Civil Society’s Role in Shaping Citizenship

What gives citizens a sense of political identity and belonging? The answer lies, at least in part, in civil society – that vast and diverse space of human life that is neither the state nor the private household. From Aristotle’s political community to Hegel’s “system of needs” to Gramsci’s site of ideological struggle, civil society has been understood in strikingly different ways across history. Yet each perspective circles back to the same central question: how do people, living alongside one another, form political identities and exercise citizenship?

What civil society actually means 🔗

The term civil society resists a single clean definition. In the broadest contemporary sense, it refers to the space of organized social life between the state and the individual – encompassing families, churches, voluntary associations, and social movements. It is sometimes described as the “third sector,” distinct from both government and the market. In everyday usage, civil society often signals the institutions that underpin a democratic society: a free press, an independent judiciary, and the freedom to associate and speak.

But this modern understanding has a long and complicated intellectual history. The meaning of civil society has shifted twice from its original classical form, shaped by thinkers spanning from ancient Greece to 20th-century Italy. Understanding these shifts is essential to understanding what role civil society plays in shaping who counts as a citizen – and what that citizenship means.

From ancient roots to the Enlightenment 🔗

The concept has its roots in classical antiquity. The Roman concept of societas civilis was introduced by Cicero, but the underlying idea goes back even further. In Aristotle’s Politics, the term koinōnía politikḗ – a political community like the city-state or polis – was established for collective survival, with the aim of human flourishing. Crucially, classical thinkers drew no distinction between state and society; the civil form of society was the state, and civility was simply the requirement of good citizenship.

Socrates argued that public argument and rational dialogue were essential to maintaining order in the polis. Plato envisioned an ideal state where citizens practiced civic virtues – wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. This classical view treated civil society not as a counterweight to political power, but as its very foundation.

The Enlightenment began to complicate this picture. Scottish political economists like Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith understood civil society as emerging from an independent commercial order, within which complex chains of interdependence between predominantly self-seeking individuals proliferated, alongside an independent public sphere. For Ferguson and his contemporaries, commerce and civic life were intertwined – economic activity was itself a form of social participation.

Hegel: the decisive separation of state and civil society 🔗

The most influential turning point came with the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). It was Hegel who first drew the boundary between the spheres of state and society in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820). For Hegel, civil society – bürgerliche Gesellschaft – was an intermediate realm positioned between the family (characterized by personal bonds) and the state (characterized by universal governance).

Hegel described civil society as a “system of needs” – the domain of economic relationships, private property, and individual rights that emerged with modern capitalism. He used the German term “bürgerliche Gesellschaft” to denote civil society as “civilian society” – a sphere regulated by the civil code. Civil society, in his view, contained contradictory forces: while it enabled individuals to pursue their interests and develop social identities through work and economic participation, it also generated inequalities that the state alone could correct.

This is a critical point. Hegel saw market relations in modern society as a foundation for the acquisition by free individuals of social identities including social solidarity – but he also recognized that the economy, left entirely to itself, produces fragmentation and diminishment of human life. The state, for Hegel, was therefore necessary to regulate civil society and provide the conditions for genuine political participation. Citizens did not merely live in civil society; they had to transcend its particular interests to participate in the ethical life of the state.

Marx’s critique: civil society as bourgeois illusion 🔗

Karl Marx inherited Hegel’s framework and turned it on its head. For Marx, the modern state is characterized by an historically unprecedented separation between an individual’s “real” life in civil society and his “political” life as a citizen of the state. This separation, Marx argued, was not a solution to the tensions of economic life – it was itself the problem.

Where Hegel saw the state as a neutral arbiter that could transcend the conflicts of civil society, Marx depicted the state as the defender of the interests of the bourgeoisie – effectively the executive arm of the ruling class. The formal political equality granted by citizenship was, for Marx, an abstraction. Workers might be equal before the law, but they remained unequal in civil society – bound by property relations, economic competition, and class hierarchy. True human emancipation, in Marx’s view, would require not just political reform but the abolition of the class-based structure of civil society itself.

Marx’s critique raised a question that is still pressing today: can citizenship be genuinely equal when the civil society in which citizens live is structured by deep economic inequality?

Tocqueville: civil society as the school of democracy 🔗

While Hegel and Marx were primarily concerned with the relationship between civil society and economic class, the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) focused on a different dimension: civil society as the training ground for democratic citizenship.

Tocqueville made a key conceptual distinction. Political society, in his view, refers to the activities of the population as it actively engages with matters of government and power – distinct from civil society, which encompasses the private relationships between citizens and their myriad non-political associations. Voluntary associations – charities, civic clubs, religious communities, local organizations – were, for Tocqueville, the essential infrastructure of democratic life.

