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Literary Review
Debating civil society
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In Conceits of Civil Society, Chandhoke makes sincere pleas to sensitise the public sphere, says DWAIPAYAN BHATTACHARYYA.
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We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of theory.
R.D. Laing
CIVIL SOCIETY has perhaps become the most widely discussed theme in contemporary political theory. Since the 1970s, when it became increasingly clear to the modernisation theories of both the Marxist and liberal dispensations that the state would not be able to deliver what is expected of it, civil society was looked up as an alternative. In the 1980s the national societies in the eastern Europe activated the associational forms of the civil society to undermine a severely bureaucratised political order. In many parts of the "developing" world this period also saw political mobilisation around issues that fell outside the traditional concerns of the political parties. Experiences such as these made civil society embody two ideas at once, the idea of democracy and of autonomy from the state.
Neera Chandhoke deftly criticises both these ideas. She argues that there are problems in conceptualising civil society as a domain of unfettered freedom. Indeed, the associational forms that we obtain in this sphere have produced conditions variously for a collective sympathy (Adam Smith), a rights bearing citizen (Hegel), the unsentimental bourgeoisie (Marx) as much as a space to counter the hegemony of the ruling bloc (Gramsci) and the disciplinary institutions of modernity (Foucault), but it will be wrong to see too much in these possibilities. These offerings were made with the simultaneous "taming" of the civil society by a hidden hand, a set of universal principles, or by the rule of property, by the passive revolution of capital, or by the gears of disciplining the self. In the course of such contrary moves — signifying a certain ambiguity — civil society became both an exclusive and exclusionary space, with no tolerance for the marginal and the radical, and operated in a hierarchical structure of power occasioned by the state.
It is impossible, Chandhoke tells us, to celebrate civil society either as a symmetric arena of civic association a la the theorists of deliberative democracy and social capital, or a domain largely autonomous of the state as the international donor agencies and the votaries of neo-liberalism would want us to believe. Chandhoke's project, on the contrary, is to "democratise" civil society by keeping the state well within reach. This she wants to do both by privileging certain "accepted" democratic norms (as guards against the subversion by communal elements) and turning civil society into a contested site for substantive democracy (so as to widen its entrance). On reviewing the struggle of the tribal population in the Narmada valley and the informal workers in Chattisgarh she concludes: "Whereas for most of us, civil society may both be accessible as well as responsive, the subalterns — the tribals, the poor, the lower castes, and women — have to struggle to enter the sphere" (p.226).
On the face of it Chandhoke's is an anti-elite project. The book has its heart in the right place; it makes sincere pleas to sensitise the public sphere and analyses in detail the problem of epistemic incommensurability that makes the voice of the poor and the marginal inaudible. Although rather thin in empirical evidence, she vigorously argues for understanding the problems of the displaced, the outcastes, the unrepresented and the underprivileged. She also laments the lack of a language for expressing the pain and the anguish of suffering of the subaltern.
"Can someone", she asks at this point, "who is not a subaltern represent a subaltern? " (p.202) Imposing such moral preconditions, however, will demand that people write only autobiographies! That apart, since she addresses the issue of representation in civil society head on, one pauses to ask, whose civil society is Chandhoke herself re-presenting? Does this work offer an analysis of how a civil society of the colonised obtained its institutional form in a period that was marked essentially by racial exclusion? Is there any attempt to theorise the sphere from which the "subaltern" is expected to make "entry" into the civil society (this is important because such entry demands a precondition of democratic mobilisation in the "outer" sphere)? Does this work, in this context, help us to think of democratic practices in defiance of and external to the norms and protocols of civil society? Are not the bulk of theoretical insights presented here culled out from stories of other societies, belonging to other times, and other continents? Can we discern here an eye to the richly sensitised and widely available storehouses of our vernacular literature? Do we, in short, find in this work an engagement with the specific history of our civil society?
Chandhoke has greatly enlarged our expectations with the vigour of her intellect and the sincerity of her conviction; we now truly long to see her overcoming our predicament of being monolingual metropolitan academics.
The Conceits of Civil Society, Neera Chandhoke, Oxford University Press, 2003, p.278, Rs. 575.
Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya is Fellow, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.
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