and to make and enforce the laws; that is, thecivitas,societas civilis, or what later
generations would come to refer to as ‘‘the state.’’ Moreover, though state power in
Rome was often notoriously run as the privateWef of individual dynasties, a quite
diVerent conception was hinted at by the very adjectivecivilis.Societas civilis
indicated a neutral arena of public life whose membership was in principle
determined not by tribe or family, but by common citizenship or status before
the law (even though, in day-to-day Roman practice, family ties and interests often
heavily inXuenced civic ones). It was in this sense that the term had been used by
Cicero and other defenders of ‘‘republican’’ themes; namely, to mean a system of
government that routinely observed rules and procedures applying equally to all
citizens, rather than being dependent on the arbitrary whims of a Pompey or a
Caesar. This was to be the standard usage of the term throughout the Roman
imperial era; but over the course of several centuries the notion of asocietas civilis
also came to embrace non-citizens, as continuous expansion of international trade
brought large numbers of people throughout the Mediterranean world into the
universalizing ambit of Roman civil law. Thus while Romanpolitical thought
powerfully shaped a long-lasting conception of civil society as a law-abidingstate
(Model 1 ), Romanjurisprudenceandcivil lawalso sowed the seeds of the what,
many centuries later in European history, would become an alternative conception
of civil society, as the characteristic sphere of private property, business, and
commerce(Model 2 ) (Ehrenberg 1999 , 19 – 27 ; Justinian 1985 ).
Both visions of civil society were largely eclipsed (together with any explicit
reference to the term) by the quite diVerent notions of public aVairs and political
authority that prevailed in Europe following the disintegration of Roman rule.
Throughout western Europe exclusive and self-governing ecclesiastical, military,
civic, and vocational corporations (of a kind particularly abhorrent to Roman civil
law)Xourished and came to dominate public, economic, and social life; while for
many centuries the location and character of ultimate civil power was to
be continually contested between warlords, emperors, feudal kingship, and the
Catholic church. But it was no coincidence that, when in the fourteenth century
some theorists began to search for a new notion of political authority that
might transcend or bypass these conXicts, they turned to the earlier model of
‘‘civil society’’ as a neutral sphere of political association, based on free contract
and consent between citizens, rather than on religious identity, ties of feudal fealty, or
mere physical force. At this stage there was no suggestion that organized religion
should withdraw from the public sphere, but simply that there should be a functional
separation between ‘‘religious society’’ and ‘‘civil society,’’ with the former enjoying
political, legal, and physical protection in return for giving moral, cultural, and
spiritual support to the latter (Black 1984 ; Ehrenberg 1999 , 45 – 57 ; Figgis 1907 , 31 – 54 ).
The religious and civil wars that periodically ravaged Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries might seem to suggest that, whatever may have been the
visions of political theorists, the notion of ‘‘civil society’’ as a neutral arena of
development of civil society 133