Portal:Politics/Selected article/2007, week 6

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Civil society is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society as opposed to the force-backed structures of a state (regardless of that state's political system) and commercial institutions.

The modern usage of the term is often traced to Adam Ferguson, who saw the development of a "commercial state" as a way to change the corrupt feudal order and strengthen the liberty of the individual. While Ferguson did not draw a line between the state and the society, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher, made this distinction in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. In this work, civil society (Hegel used the term "buergerliche Gesellschaft" though it is now referred to as Zivilgesellschaft in German to emphasize a more inclusive community) was a stage on the dialectical relationship between Hegel's perceived opposites, the macro-community of the state and the micro-community of the family. Broadly speaking, the term was split, like Hegel's followers, to the political left and right. On the left, it became the foundation for Karl Marx's bourgeois society; to the right it became a description for all non-state aspects of society, expanding out of the economic rigidity of Marxism into culture, society and politics.