ABSTRACT
I personally do not find the notion of ‘civil society’ very useful, and I tend not to use it in my work. The problem with such a notion is that it is much too elusive. It has so many different and conflicting meanings that it has become almost completely indeterminate. First, it is used in very different ways in different geographical and cultural contexts, for instance in advanced Western societies, in ex-Eastern Europe and in the non-Western world. Second, in the West itself, it is used to refer to such different things that sometimes it is very difficult even to begin a fruitful discussion. One usually remains in the first stage which consists in trying to find basic agreement on the definition of what one is going to talk about. However, there is one thing on which all those who use the term agree: it is that civil society is a ‘good thing’. They all see it as a good thing, because, albeit in different ways, they envisage civil society as something which will bring back a series of economic, social or personal powers that have been taken away by the state. But when it comes to specifying the resources to which one can appeal in order to reassert the role of society against the state, the answers given differ so widely that, despite the agreement on the goodness of civil society, one has to conclude that there is no agreement in the use of the term. This means that if we follow Ludwig Wittgenstein in asserting that the meaning of a term is linked to its use, we are really in trouble when it comes to defining civil society. Faced with such a situation there is, in my view, no point in trying to decide what the term really means. Of course, each group or theorist proclaims that their definition is the correct one, and I do not see on what basis we could decide who is right. I think that it is clearly more interesting to examine what, if any, are the family resemblances between the different uses of civil society and what they tell us about the real stakes in this debate. In this chapter I will limit my examination of the term civil society to the Western context, but it could also be fruitful to scrutinise the different uses of civil society elsewhere, as in the present volume, and particularly in the Muslim world. For instance, there is a very interesting debate in Egypt which has been documented by Sami Zubaida (2001). He shows how one can find there two completely contradictory conceptions of civil society, one secular and liberal, which calls for the legal recognition of voluntary associations such as political
parties and trades unions, and another one Islamic and communitarian, for which civil society is a space not subject to the rule of law but governed by Islam.
