Locating civil society in Marx and Gramsci

This chapter explores the origins and aims of the two phases of the WISERD; research programme on civil society. It examines the first phase research agenda and some research results on: locality, community and civil society; individuals, institutions and governance; economic austerity, social enterprise and inequality; generation, life course and social participation. It also outlines the second phase concern with frontiers of civic exclusion and expansion; polarization, austerity and civic deficit; contentious politics of civic gain; material resources, social innovations and civil repair; and data infrastructure and data integration. The influence of David Lockwood’s account of civic stratification is also explored.

Locating civil society in Foucault

For both Marx and Gramsci, the separation between the economic and political spheres was a key feature of bourgeois societies. Marx saw the conflict between bourgeois and citoyen as requiring resistance to this separation as crucial to democratic emancipation and wrote that the Paris Commune realized this. He also saw social emancipation in terms of the expansion of free time rather than work time. Gramsci argued that civil society became more important in the 1870s as the masses gained the vote in political rights. They both argued that democracy could not be restricted to the political sphere but should also involve economic democracy. This is undermined by the expansion of the world market and survival of national states.

The multispatial governance of social and economic policy

This chapter distinguishes Foucault’s approach from the work of Anglo-Foucauldian scholars. The latter adopted a microsocial perspective, focused on the programmes and rationalities of government that work across multiple alliances between different actors, and argued for bottom-up civil society responsibilization. Foucault was not only state-phobic but also suspicious of political action based on civil society. His theoretical interests shifted from the micro-physics of disciplinary society and its anatomo-politics of the body to the more general strategic codification of a plurality of discourses, practices, technologies of power, and institutional ensembles around a specific governmental rationality concerned with the social body (bio-power) in a consolidated capitalist society. This is reflected in the statification of government and the governmentalization of the state. This led to his analyses of sovereignty, territorial statehood, and state power and the role of civil society in this regard and to less well-substantiated claims about their articulation to the logic of capital accumulation.

Locating the WISERD Project: Public policy governance towards common good

The author introduces semantic fixes and then considers institutional and spatio-temporal fixes. The analysis relates the author’s previous work on conjunctural analysis, cultural political economy, and social fixes directly to various forms of governance. Institutional and spatio-temporal fixes treat space and time as direct objects of governance, governing the spatio-temporal dimensions of other substantive objects of governance and compensating for the uneven spatio-temporal effects of governance. This facilitates the study of how the inherent contradictions and antagonisms of capitalism are governed through a historically variable set of semantic, institutional, and spatio-temporal fixes. It shows that state power can be analysed as ‘government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy’ and reveals the role of governance and multispatial metagovernance.