Civil society

Civil society in history

The term 'civil society' goes back to Aristotle's phrase koinōnía politikḗ. His ‘Politics’ refer to a ‘community’, corresponding with the Greek city-state (polis), in which free citizens on an equal footing lived under the rule of law. The ‘telos’ or goal of civil society was common wellbeing where a man was defined as a ‘political (social) animal’ (zōon politikón).

The concept of societas civilis is Latin and was introduced by Cicero. Throughout history, this concept was discussed by various philosophers such as Hegel, Marx or Gramsci, evolving and changing during the time.

A new way of using the concept of civil society came within neoliberal ideology legitimising development of the third sector which substituted the state welfare in the former Soviet bloc after it had the transformed in 1989. The recent development of the third sector there is partly a result of this welfare systems restructuring, rather than of democratisation.

Moreover, in the 1990s, with the emergence of the nongovernmental organisations and the new social movements on a global scale, civil society as a third sector became treated as a key terrain of strategic action to construct ‘an alternative social and world order’.