자유주의 시민사회론을 넘어서

Beyond the Liberal Conception of Civil Society

The purpose of this paper is to criticize the liberal conception of civil society. Liberals, including neo-liberals today, have a strong dichotomy of civil society and state. Their ideology presupposes civil society as the sphere where politics ends and the market relationships operate spontaneously by its own rules. This libertarian interpretation emphasizes the privateness of civil society where individuals can pursue their interests without any public control and interference. This incurs disastrous polarization, of which remedy is to be possible by another thinking of civil society. This paper discusses the possibility by investigating the representative critics of liberalism such as Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor. Their positive definitions of civil society have in its core a strong political postulation which requires us to regard civility not as private refinement but as civic vigilance. They assert only this civility help us to overcome the domination of market which colonizes our life-world. Therefore their practical aim is to revitalize civil society s constitutive power of associational life of participant citizens. Adam Ferguson s discourse of civil society in the context of eighteenth-century civic republicanism is to be read as intellectual background of this sort of the positive conception of civil society.