The growth of the so-called “bad” civil society or “uncivil” society has turned into an increasingly problematic phenomenon in contemporary democracies, with implications both in practice and in theory that have gone so far as to jeopardize the very concept of civil society. This article is framed within a solid theory of democracy – the Habermasian theory – and draws, in particular, on one of the most widely accepted conceptualisations of civil society – that of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato – to…
Read moreThe growth of the so-called “bad” civil society or “uncivil” society has turned into an increasingly problematic phenomenon in contemporary democracies, with implications both in practice and in theory that have gone so far as to jeopardize the very concept of civil society. This article is framed within a solid theory of democracy – the Habermasian theory – and draws, in particular, on one of the most widely accepted conceptualisations of civil society – that of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato – towards identifying a way to distinguish uncivil society from civil society. To that end, this article proposes a criterion and two types of politics for classifying social movements based on the extent to which their actions contribute to either damage or strengthen the public sphere as such. This conceptual work pursues a double objective. On the one hand, it seeks to respond to the issue of how to deal with uncivil society, whether we should engage and debate with it, ignore it, or condemn it. And, on the other, it aims to identify how civil society could – in theory and in practice – continue to yield valuable elements for contemporary democracies.
