occupy as they go about their daily business as having at least three primary arenas, whether within tribal enclaves, nation-states, or a global society: the government and the private sector to be sure, but also the civil domain, civic space or what Eastern Europeans and Russians regularly referred to as civil society before they became “democratic” and were persuaded by their Western handlers that local participatory institutions were unsuited to democracy’s market ambitions.

Civil society, or civic space, occupies the middle ground between government and the private sector. It is not where we vote and it is not where we buy and sell; it is where we talk with neighbors about a crossing guard, plan a benefit for our community school, discuss how our church or synagogue can shelter the homeless, or organize a summer softball league for our children. In this domain, we are “public” beings and share with government a sense of publicity and a regard for the general good and the commonweal; but unlike government, we make no claim to exercise a monopoly on legitimate coercion. Rather, we work here voluntarily and in this sense inhabit a “private” realm devoted to the cooperative (noncoercive) pursuit of public goods. This neighborly and cooperative domain of civil society shares with the private sector the gift of liberty: it is voluntary and is constituted by freely associated individuals and groups; but unlike the private sector, it aims at common ground and consensual (that is, integrative and collaborative) modes of action. Civil society is thus public without being coercive, voluntary without being privatized. It is in this domain that our traditional civic institutions such as foundations, schools, churches, public interest and other voluntary civic associations properly belong. The media too, where they take their public responsibilities seriously and subordinate their commercial needs to their civic obligations, are part of civil society.

Unhappily, civil society has been eclipsed by government/market bipolarities and its mediating strengths have been eliminated in favor of the simplistic opposition of state and individual: the command economy versus the free market. This opposition has forced those wishing to occupy noncoercive civic space—whether in traditional democracies, new democracies, or the global civic domain—back into the private sector where they reappear, quite improperly, as “special interest” advocates supposedly unmarked by common concerns or public norms. We are compelled to be voters or consumers in all we do; if we wish to be citizens, if we want to participate in self-governance rather than just elect those who govern us, there is no place to turn.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in Tocqueville’s America and afterwards, American society