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The Purpose of Civil Society*

Anmol Vellani

Does civil society have a larger purpose? I shall endeavour to answer that

question my first asking another, perhaps surprising, question: can civil society exist

under an authoritarian regime, under dictatorship or a fundamentalist state?

Authoritarian states typically deny legitimacy to the public sphere the sphere that lies

between the family and the state wherein private citizens connect or associate with one

another to pursue their common interests or the good of society.

Nonetheless, even under the most repressive regimes, civil society

activity can and does endure. Think of what came to light once the Talibans cover of

darkness had been lifted. I mean not just the music that survived, or the dancing that

went on in secret rooms, or the beauty parlors and video parlors that kept on doing

business. I am referring also to the womens groups that quietly educated girls in

opposition to the Talibans diktat, risking their wrath and terrible vengeance.

But such activity is treated as illegitimate by the absolutist state. It is

thus forced to go underground and its role is inevitably oppositional. What does it

oppose, however? Clearly, on the one hand, it challenges what the absolutist state

projects and promotes as the public good. But it also challenges something else. A

fundamentalist or dictatorial state does not just define the public good; it insists that

defining the public good is solely its preserve. A clandestine civil society is opposed,

therefore, to regarding the public good as the states, or for that matter, anyones

monopoly.

Consider the implication of thinking that it is enough if civil societys

opposition to an authoritarian state were to rest on a single but rival vision of the public

good. Civil society would then be committed to replacing the existing state by one that,

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while promoting a different understanding of the public good, would be like its

predecessor in refusing to accommodate other ideas of the public good. It would favour

a state that says Im right and youre wrong, even if it stops short of saying as

fundamentalists and dictators do Im right and youre dead.

However, it is hard to defend the idea that civil society owes allegiance to

a particular conception of the public good and therefore that its purpose is to realise it.

By its very nature, civil society is committed to creating space for multiple visions of the

public good. There can be no civil society without a right of association, but what would

be the point of giving people the right to associate if they can only come together to

pursue the same thing? Civil rights are meant to widen our choices, not restrict them. It

is for this reason that civil society is most compatible with democratic forms of

government. Democracies acknowledge that individuals and groups within society

might have competing interests and differing conceptions of the good.

But is civil society compatible with any kind of democracy? Can

foundations and NGOs, which mostly see themselves as working on behalf of the poor,

the dispossessed and the marginalised, accept the idea that the function of democracy is

to accommodate and facilitate the expression of competing interests? Competitions are

generally won by the rich and powerful. In most functioning democracies, not

surprisingly, the interests of the influential and powerful are consistently privileged.

For this reason, I believe that civil society must support the idea that

democracys fundamental purpose is to promote active citizenship. The poor, after all,

are disenfranchised because they are subjects rather than citizens, because they lack the

power to participate in the making and shaping of the public sphere. Such a vision of

democracy, moreover, is alone consistent with more recent rights-based views of

development-as-empowerment.

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But the agents of civil society have good reason to resist this idea: if active

citizenship were fully realized in our societies, would they not all be out of a job? As a

professional class, is it not in their interest to reproduce the conditions that demand their

continuing intervention on behalf of the disenfranchised? It is only in the absence of any

progress towards active citizenship that civil society organizations, which are

dominated by middle-class professional elites, can sustain a culture of dependency.

There is, in other words, a palpable tension between what we must take

to be the larger purpose of civil society and the self-interest of developmental

professionals. Working for the interests of the disadvantaged, committed to a certain

understanding of development and democracy, civil society actors must believe that

they could find nothing more fulfilling than to become inconsequential!

Foundations and NGOs might argue that they will never become obsolete

because no society can ever be free of the needy and dispossessed. I really do not mind it

if civil society professionals make that argument, as long as they do not make it with

relief. I do not mind it also because my argument is not that foundations and NGOs will

become irrelevant, but that they must want to become irrelevant. They must visualize the

ideal state of civil society as one in which the poor and disadvantaged are themselves

able, fully and properly, to represent their own interests and struggle for their rights.

They must strive for obsolescence in the firm belief that the sooner they departed from

the public stage the better.

* Excerpted from a keynote address delivered at a conference on A Dialogue towards anEffective Grantmaker and Grantseeker Relationship in the Philippines in 2004.