Page 111 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

seems to be very similar to the concept of legal domination, especially
since Castells says that it ‘generates’ (?) civil society. 12 One immediately
thinks that one is in the presence of the familiar Hobbes–Locke–Smith con-
ception of individualistic market society based on bourgeois concepts of
contract rather than on feudal notions of status, in which law plays a criti-
cal role in legitimizing, indeed obscuring, the domination of the bour-
geoisie. One thinks not only of Weber but of Hegel whose entire Philosophy
of Right devoted itself to putting this law on a more solid rationalistic
foundation.
But Castells immediately dispels this idea as he goes on to qualify this
characterization by explaining in just what sense he is using the concept
of ‘civil society’ and just what is his attitude to the world which the bour-
geoisie has made. In the same sentence he goes on to state that civil soci-
ety ‘generated’ this ‘legitimizing identity’ and produced organizations and
institutions ‘as well as a series of structured and organized social actors,
which reproduce, albeit sometimes in a conflictive manner, the identity
that rationalizes the source of structural domination’. 13 The crucial point
here is in the last phrase – ‘the identity that rationalizes the source of struc-
tural domination’ [my italics]. Because Castells’ position is an anti-capitalist
one grounded in the past, he is loath to concede the progressive democ-
ratizing consequences of bourgeois civil society relative to the other
historical forms which preceded it. All he sees from his communitarian
perspective is that this bourgeois society defeats and subordinates all com-
munities and is to be steadfastly opposed for this reason. This is why he
rejects the democratizing and civilizing claims for civil society in the writ-
ings of Gramsci and Tocqueville for the more hostile notions of civil soci-
ety in the works of Foucault, Sennet, Horkheimer and Marcuse. Where
others see democracy, enlightenment and the rule of law, Castells says
that this group – and this is certainly true in my estimation of Foucault,
Horkheimer and Marcuse – sees ‘internalized domination and legitima-
tion of an over-imposed, undifferentiated, normalizing identity’. 14 In this
connection, it is not without significance that Castells makes Gramsci ‘the
intellectual father’ of the civil society concept, neglecting its roots in the
English Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment more than 250 years
before. 15
Such a viewpoint bears a superficial resemblance to critiques of bourgeois
society from within the socialist tradition. This would, however, be a
fundamental misunderstanding. It is not only at variance with the social-
ist tradition, it is also incompatible with the liberal tradition from which
socialism itself springs. As Fritsche has pointed out in his brilliant analysis
of Heidegger’s anti-capitalist romanticism, there is an extremely strong

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