The Private, the Public and Civil Society

Social Realms and Power Structures

Bibliographic Data

ID6299426
AuthorsArnaud Sales (0000-0001-5515-6625, Faculté des études supérieures, 2910 Edouard Montpetit, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3J7, corresponding author)
Year1991
Volume12
Issue4
Pages295-312
Publication date1991-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0192-5121 • E-ISSN: 1460-373X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/019251219101200404
OpenAlexW2139510628
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited16

This paper will attempt to show how, in contemporary societies, civil society is related to other social fields, in particular (a) the private and the public spheres; (b) the most organized areas of the social and those areas where the most informal relationships predominate; (c) the structural relations of civil society with the state and the major economic and socio- cultural systems of control and power. Various models of differentiation of social fields will be examined: (1) the dualistic model of state-civil society (which is unsatisfactory because it makes civil society the rag-bag for everything that does not belong to the state); (2) Freund's model opposing the public and the private spheres; (3) the concept of public space, and the thesis of mutual infiltration of public and private spheres; (4) the opposition of systemic regulation (automatisms resulting from the coordination of politics and administration) and self- regulation (natural automatisms); (5) Habermas's model of System- Lifeworld. This analysis should yield a better understanding of (1) the specificity of civil society as the interface between the public and the private and the locus of public opinion formation; (2) the expansion and contraction of public and private domains, and of civil society in a given historical period

Civil society · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Public space · Social movement · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Public Administration

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub