by iFaqeer
“Civil Society” has become the new touch phrase in Pakistani politics. And it’s gotten to the point where people express the same kind of cynicism about it that is usually reserved for words like “Islamist”, and “War on Terror”, and, well, “Progressive Islam”. A friend on one of our alumni mailing lists was getting pretty disgusted by Nawaz Sharif’s piling on to the Civil Society bandwagon.
But words have meanings, and undue cynicism can be self-defeating. In fact, we need to fight the battle of perception and how things are framed. That’s been quite a discussion in US politics and thought, particularly kicked off by the book by George Lakoff titled Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
And in our own situation in Pakistan, it is important to keep people honest in their language.I think it would go go a long way towards a better society.
And honestly, I have the same attitude towards “terrorism”, “moderate”, “Islamist”, etc. See, for example, my post on the concept of one man’s terrrorist being another man’s freedom fighter or other posts on being flip with language, such as this one about terrorists that are “Hindu” or “Islamic”.
And to further that cause, here’s my definition of “Civil Society”:
Anyone who’s not affiliated with a political party or a government servant (including military).
What’s yours? What’s your pet peeve in terms of language?
11 Comments
December 13, 2007 at 12:43 pm
my pet peeves here have to be the words “Islamist”, “muslim extremist” and the “free world” – why is it so easy for “civil society” (heehee maaf keejiye, i couldn’t help it!) to swallow all this nonsense?
December 13, 2007 at 1:30 pm
i think it behooves *civil* society to behave in a more *civilised* manner, and prove worthy of living in an equitable society. until we clean up our own acts what right do we have to expect things around us to improve.
December 13, 2007 at 1:59 pm
You are right. Believing in an entity like ‘civil society’ automatically creates a duality where everyone belonging to civil society is kinda misanthropic towards everyone outside it. In my humble opinion, civil society, if there has to be a class like this, should actually mean those who believe in the equal rights of all citizens of the state
Trust me, there are people in politics, military and government who also believe and wish in these kind of rights. Its just that they do not have the scruples to give voice to their wishes and pay the price for that.
December 13, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Sabahat Saheb
this is a well timed post – as we try and grapple with the over-emphasis of civil society or “civil societies” on Pakistani channels (equating them with NGOs I suppose) such a debate is in order..
I would like to paste this insightful artice that I read some time back:
Does civil society exist in Pakistan?
by Irfan Muzaffar
The writer is an educator and a student of political philosophy at Michigan State University in the US
The return of civil society in debates about understanding Pakistan’s social and political milieu is indeed a very welcome development. This contribution adds a historical perspective to this conversation. My exploration of the notion of civil society is guided by Wittgenstein’s contention that our concepts are like threads made up of fibers. The strength of a particular thread does not derive from the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers. Instead of a definition, then, we capture this “family resemblance”.
I attempt to capture the family resemblance called civil society by examining the use of the term in various philosophical traditions of the ‘west.’ I contend that the current articulations of civil society — especially its equivalence with non-government organizations — is not the same as its antecedent articulations in the discourses of the liberal democratic state. Tracing the notion of civil society in the philosophical works of John Locke (1632-1704), G W F Hegel (1770-1831), Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), and finally its current manifestations, one finds that civil society in western discourses has always remained internal to state, and never conceived as apart from and/or standing pitted against it. If we accept this as a valid representation of civil society, then we may also have to confront the unsettling corollary that civil society does not exist in Pakistan.
My story of civil society begins with John Locke, who conceptualized it as emerging from political society. He conceived political society as one, which permitted unfettered political competition, and civil society as a check on it. It was supposed to be a state of society in which individual rights to life, liberty, and property were guaranteed. The political society did not offer any such guarantees. Civil society, thus, was a corrective to the political society inasmuch as it guaranteed the protection of natural rights. The state’s job within the civil society — and as part of it — was to create conditions that ensured such protection. Thus, a political society in which the basic rights of citizens were not recognized could not be civil. Although Locke’s ideas did not go as far as describing the forms of modern liberal democratic state, his privileging of rights continues to characterize the liberal democratic modern state.
In Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights, the notion of civil society is very similar to Locke. But while Locke spoke directly in terms of a conception of natural rights, Hegel privileged the rational individual who ultimately had to make a rational, but inevitable, decision to have a universal totality called the state. The state then guaranteed his rights along with those of the others. For Hegel, then, the civil society was a transitional step in human development toward some superior stage. It was a stage of social organization in which the individuals shared their needs, and were able to socialize with other individuals.
