Civil Society—From Hegel to World Bank and Beyond

B.Chandrasekhar^

Has our romance with civil society been coming to an end? Neera Chandhoke the well-known
Indian authority on civil society would like to put it in its place: ‘The civil society argument has
now been around for about 25 years. The problems of the world remain as intractable, even as
the numbers of agents who seek to negotiate the ills of human condition have expanded
exponentially….. Is it time that we begin to consider the role of civil society? Is it time to once
again put civil society in its place?’1

There is an illusion that developed purposefully around the concept of civil society two decades
ago. By the advent of globalization era the concept of social capital has gained prominence and civil
society has been the terrain where the social capital is invested and made as facilitator of the market
economy. The initial attempt to marginalize the nation-state by pitting the civil society against it has
made the latter category to come back into the discourse of social sciences with all vigour. Much
reliance has been placed on the transformative capacity of civil society. Now the sojourn is
coming to an end as the limitations of civil society have been realized by the theoreticians. In fact
according to Zygmunt Bauman, the society itself is becoming a zombie category and instead of
citizen, consumer is the stark reality.

The theoretical illusion woven by many leftist intellectuals around the concept of civil society is
partly a product of interpretation of the civil society in Gramsci’s writings. The interpretative
transmogrification of the civil society since Gramsci had resulted in the illusions that took away
its economic essence of pivotal importance and reducing it to the status of a superstructural
category. Most writers on civil society agree that civil society has an institutional core constituted
by voluntary associations outside the sphere of the state and the economy. Such associations
range from churches, cultural associations, sport clubs and debating societies to independent
media, academics, groups of concerned citizens, grass-roots initiatives and organizations of
gender, race and sexuality, all the way to occupational associations, political parties and labour
unions. 2 The concept became handy for intellectuals and activists of varied ideological
persuasions: socialists opposed globalizing corporate networks, global society theorists
disenchanted with the nation-state, critiques of the development state, protagonists of free
market economy, communitarians articulating concerns about community life, leaders of people’s
movements of various sorts and even those critical of representative democracy itself.3

Correspondingly for the right and the left, for the World Bank and the ‘ultra-left’ human rights
discourse is very dear. It is the civil society in which people are organized for rights and
entitlements in this rights-obsessed world in the process of which human rights have been turned
from a discourse of rebellion and dissent into that of state legitimacy4. Political theorists and
pundits of all stripes repeatedly and almost automatically assert that at the root of all the
political/ social ailments of countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Zimbabwe is the

^ Lawyer since 1988 based in Guntur, AP., and Spl. Public Prosecutor, Tsundur Carnage Case. Author
of Sacco-Vanzetti and NGOla Katha (both in Telugu). Published several articles in Telugu and
English on human rights issues and philosophy and engaged in writing critique of the rights
discourse.
1
Chandhoke, Neera. 2009. ‘Putting Civil Society in its Place’. Economic & Political Weekly February
14, 2009 Vol. XLIV No 7: 12-16.
2
Flyvbjerg, Bent. 2008. “Habermas and Foucault: thinkers for civil society?”. Brit.Jnl. of Sociology
June 1998 Vol.49 No.2.
3
Jayaram, N. 2005. “Civil Society: An Introduction to the Discourse’ in N.Jayaram (ed.), On Civil
Society: Issues and Perspectives, pp. 15-42. New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
4
Douzinas, Costas. 2000. The End of Rights, pp.7. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
 2

absence (or the weakness) of civil society5. The World Bank prescribes building civil society as a
solution to the ‘problems’ in/with ‘rogue’ countries. The NGO sector with titles such as global
civil society, global social movement, has its cameo appearance in the international conferences. It is
considered as the third domain6, the two other being the nation-state and the supra nation-state-
UNO. Thus civil society has been regarded as an aim to be achieved and an ideal to be
institutionalised with all our energies in our countries.

Is this the way to understand civil society and fall in love with it? Is it an ideal to be built up or a
target to be destroyed for the sake of nature and mankind? This paper attempts to trace
genealogy of the concept of civil society right from Hegel down to the present day and portrays
the postmodern ‘society’ using Baumanian diagnosis.

2
One of the most important aspects of Hegel’s political theory is his extensive treatment of civil
society in the Philosophy of Right which is his laborious and painstaking system of political and
social philosophy. Hegel was the first thinker of the modern German tradition to recognize the
importance of economics for social, political and cultural life7. In the early modern era the term
‘civil society’ had a very general meaning. It referred to society in so far as it is governed by laws;
civil society was therefore contrasted to the state of nature. By the eighteenth century, however,
the term began to acquire its more narrow contemporary meaning. It now refers to one aspect of
modern society, namely a capitalist economy, society in so far as it is based on private enterprise,
free markets and modern forms of production and exchange. It is in this more narrow and
modern sense that Hegel uses the term8 for the first time in his last edition of Philosophy of Right in
1821. Up to his immediate predecessors civil society was used to indicate political society, to
mean pre-political society, that is, the phase of human society which up to that time was called
natural society9.

