society was shared by major theorists of the British liberal tradition, such as Locke,
Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, J. S. Mill, Lord Acton, and T. H. Green; and it was
likewise what was meant by the notion of a ‘‘societe ́civile,’’ that stemmed from
Rousseau and was developed in France during the French Revolution and under
the regime of Napoleon (Harris 2003 , 23 – 9 ). Within this common discourse there
were many diVerences of emphasis and detail. British writers mostly viewed
civil society as a political framework that permitted and encouraged widespread
associational diversity and autonomy, whereas French civil society theorists were
much more inclined to emphasize equality and uniformity beneath the overarch-
ing umbrella of central government and the Napoleonic Code (Acton 1862 , 2 – 25 ).
Both British and French traditions, however, continued to identify civil society
with the sphere of government and the state; while social life and voluntary
association were nearly always viewed as the beneWcent outcome of civil
society, rather than as its characteristic embodiment.
Nevertheless, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, there were spasmodic
signs of various substantive and semantic shifts in this long-standing politico-legal
understanding of the term. The most important of these changes took place in
Germany, where some authorities began to portray ‘‘civil society’’ as a much
grander idea, others as something much moreXawed and limited, than in its
classical and ‘‘early modern’’ formulations. A shift in the former direction was
apparent in the writings of Immanuel Kant, who hinted at a conception of ‘‘civil
society’’ as a cluster of common civic, legal, ethical, and visionary norms that
potentially embraced not just the denizens of any particular kingdom or polity but
the whole human race (Reiss 1970 , 41 – 53 ) (Model 4 ). And a move in the opposite
direction took the form of an increasing identiWcation of civil society (bu ̈rgerlich
Gesellschaft) not with kingly or princely ‘‘government’’ but with the quasi-public,
quasi-private activities of production, commerce, banking, andWnance: a shift that
may have reXected the resurgence of interest within post-Napoleonic Germany in
the economic doctrines of Roman civil law. It was in this latter context that an
important new conception of ‘‘civil society’’ was to be developed by Hegel and
Marx; a conception that referred—not to the disinterested, impartial, public
sphere conjured up by Cicero and the English contract theorists—but to the self-
interested, competitive,privatesphere of the bourgeois commercial economy. In
the writings of Karl Marx the very term ‘‘bu ̈rger’’ or ‘‘bourgeois’’ lost its older,
‘‘public’’ connotation of the disinterested citizen, and was transferred instead to
the socioeconomic category of the ‘‘private’’ entrepreneur (Hegel 1991 , 220 – 74 ;
Marx 1975 ) (Model 2 ).
Similar changes were perceptible in other aspects of the language of civil society.
In France the phrasesociete ́civilecame to be applied in some circles, not to public
and legal institutions, but to what in English was often referred to as ‘‘polite
society’’ (meaning the world of salons, culture, fashion, and good manners) (Harris
2003 , 21 – 2 ). Likewise, in English, French, and German narratives, the adjectives
development of civil society 135