ABSTRACT
Civil society was an invention from the conditions of European modernity which was able in principle to explain the reciprocity of people who experienced themselves as individuals in relationships with strangers. It was the milieu in which individuals entered into voluntary associations and thus freely carried out the social construction of a bounded community called society. Civil society was the guarantee and the achievement of societal self-sufficiency and of the deconstruction of the natural artifice. Carl Schmitt was attempting to deconstruct the principle of equality, and implicitly the ideal of symmetric reciprocity, on the basis of the practical requirements of equality and reciprocity. Schmitt argues that the contradiction between these two principles is perfectly revealed in Jean Jacques Rousseau's work. Rousseau, according to Schmitt, bases the legitimacy and the right of the state on its ability to represent the entirely homogeneous 'general will'. Rousseau understands the 'general will' as involving nothing other than the complete unanimity of the community.
