Adam Smith and Hegal the Idea of Civil Society

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Adam Smith & Fredrik Hegel: The Idea of Civil Society Asifa Zunaidha F (26812 – Group B) The concept of ‘Civil Society’ has regained currency among political theorists especially after the EastEuropean debacle, as the antidote for all the malaise confronting the developing societies. This paper tries to understand the original conception of civil society during the transition from mercantile to commercial society or manufacturing capitalism. Adam Smith, implicitly in his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ (1790 ed.), and Fredrik Hegel, explicitly in his, ‘Philosophy of Right’ (1821), theorized the idea of civil society, for the first time in the Modern era. This paper attempts to understand their idea of civil society through three questions: Does civil society mean the pursuit of private interest for Hegel & Smith? Why do they feel that it is an ideal domain for the pursuit of the idea of freedom? How do they resolve the idea of private property? Why probe the roots of ‘civil society’ now? In the context of 21st century, the concept of civil society1 is celebrated across the World as a „consensual concept‟2, from being a „contested concept‟3, a few decades ago. There was a time when civil society was interesting; even riveting, for political theorists, simply because rival and often acrimonious interpretations, formulations, and theorizations jostled with each other to impart meaning to the concept. No theorist who subscribed to say de Tocqueville‟s formulation on civil society as the realm of social associations had remotely anything in common with a Gramscian, who saw civil society as the region where the capitalist state establishes hegemony over society. A Hegelian would worry that civil society is neither wholly good nor entirely bad, for it is the site of the battle between particularity and 1 Neera Chandoke defines Civil Society, as “the site at which
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