senior officials belong to one or other of the factions in the Christian Democrat
party; and even in Germany, government changes usually involve new
appointments in upper-level public administration offices. In the United
Kingdom there was some evidence that, in the 1980s, appointments to key
civil service posts, especially in the Treasury, were only made if the candidate
was seen as a believer inThatcherism. Nevertheless, the idea of a civil service
as a politically neutral body, dedicated to the execution of decisions it does not
make, remains an influential one.
Civil Society
Civil society was central to the work of some of the most important political
thinkers from the 17th century onwards. Among others,Hobbes, Lockeand
evenHegeldistinguished between thestateand civil society, that is the
organized society over which the state rules. Such a distinction is not entirely
valid, since the state is itself part of society. However, we are aware that, as well
as institutions bound up with formal authority and political control, there
exists a set of interlinked and stable social institutions which have much
influence on, or control over, our lives. The distinction, and the consequent
importance of civil society as a concept, originates with thestate of nature
theorists, especially Hobbes and Locke. They held that political authority was
at least hypothetically dispensable; that is, they argued as though it was possible
not to have a state, and they therefore needed a concept to describe the
remaining institutions. Civil society, then, is the framework within which
those without political authority live their lives—economic relationships,
family and kinship structures, religious institutions and so on. It is a purely
analytic concept because civil society does not exist independently of political
authority, nor vice versa, and, it is generally believed, neither could long
continue without the other; therefore, no very clear boundary can be drawn
between the two.
The neglect of civil society in recent decades has two main causes. One is
the fact that the state itself has been discussed less often, having been replaced,
inadequately, by notions like ‘the political system’. The other is that the
growing trend towards using sociological models in political thinking has
tended to efface the barriers between political activity and social activity; both
are treated as manifestations of underlying ideological, cultural or even
economic patterns. In fact, the question of the interpenetration of state and
society in this sense might more sensibly be treated as an empirical question to
be solved in each particular case. Perhaps the real use of the concept is to stress
that political systems are, morally if not sociologically, secondary to, and ought
to be reflections of, direct and sometimes voluntary human relations. Even this
point would be denied by some, especially those influenced by the classical
Civil Society