Civil Society in the Shadow of the Neoliberal State
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Civil Society in the Shadow of the Neoliberal State Corporations as the Primary Subjects of (Neoliberal) Civil Society Mathias Hein Jessen 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
In this paper, I outline an approach to civil society that is in contradistinction to the dominant liberal conception of civil society as a sphere or sector distinct from the state with inherently positive values. Instead, I argue, civil society always exists in the shadow of the state. I propose to advance a conception of civil society through the combination of two thinkers who are not often combined: G.W.F. Hegel and Michel Foucault. From Hegel, I take the conception of the state’s regulation of civil society to direct the particular interests towards the universal of the state through the police and, especially, the corporation. By incorporating a specific type of civil society, the state attempts to shape a civil society that advances its own interests. From Foucault, I take the conception of civil society as a transactional reality, as well as the conception of neoliberalism as a form of statecraft and the production of subjects. I propose that neoliberalism can be understood as the promotion of the corporate form to all areas of social life. In neoliberalism, the central wealth-producing subject is the corporation, and as a result, the state privileges the corporation by granting it extensive powers, privileges, and exemptions from law. This happens to the detriment of both individual and other collective subjects, making it the primary subject of neoliberal civil society. Keywords Civil society . State . Neoliberalism . G.W.F. Hegel . Michel Foucault . Corporation Civil Society in the Shadow of the Neoliberal State
Introduction In the 1980s, civil society became the center of massive attention in politics, academia, and public debate. Civil society (re-)emerged as a societal force fighting for democracy, human
* Mathias Hein Jessen [email protected]
1
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelaenshaven 18B, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Jessen
rights, and civil liberties in the face of authoritarian regimes in especially Eastern Europe and Latin and South America (Keane 1998; Kocka 2004; Kumar 1993). Throughout the 1990s, the notion of civil society was increasingly incorporated into political theories in the West. Here it was predominantly understood as a normatively privileged sphere with values such as communication, voluntarism, social cohesion, democratization processes, and contestation and critique, which required protection from the encroaching and colonizing logics of the state and market (Cohen and Arato 1999). In this line of thinking, civil society often came to be represented as a specific “sphere” or “sector” outside the state and market, with inherently good and progressive values essential to a vibrant democracy. At the same time, civil society was increasingly seen by many Western European policy makers as a potential provider of
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