148 "Presenting" the Past
people should transform themselves from a "sack of potatoes" into execu-
tors of their own interests and aspirations, and should look after those, the
independent flow of information, free learning, and culture. He posits that
different sociological mechanisms come into play in a society that demands
its rights and transforms itself from object to subject.^2
Being the public realm constituted by private individuals, civil society
points to those elements of both individualism and community that have
characterized Western political thought. Adam Smith recognizes civil
society as that realm of "natural affections and sociability," and Marx dis-
tinguishes that as the arena where a man "acts as a private individual,
regards other men as means, degrades himself into a means and becomes
a plaything of alien powers." Civil society referred to a realm of social
mutuality in the eighteenth century and characterized "that aspect of
social existence which existed beyond the realm of the State" in the nine-
teenth century.^3 Hannah Arendt contends that the distinction between the
private and public spheres of life corresponds to the household and the
political realms that existed as separate entities since the rise of city-state.
But the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public,
is a new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the
modern age, and it found its political form in the nation-state.^4
Deriving and transforming the concepts of civil and political society
from Hegel, Gramsci differentiated them as follows: "What we can do, for
the moment, is to fix two major superstructural 'levels': the one that can be
called 'civil society', that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called
'private', and that of 'political society' or 'the state'. These two levels cor-
respond on the one hand to the functions of 'hegemony' that the dominant
group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of 'direct
domination' or command exercised through the state and 'juridical' gov-
ernment." Gramsci's dichotomy of civil society and the state should not
be misunderstood to mean that they are physically divided into separate
areas with a clearly defined boundary between them. Both of them are
composed of social relationships.^5 Arendt attests to this claim by stating
that "in the modern world, the social and the political realms are much
less distinct." She further argues that "the two realms indeed constantly
flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life pro-
cess itself." The division between the public and private realms, between
the sphere of polis and the sphere of household and family, and between
activities related to common world and those related to the maintenance
of life, is extraordinarily difficult for us to understand, as "the dividing
line is entirely blurred."^6
Whether we should establish democracy at the superficial level or bring
about social change at the fundamental level is only the secondary issue
for the civil society. What is primary is the people's responsibility to chal-
lenge things and change them. After all, it is the people who participate