Among the many lessons of Trump’s return to the White House, a crucial one concerns civil society: a mushy and frustrating, but nevertheless inescapable, concept. Taken up from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – where Bürgerliche Gesellschaft referred ambiguously to both the emerging realm of market exchange and the late medieval Stände – Marx sought to lay bare its underlying structure and laws of motion. But in making this intellectual breakthrough he lost something of the political and cultural importance of the sphere of associations and interest groups that characterized this ‘second level of the superstructure’, wedged, as Gramsci pointed out, between the productive economy and the state. (True, in his analysis of Bonapartism Marx returned to this earlier meaning, counterposing the overweening late-absolutist French state to civil society).
A separate lineage runs from De Tocqueville through Durkheim to contemporary political sociology and political science. It focused on the virtues of intermediate structures (recalling in some ways Montesquieu’s intermediate powers) whose main function was to contain the excesses of modern democracy – a regime which, De Tocqueville claimed, could be made compatible with liberty on the condition of the existence of a flourishing associational sphere (functional substitute for the great appanage families of the old regime). It was Arendt who fused the Marxian and De Tocquevillian traditions in her account of modern totalitarianism (although there is no evidence that she had read Gramsci). For Arendt, the key precondition for totalitarianism was the pulverization of civil society, which produced the isolation of mass society, full of disoriented individuals available for demagogic mass movements.
After a few decades’ hiatus, the concept came roaring back during the brief period in the 1990s known as the ‘end of history’ which was characterized by a peculiar duality: celebration of the defeat of the communist alternative and anxiety at the erosion of liberal democracy in the west. Civil society seemed relevant to both – in explaining the end of state socialism and offering a recipe for renewing the etiolated electoralism of the capitalist core. Now, it is in the public eye once more, though in a very different context, as the liberal intelligentsia and NGO activists vigorously dust off their dog-eared copies of The Origins of Totalitarianism and call on civil society to resist the gathering authoritarian threat.
Timothy Snyder, whose On Tyranny is the obligatory reference for left-liberal political commentators with intellectual pretensions, emphasizes the importance of supporting ‘organizations that are concerned with human rights’ to avoid ‘what Arendt described as the devolution of a society into a “mob”’. ‘It’s crucial to remember that civil society has risen up to defeat threats before and can do so again’, notes Rebekah Barber, a staff writer at the NGO trade magazine Non-Profit Quarterly. Her colleague David Snyder agrees that ‘in this moment of deepening crisis, civil society must act.’ Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, define civil society in Newsweek as a ‘living, breathing, network of people and organizations working every day to improve our communities’. Civil society here acts, resists, and even lives and breathes.
However warranted the concern about the Trump administration’s attack on the non-profit sector, much of this commentary suffers from a double confusion: about the history of totalitarianism and about what civil society is. Regarding the former misconception, it must be emphasized that despite The Origins of Totalitarianism’s many interesting insights – above all concerning imperialism – its central argument is largely wrong. In the two countries that produced indisputably fascist regimes in the interwar period, Italy and Germany, civil society was highly developed prior to the authoritarian takeover. In both, cooperatives, churches, trade unions, political parties and mutual aid societies had experienced massive growth from 1870 onward. The idea that pre-fascist Germany and Italy were atomized mass societies is misleading. And what did the fascists do with this organizational infrastructure once in power? They occupied it and bent it to the regime’s purposes. This contains an important lesson about what civil society is (and what it is not). Civil society, as Gramsci understood, and as today’s liberals do not, is a terrain of struggle. It is not, and cannot be, an agent.
This is highly relevant to the current moment in the US. For it is not the case that MAGA wishes to destroy the realm of associations and interest groups – it seeks to colonize it. It does not discourage civic engagement; it seeks to promote its own forms of it. Thus, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, J. D. Vance exhorted listeners of Kirk’s podcast to ‘get involved, get involved, get involved’, explaining that civil society ‘is not just something that flows from the government, it flows from each and every one of us’. Ryan Walters, the former superintendent of Oklahoma’s public schools, announced the ambition to launch a Turning Point USA chapter in every high school and college in the state. This is a struggle for hegemony fought on the terrain of civil society, not a struggle for or against a (mythical) realm of pre-political consensus and practical problem solving – what Gramsci would have called a war of position.
But herein lies an irony of which the Trumpists seem blissfully unaware. For, far from exercising great cultural influence as the right claims, leftist and progressive intellectuals in the US have for decades been cordoned off as a privileged but largely irrelevant clerisy within the university-NGO complex. Here they have formed what Gramsci would have called a traditional intelligentsia, speaking to itself in its own arcane language and leaving the left at a severe disadvantage. It is not outside the realm of possibility that the Trump administration’s attempted destruction of this cordon sanitaire might create the conditions for left intellectuals to establish a more intimate link to the political and social forces of the day from which they are presently cut off. If so, Trump would have had a hand in the creation of a new modern prince adapted to the age of social media, virality and artificial intelligence, in addition to the ubiquitous culture industry. MAGA would be midwife of the very thing it most fears.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: Contra Arendt
Posted by Gerard on October 4, 2025, 9:07 am, in reply to "Contra Arendt"
Arendt is the forgotten female genuis... precisely what has happened..by being fearful of "the common wheel" green-wellied enviromental-ists...neoliberal since Thatcher..have sacrificed society in order to protect their oh so fragile communities (and it hasn't worked CAT & Findhorn are no longer educational insitutions) working Schumacher backwards towards the inevitable denouement...
Re: Contra Arendt
Posted by Mark Doran on October 4, 2025, 1:18 pm, in reply to "Contra Arendt"
This kind of writing really should attract a prison sentence.
on October 4, 2025, 12:36 am