In Hegelian conception the theme of ‘freedom for all’ animated civil society. This emphasis on freedom for all worked to bring civil society in a dialectical relationship with all kinds of fanaticisms in the western world. French political theorist Dominique Colas, in his book Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories, points out that all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the concepts of civil society and fanaticism always appeared together and in opposition to one another. While fanaticism could survive in brute political competition in a political society, it had to be confronted with a strong emphasis on ‘freedom for all’ in the civil society. In European history, there have been moments when civil society lost itself out to political society. When that happened, fanaticism ruled — Nazism and fascism being instances of such moments. The dialectic between fanaticism and moderation/freedom continues to fuel the movement of history in the west.
To recapitulate, while Locke had linked the idea of civil society with the realization of freedom, and with protection of natural, inalienable rights of humans, Hegel carried this forward, and collectively these political philosophies asserted civil society as a structure of relationships in which the rights of individuals received primacy and were recognized and upheld by law. In both of these conceptions, state and civil society were not external to each other. Civil society represented a state of society in which the state was busy guarding the rights of its citizens. The state apparatus, in particular, law and public authority appeared as parts of civil society. Civil society did not name a segment of society, or a set of organizations within it.
The Hegelian notion of civil society had assumed human equality and a notion of natural rights as somehow inherent to civil society. The parallel pursuit of private and common public good underpinned the Lockean and Hegelian concpetion of civil society. That is, while the civil society allowed for the pursuit of private interests, it was also supposed to guard the common concern for the freedom and welfare of all its members. This notion of civil society was critiqued by Marx from an economistic perspective. Marx, unlike Hegel, portrayed civil society primarily as a domain of particular interests rather than a guaranter of collective freedom. In his critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, Marx focused on the symbiotic relationship between economic interests and political institutions. Since the civil society professed right to property, it could not express the interests of society as a whole. That is, under transformation from Hegelian idealism to Marxian materialism, the concept of civil society transformed from a guaranter of natural rights to one that could only protect the interests of a particular class.
Italian writer and theorist Antonio Gramsci developed this idea further by introducing the notion of hegemony to its vocabulary. He associated state with direct coercion and civil society with hegemony. So state, in this conception used coercive power to legally enforce its writ, while civil society produced the consensus for protection of the interests of the dominant groups. This enabled, according to Gramsci, the modern governments to secure consensus without recourse to violent coercion. The state and civil society were distinguished by Gramsi on the basis of functions that they performed, with state performing the juridical and civil society that of manufacturing the consensus. However, it should be observed that state and civil society were still united by a common objective. Both legal enforcement (by state) and consensus making (by civil society) had to facilitate governance in the absence of an ideal arrangement to guarantee the needs of all. Gramsci also suggested that for change to happen, it was important to turn the civil society’s consensus generating mechanisms on behalf of ruling elites, into sites for contestation and resistance.
Now, given this brief genealogy of civil society, how must we speak of civil society in Pakistan? If we speak of civil society in terms of Locke and Hegel, we perhaps do not have one. When we speak of civil society, we usually refer to a particular segment of society. This reference was even visible in the media language used to identify participants in the recent movement for the independence of judiciary, political parties, the lawyers’ bodies, and civil society.
I have narrowly articulated conceptions of civil society in western philosophies and, using these descriptions as a reference, have raised some questions. I understand that the western origins of the term do not matter and I do not argue for a return to some original definition of civil society. Terms do assume their meaning in particular practices, and civil society must mean what it does within the current practice in which it is put to use in Pakistan. Yet, the meaning of civil society is narrowed or broadened depending on whether the term refers to a particular segment of society, or toward the state of entire society. As things stand, in most of the developing world, NGOs are increasingly identified with civil society. We should ask whether or not we are narrowing the scope of civil society by identifying them with a small segment of social organizations such as the NGOs?
(this was published in the Daily Times)
December 13, 2007 at 10:45 pm
“civil society” is SO elitist!
and
exclusive!
what is wring with “people” – when used in context of current affairs in pakistan?
December 17, 2007 at 3:11 am
‘civil’ implies recognition of the fact that we are a species that respects the other’s right to live as much as our own and so will not by word, look, or action impinge on what is anothers. This definition leaves very few of us in the ‘civil society’ category, if any at all!
December 17, 2007 at 9:20 am
[...] has offered this very thought provoking post at ‘Pak tea house’. He appears discussing un-wanted cynicism that has many negative [...]
December 20, 2007 at 8:51 pm
PTH thanks for the daily times article.
January 21, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Just a correction. I wrote the article pasted above and am glad that it contributes to this conversation. It was not published in Daily Times, but in The News in its Sept. 27 issue
January 22, 2008 at 4:26 am
Dear Irfan Muzaffar
Many thanks for visting – Apologies for the mistake. Yes, your piece was most useful for many readers here.
thanks for visiting
Raza Rumi (Ed)
March 18, 2009 at 10:23 pm
congratulating you
Hi, I am writing comment this blog first time. I like this site so much. kind of site is so good.