What is civil society: characteristics and history

What is civil society? Very often we come across this concept, plunging into public and political discussions, so popular in our country. After all, you will agree, the question of whether there is a civil society in Russia, sounds quite often today, especially from the lips of all the same politicians or public figures. Of course, we all intuitively understand in the most general terms what civil society is. However, we do not always fully understand the intricacies of this sociological category. Let's try to fill in these gaps and put everything in its place in this article.

Historical roots

This concept arose in Europe in the era of the formed capitalist relations. Actually, what is civil society, as not the result of the development of capitalism and the social transformations of the New Times? Important milestones in its formation were the bourgeois revolutions in Europe, especially the British in 1640 and the French of 1789. The first laid the foundations of civil liberties in world history, limiting the royal autocracy, and also opened the way of the country to capitalist development. The second and altogether marked the triumph of ideas about nationwide equality, when the lower classes achieved a legislative consolidation of their influence on the state's policy, even if not all were implemented in practice. Speaking about the fact that capitalist relations have become an important prerequisite for the emergence of civil society, we mean that they contributed to social transformation, destroying feudal relations and creating new categories of the population: the bourgeoisie and the working class in the first place, who soon after realizing the community of their interests And the importance in society (which could not be done by scattered peasants of the times of feudalism, whose world, by and large, did not go beyond the native village), began to demand more and more rights and freedoms. These requirements were directed, first of all, to the current political system, in fact, to the state itself. This is a fundamental characteristic, thanks to which we today intuitively distinguish between civil society and the state. The philosophy of this idea was basically formed by the prominent thinkers of the New and Newest Times. Among them is to highlight the authors of the idea of a "social contract" by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the French Enlighteners Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Montesquieu, the German founders of dialectical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

What is civil society today and what are its signs?

And it is characterized by the following signs:

• The development of democratic foundations;
• Really effective protection of citizens;
• Free activity within the legal framework of the society of owners of production assets;
• A sufficiently high level of civil and political culture;
• Sufficiently high level of education of the population;
• The applicability of self-government;
• Multistructure of the economy ;
• A significant number of middle class in society;
• High attention to social policy on the part of the state;
• Pluralism of opinions in society;
• Free competition.