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Africa in the Age of Democratization: The Civic Limitations of Civil Society*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Robert Fatton Jr.
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Extract

Broadly defined, civil society is the “private sphere of material, cultural and political activities resisting the incursions of the state” (Fatton 1992, 4-5). While such a broad definition is incomplete and in-deed simplistic, and will acquire more specificity as the analysis proceeds, it will suffice for our immediate purposes. In this general and provisional configuration, civil society represents a counterweight to state power and can thus serve as a critical agent of democratization. Civil society is thus a constant thorn in the monopolizing political claims of the state. This is not to imply that there is an unbridgeable chasm and an unmitigated opposition between state and civil society. In fact, there is a dialectical interaction between state and civil society. The state is transformed by a changing civil society; civil society is transformed by a changing state. Thus, state and civil society form a fabric of tightly interwoven threads, even if they have their own in-dependent patterns.

The state penetrates civil society through its multiple economic interventions, its disciplinary regulations of private behavior and its ideological “interpellations.” The state aspires to become totalitarian because ruling classes are predators bent on maximizing their supremacy; they seek therefore a complete appropriation of civil society. Civil society, in turn, penetrates the state through the erection of protective trenches against coercive abuse, material extraction and political compliance. Civil society aspires to negate the state, and subaltern classes, who are the state's principal victims, are determined to minimize their losses by abolishing it.

The contradiction between state and civil society is, however, not that simple.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , September 1995 , pp. 67 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1995

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1993 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC: September 2-5, 1993; University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, September 14,1993; Miller Center, University of Virginia, October 27, 1993; Brown University, Center for the Comparative Study of Development, Providence, February 17,1994. Two earlier versions of this essay were also published as working papers under the same title: “Civility, Incivility, and Democratization: The Politics of Civil Society in Africa,” in: Occasional Paper Series, The Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1994; and Working Papers on Comparative Development, No. 19, Brown University. I want to thank Edmund Keller, Merle Bowen and Catharine Newbury as well as three anonymous readers for their helpful comments and suggestions. My colleague at the University of Virginia, John Echeverri-Gent read carefully the manuscript and offered valuable advice. Finally, special thanks to Cynthia HoehlerFatton who sharpened my ideas and transformed my nebulous prose into a more readable text.

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