He had good reason to worry about what happened when these associations were absent. Tocqueville feared a scenario in which citizens, becoming increasingly isolated in their individual pursuits, would give up any claims on public life and submit to a paternalistic and despotic central government. His remedy was associational life: citizens learning to collaborate, to pursue shared goals, and – in doing so – to develop the civic habits and dispositions that democracy requires.

Tocqueville regarded these associations as laboratories of democracy that teach citizens the art of being free and enable them to pursue their interests collectively. This was more than a theory of social organization – it was a theory of political identity. Citizens, for Tocqueville, are made through participation. They do not arrive at civic life fully formed; they develop their identities as citizens by engaging in civil society.

Gramsci: civil society and the contest for hegemony 🔗

In the 20th century, the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci added another layer to this debate. Rather than treating civil society as a neutral space of voluntary association, Gramsci understood it as a site of ideological contestation. He stressed the fluidity of relations between the state and civil society, arguing that the two often overlap – civil society (trade unions, media, religious organizations) and political society (police, army, legal system) cannot be fully understood in isolation from each other.

For Gramsci, hegemony – the cultural and ideological dominance of a ruling class – is not maintained by force alone. It is sustained through the institutions of civil society: schools, churches, the media, and professional associations. These institutions shape what people believe is natural, legitimate, and desirable. This means that civil society is not simply a check on state power; it can also be a mechanism through which power is reproduced. Citizenship, from a Gramscian perspective, is always shaped by the ideological context in which it is exercised.

Civil society, economic competition, and political identity today 🔗

The tensions that Hegel and Marx identified between economic life and political citizenship have only deepened in the modern era. Civil society is still invoked by many of its advocates as a synonym for the values of authenticity and belonging, neither of which, it is assumed, can be achieved in politics or economic life. Yet in practice, the institutions of civil society are themselves shaped by economic pressures – competition for funding, shifting labor markets, and the privatization of public services all affect who can participate in civil society and on what terms.

The concept of citizenship today is composed of three main dimensions: citizenship as legal status (civil, political, and social rights), citizenship as active political participation, and citizenship as membership in a political community that provides a distinct source of identity. Civil society intersects with all three. It is the arena in which rights are exercised and sometimes won; it is a primary site of political participation beyond the ballot box; and it is the cultural space in which collective identities are forged, challenged, and renegotiated.

The universalist model of citizenship – the idea that citizenship confers an identical set of rights on all members of a political community – has come under sustained pressure. Critics argued that the model proves exclusionary if it requires transcending particular, situated perspectives to achieve a common point of view, since this effectively privileges dominant cultural norms while marginalizing minority experiences. Civil society has often been the arena in which these exclusions have been challenged – by labor movements, feminist organizations, civil rights groups, and others who have demanded that formal legal equality translate into genuine political and social inclusion.

The uneasy relationship between civil society and the state 🔗

One of the oldest questions in this field remains unsettled: is civil society best understood as independent from the state, or as deeply entangled with it? Some argue that civil society is a bulwark against government; others see it as an indispensable support for government. The reality is probably both – and the balance shifts depending on the historical and political context.

What seems clear is that civil society cannot be treated as a simple alternative to political life. The state sets the legal framework within which civil society operates. Economic structures determine who has the resources, time, and security to participate. And ideological forces – as Gramsci emphasized – shape what kinds of civic engagement are recognized as legitimate and what kinds are dismissed as particularistic or disruptive. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, developing these ideas in the 20th century, identified the role of political culture in a democratic order as vital, arguing that politically engaged civil organizations facilitate a more informed citizenry who make better voting choices and hold government more accountable.

Civil society, then, is neither a romantic sphere of authentic community nor simply a transmission belt for state power. It is an arena of genuine complexity – where economic interests, cultural identities, and political aspirations intersect and compete. Its relationship with citizenship is dynamic: civil society shapes what citizenship means in practice, while the terms of citizenship determine who can participate in civil society on equal terms.

What do you think? Does the economic inequality within civil society undermine the promise of equal citizenship – or can civic participation help bridge that gap? And whose vision of civil society do you find most compelling: Tocqueville’s voluntary associations as schools of democracy, or Gramsci’s contested terrain of ideological struggle?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_society
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/civil-society
3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/other-religious-beliefs-and-general-terms/miscellaneous-religion/civil-society
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-social-political/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Hegel's_Philosophy_of_Right
6. https://home.olemiss.edu/~gg/paperhtm/civlsoct.htm
7. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/civil_society_and_the_foundations_of_democratic_citizenship
8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292362258_Tocqueville_and_Civil_Society
9. https://devpolicy.org/civil-society-and-development-moving-from-de-tocqueville-to-gramsci-20150817/
10. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/
11. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691088020/civil-society-and-government