Conceptualizing Politics

3.   State and society
This section’s title could just as well be Politics and Society, but I have chosen State 
because this is the level on which the underlying topic finds its closer definition. By 
society we understand the totality of the interactions between individuals and groups 
either in general, as it is largely the case in the following pages, or with regard to a 
specific place (French society) or time (Chinese society during the Ming dynasty). 
Politics and the state are seen as a particular area of those relationships, which comes 
up more clearly in the language of system theory: politics is a sub-system of the 
overall social system. As I have hinted at in Chapter 1, this is all right as far as it 
does not translate into the mechanical picture of politics being just the mirror or 
side effect of what happens in society. Politics, and in particular, the state do vice 
versa influence society, as we will see later, and none of these poles is as such the 
independent variable in social and political history. We should also not forget that 
politics and society (less so for the state, because of its institutional reality) are con-
ceptual constructs that it is unwise to reify as if they were hardware, while they live 
primarily in their interaction. To make a long story short, political actors, primarily 
the state, make formal decisions and build institutions with central power, while 
society, though also possessing features like power and institutions, does not.
State and society is an odd couple, born in recent centuries from the splitting of 
something that used to be one. The Greeks and the Romans possessed the notion of 
the state, as attested by Cicero’s definition of it as res publica/commonwealth given 
in the book he dedicated to it.
15
 In antiquity, however, the items we call state and 
society were not different from each other, but one; religion was a dimension of 
public life and the 
οἰκονομία/economy was conceptually confined, as in Aristotle’s 
model, to the law (
νόμος) governing the household (οἶκος) as unit of production 
(in a prevalently agrarian economy). Religion as a sphere separated from politics, 
coexisting with it but on its own principles,
16
 emerged first with the spread of 
Christianity and the discovery of interiority, as in Augustine. We have already seen 
that the European Middle Ages were based on the bipolarity of worldly and spir-
itual society and authority, notwithstanding all their entanglements. The rise of a 
worldwide market economy since the sixteenth century draws the philosophers’ 
attention to the growing importance of the new economy of trade and production, 
seen in its growing independence from state power. In the history of economic 

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The state  65
thought, this is mirrored in the debate between free trade supporters and physi-
ocrats on the one side, and mercantilists on the other. With A Natural History of 
Civil Society (1767), a book welcomed in all of Europe and authored by the Scottish 
philosopher Adam Ferguson, a new term
17
 entered the learned language and found 
a few decades later an echo in Hegel’s political and law philosophy – though the 
meaning of bürgerliche Gesellschaft adopted by Hegel was not identical with Fergu-
son’s, for whom ‘civil’ means ‘civilised’. A new peak in the relevance of ‘civil society’ 
was hit in the young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political philosophy,
18
 written in the 
1840s but not published until 1927 and influential in the years thereafter.
* * *
In the present political and theoretical use ‘civil society’ means two things and needs 
some disambiguation. In connection with its classical Scottish and primarily Hegelian 
meaning, which I cannot elucidate any further here, it indicates the complex of the 
private relations between individuals and groups, be they economic, social or cultural 
in character. An industrialists’ club or a trade union is as much a civil society organisa-
tion as a charity or a music association, such as the Viennese Musikverein; a particular 
material or set of ideal interests are the driving force. Personal relations belong to 
civil society as little as state institutions; our relationship to the latter are regulated by 
public law, which checks private wishes against the public interest and acts through 
commands of the authorities; while those who belong to civil society, its members, 
are shaped by the private institution of contract, based on consensus, though the frame-
work for contract law is set by the state. This is the meaning I am following in my 
further considerations on the relationship between civil society and the state.
Another more recent meaning, widely adopted in public debate nowadays, sees