The Private,the Public and Civil Society: Social Realms and Power Structures

Abstract

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.

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