‘‘political’’ and ‘‘civil’’ (previously identical) began slowly to drift apart. The former
came increasingly to mean ‘‘party-political’’ or ‘‘partisan,’’ while the latter was used
to refer (among other things) to those areas of public life that were deemed to be
‘‘outside’’ or ‘‘above’’ politics. These shifts of meaning took place in a variety of
spheres: in the emergence in Britain and elsewhere of the ideal of a ‘‘civil service’’
that was explicitly apolitical; in the drafting of national ‘‘civil codes’’ of law; and in
Alexis de Tocqueville’s ( 1966 )Democracy in America, where ‘‘political society’’
(meaning the political struggle to control government) was categorically contrasted
with ‘‘civil association’’ (meaning people coming together in voluntary groups).
De Tocqueville’s account signaled the emergence of what was eventually to become
one of the major building blocks of civil-society discourse in the later twentieth
century. This was the identiWcation of civil society as the distinctive sphere of
altruism, communalism, and voluntary cooperation; themes that were often closely
linked to notions of ‘‘disinterested public service,’’ but were nevertheless quite
distinct from the formal structures of government and the state (Tocqueville
1966 , 232 – 40 , 671 – 6 ) (Model 3 ).
Whether because of this gradual blurring of the original ‘‘statist’’ meaning of the
term, or for some other reason, ‘‘civil society’’ gradually faded from mainstream
writings on the theory and practice of politics during the later decades of the
nineteenth century. The densely self-governing, mutualist, and voluntarist culture
of late-Victorian Britain has often been identiWed by recent commentators as a
paradigmatic example of a Xourishing ‘‘civil society,’’ but it was never thus
described by the Victorians themselves (and was not what they would have
understood by the term). In Germany the revisionist socialist leader Edouard
Bernstein protested strongly against the Marxist conXation of ‘‘bu ̈rgerlich
Gesellschaft’’ with mere ‘‘bourgeois’’ economic self-interest, but Bernstein’s attempt
to retrieve a more ‘‘public’’ conception of civil society(Zivillgesellschaft) met at the
time with very limited success (Tudor and Tudor 1988 ). Similarly, in liberal and
conservative thought, the language of ‘‘the state’’ came increasingly to dominate
and crowd out much of the conceptual space previously occupied by traditional
legalistic understandings of civil society. Even the great spate of early twentieth-
century Anglo-American writings on ‘‘civics’’ and ‘‘good citizenship’’ rarely if ever
linked these ideas to a civil society framework. And at the same time there was,
throughout Europe and North America, an ever-growing interest in the phenom-
enon of what had become known simply as ‘‘society.’’ This latter word appeared
very similar to, but in fact conveyed a range of meanings very diVerent from, the
older Latin construction ofsocietas. Though always eluding precise deWnition, the
idea of ‘‘society’’ in this newer sense came increasingly to resemble something like
‘‘the sum total of all human aVairs.’’ This was a mysterious entity, seemingly
propelled by its own impersonal societal laws, that appeared quite distinct both
from the private motivations of individuals and from the rationalist and purposive
conception of politics that traditional ‘‘state-centric’’ notions of civil society had
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