public space that transcended lesser or rival identities remained largely a dead
letter. Nevertheless, the seventeenth century was to see major developments in the
deWnition and crystalization of ‘‘civil society’’ as an abstract political, legal, and
normative idea (and, much more sketchily, as a guide to political practice). Both
the establishment of state churches headed by secular rulers, and the principle
of ‘‘toleration’’ (permitting plurality of religious beliefs) were portrayed by
some contemporaries as promoting and embodying important principles of
‘‘civil society’’ (Figgis 1916 , 94 – 115 ). The gradual revival of interest in Roman civil
law, and its insemination into contemporary political thought greatly enhanced the
notion of civil authority as an impersonal sphere regulated by law, rather than—or
at least in addition to—a hierarchy of interpersonal allegiances climaxing in the
person of a royal ruler. And in England the writings of the contractarian school—
Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke—all powerfully reinforced the
notion of ‘‘civil society’’ as identical with settled political authority and eVective
law-enforcement (Hooker 1977 , 95 – 149 ; Hobbes 1952 , 1983 ; Locke 1965 ). For
Thomas Hobbes it was ‘‘civilsociety’’ (i.e. a civil government able to enforce the
law) that made possible the very existence of mere ‘‘society’’ (the latter implying,
not the all-encompassing category envisaged in present-day discourse, but
‘‘sociability’’ or the coming together of citizens for a multiplicity of purposes in
small groups) (Hobbes 1952 , 1983 ; Locke 1965 , 367 – 8 ). John Locke, unlike Hobbes,
thought that ‘‘the People’’ (i.e. an aggregate of persons interacting outside politics)
might survive even if ‘‘Civil Society’’ (i.e. the body politic) were to break down. But
even Locke thought that such collective social survival could only be short-lived
unless a newcivilsociety, that is legislative and governing institutions and agencies
of law enforcement, were to be rapidly re-formed (Locke 1965 , 476 – 7 ). In the works
of all these writers, the terms ‘‘civil society’’ and ‘‘political society’’ were not
contrasted but used interchangeably. The writings of the contractarians also
emphasized that an eVective ‘‘civil society’’ did not have to be a speciWcally
Christian one: the governments of Turkey and China, for example, were perfectly
capable of constituting ‘‘civil societies,’’ provided that they maintained the
peace, acted justly, and obeyed natural laws. By contrast, the regime of Louis XIV
in France (widely deemed the most ‘‘civilized’’ nation in Europe) was classed
by English authors as ‘‘not a civil society,’’ because its citizens could be
arbitrarily imprisoned without trial and because earlier concessions to religious
pluralism had been rescinded under the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (Locke
1965 , 454 , 459 , 476 – 7 ).
This model of ‘‘civil society’’—not as voluntary self-help, or community
action, or a ‘‘non-governmental’’ public sphere, but as a cluster of institutions
synonymous with the functioning of a law-making, law-enforcing, and law-abiding
state—was to be a commonplace of much British, and to a lesser extent European,
political thought down to the period of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth
century. Despite many recent misconceptions to the contrary, this view of civil
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