Conceptualizing Politics

civil society as the sphere of those initiatives and groups that intend to uphold the 
public interest or better pursue the public good in social and political life outside 
the state. Civic initiatives, neighbourhood committees, advocacy groups, charities, 
associations centred on sexual orientation or ethnic issues, and NGOs are the best 
known components of civil society in this version. Their understanding of the 
social world is opposed to the impersonal logic of state administration and even to 
ordinary political action, in particular to party politics. Their claim to represent the 
people’s authentic interest cannot be taken at face value, because their representa-
tiveness is not guaranteed by public procedures and their defence of particular, if 
morally high-ranking, interests can end up in lobbyist or self-perpetuating activities; 
even less so can the somehow redeeming appeal they and their theoreticians seem 
to see in the formula ‘only civil society can heal the wrongs made by the state(s)’ be 
taken seriously, since states cannot be reformed by evoking some morally superior 
agent. Yet their ability to indicate situations of inefficiency, inflicted suffering and 
injustice is high and should be better brought to bear in democratic processes.
Now, the relationship between politics and society has been described some sixty 
years ago by political scientists such as David Easton (1917–2014), Gabriel Almond 
(1911–2002) and Karl Deutsch (1912–1992) in systemic terms: (civil) society, with 
its problems and changes, is the environment in which ‘demands’ are given as ‘input’ 

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66  How politics works
into the political system, which is expected to provide an ‘output’ of answers that 
will interact with the environment generating ‘outcomes’, and subsequently new 
challenges and demands. The notion of a political system was intended to replace the 
state as the core actor, dismissing the legal framework in which the state used to be 
confined. The systemic approach is no longer dominating the scene in political sci-
ence, partly because of its inner problems, partly because general theory and holistic 
approaches are now hardly in demand in the discipline. Yet it remains the last over-
arching attempt to describe the relationship of politics and society after the two 
preceding philosophical episodes: Hegel saw civil society as the sphere of want and 
self-interest, capable of some self-regulation but unable to lay out real political gov-
ernance, which was the exclusive performance of the state as higher manifestation 
of the Spirit (Geist). On the contrary, the young Marx (1843), whose views were 
still influential in the 1960–70s, saw civil society as divided until modern times by 
class struggle, whose temporary winner used the repressive and bureaucratic tool of 
the state to consolidate its power and rule out change. The proletarian revolution 
was expected to tear down definitively the state and make room for society’s self-
rule on the basis of a full satisfaction of human needs.
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The difference between these three models is telling: Hegel and Marx saw soci-
ety and the state as elements of a philosophy of history, which explains their past 
and predicts their future with normative accents; system theorists stay far away from 
history and normativity and only suggest a conceptual and content-free frame of 
reference for understanding process and change. All three versions of society are no 
longer able to shape political theory, and the very notion of society does not seem 
to play any significant role in recent research, except in very specific versions such 
as ‘knowledge society’, ‘information society’ and ‘world society’, all attempts to find 
names for the presumptive pivot of the universe in which we live. To elaborate on 
these definitions is the task of social rather than political philosophy. Yet, taking note 
of the bottleneck in which the notion of society has ended up should not be mis-
taken as an endorsement for Margaret Thatcher’s, British PM from 1979 through 
1990, ontological rejection of it as a space of solidarity in the name of radical indi-
vidualism.
20
 We should rather turn our attention to the circumstance that, at least in 
welfare states, state policies have penetrated society, increasingly influencing the indi-
viduals’ income, status and (retreating) sense of independence. This is likely to be one 
of the main reasons why state and society are less distinguishable than in the times 
of good old liberalism. Given the high level of their intertwinement, it is illusory to 
see society as the dimension of private interactions capable of contesting the state’s 
intrusion or to represent a higher moral instance against it; at least in democracies, 
corruption in the public administration is often matched by corruption in society.
Two other terms – community and the public sphere – come up in the context 
of the relationship politics has with what surrounds it or lies beneath it – spatial 
metaphors are inevitable in the description of social and political constructs, which 
we tend to see as works of architecture.
Community is seen as the web of ‘organic’ relationships among persons, of which 
the family is the paradigm, based as it is on mutual emotional bonds; the will 
of the community is more important than that of the single members. On the 

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The state  67
contrary, society refers to the relationships between individuals that are based on 
the exchange of performances, shaped by contract and aimed at individual utility. 
This language was established by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in 
his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft/Community and Society (1887) and remains 
alive in sociology; a last echo of this counterposition between two ground types 
of socialisation came in the 1980–90s with the debate communitarians vs. liberals, 
which will be further explained in Chapter 9. Its interest for political philosophy 
derives from its ability to conceptualize the criticism of capitalism and modernisa-
tion, including liberalism and democracy, because of the destruction they have been 
operating on traditional and presumptively more humane personal bonds.
21
 Need-
less to say, in this sociological vocabulary the meaning of society is different, almost 
opposite to the meaning it has in the dyad state-society sketched above; the content 
of ‘society’ here is to be found in the Tönnesian version of ‘community’.
The other concept, the public sphere,
22
 denotes the dimension in which the com-
municative interaction between citizens, with regards to social and political affairs, 
takes place. It is the place in which both discourses aimed at the formation of politi-
cal will and the criticism of existing policies and laws are developed in freedom 
and outside any interference from the state and the economic powers that be. Its 
classical shape first emerged in the 
αγωρά/agorà or gathering and marketplace of 
the Greek city states and the forum in Rome and other Roman cities. A full-fledged 
public sphere was reborn in the coffee houses, theatres and clubs of the bourgeois 
civil society, with the press and its freedom as the main channels. Universal suffrage 
in democracy and mass parties both enlarged and eroded liberal Öffentlichkeit. On 
the one hand, its existence and vitality remain crucial as a counter-power to state 
power and its administrative constraints, as well as a source of new ideas and norms 
in a rapidly changing world; think of the role played by public discourse in putting 
unprecedented issues such as the environment, climate change and the responsibil-
ity to protect on the political agenda. On the other hand, the public sphere – which 
includes, but is much broader a concept than public opinion – is endangered not 
only by the more sophisticated and tentacular presence of the state, but also by a 
media system that is scarcely instrumental to a free exchange of ideas among equal 
partners, dominated as it is by oligopolistic powers and high-professionalised play-
ers. With the exception of the high quality press, this system turns out to be a self-
contained ‘fourth power’, as in its literary or cinematographic image, rather than a 
space for the formation and rejuvenation of the public sphere. It cannot yet be said 
whether online communication and its blogosphere represent a valid reshaping of 
the public sphere, nor if its drawbacks (the easier dissemination of hate speech, sec-
tarianism, and weird beliefs) prevail over the enhancement of freedom and ‘voice’.
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