According to Hegel’s system, civil society is subsumed under the category of ethical life. Ethical
life consists in three fundamental moments: family (immediate unity); civil society (difference);
and the state (unity in difference), where all the differences of civil society are retained within a
more integrated and organized whole.

Hegel begins his treatment of civil society by baldly stating its two leading principles. Firstly, the
pursuit of self interest. In civil society every one seeks their own good, regarding every one else
simply as a means for their own ends. Secondly, everyone satisfies his self-interest only if he also
works to satisfy the self-interest of others. Hence people relate to one another strictly on the
basis of mutual self-interest. Since they see public life only as a means to satisfy their own ends,
Hegel describes civil society as the stage of ‘the alienation of ethical life’.

Hegel placed great value on civil society chiefly because he considered it a necessary stage in the
development of freedom. He saw civil society as another manifestation of the fundamental
principle of the modern world: the right of subjectivity and individual freedom. Hence he praised
its many liberties: equality of opportunity, the right to pursue one’s self interest, and the freedom
to buy and sell goods in the market place…….. Still, the freedom of civil society is not freedom

5
Fontana, Benedetto, 2006. ‘Liberty and Domination: civil society in Gramsci’ in boundary 2 2006
Vol.33 No.2: pp.57-74.
6
Chandhoke, Neera. 2003. Conceits of Civil Society, pp. 70-89. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
This book gives a detailed account of the march of NGO sector along with the rise of the global
markets and the reappearance of the concept of civil society.
7
Beiser, Frederick, 2005. Hegel, pp.243. New York: Routledge.
8
Ibid, pp.244.
9
Bobbio, Norberto. 1979. ‘Gramsci and the conception of civil society’ in Chantal Mouffe (ed.),
Gramsci & Marxist Theory, pp.21-47. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
 3

in the full and positive sense; it is only a form of negative liberty, i.e. the right to pursue my
interests independent of the interference of others10.

In defending his portrait of civil society, he was defiant of his old master Jean-Jaques Rousseau
for whom there is more freedom in life of prescription which gives power to satisfy our natural
need in contrast to civil society which takes away that power and makes us to be dependant on
others to satisfy even our natural needs and makes us to acquire new artificial needs.

Hegel insists that freedom involves the power to liberate ourselves from our natural needs and to act
according to rational principles. In civil society we begin to liberate ourselves from nature
through work, which gives us the power to form objects according to our own concepts. Since
we have to make ourselves useful to others to satisfy our own needs, we are forced to develop
talents and skills. Rousseau condemned artificial needs because they undermine our natural
independence; but Hegel celebrated them because they are the product of our own free activity
rather than nature11. Given the natural inequalities in skills and resources what people receive
from civil society is in direct proportion to what they bring into the market. In Hegel’s writings it
becomes clear that the individual need for recognition (and hence existence) is attained through
the recognition of property. Indeed, for Hegel property in the realm of civil society takes the
place of love in the realm of family12. Thus civil society for Hegel, apart from other less
important things, is predominantly area of operation of self seeking atoms -- homo aeconomicus
connected merely by ties of self-interest and their economic transactions. The political for them
is the state which is the generalized community since communitarian beingness has been
alienated to form the state. Hegel was not too uncritical about such civil society. He proposed
that the state should control it. For him civil society was ‘a wild beast that needs a constant and
strict taming and mastery’, and the master-the state could, apart from taking up several social
welfare measures, go to the extent of creating new markets for industry through colonization13

3
Like Hegel, for Karl Marx civil society is the realm of economic relations. But, unlike Hegel,
Marx had a definite conception that civil society is part of the structure but not superstructure.
Instead of the state taming the forces of civil society, the vice versa is true as the state is, for
Marx, part of the superstructure. Referring to the Hegel’s analysis of civil society Marx in his
Critique of political economy specifies that ‘the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political
economy’. ‘Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite
stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial
life of a given stage and, in so far, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand
again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality and inwardly must organize itself as
State’. The latter is the guarantor of security to the individual. The concept of security, wrote
Marx in On the Jewish Question,14 does not raise the civil society above its egoism. On the contrary,
security is the insurance of its egoism. ‘None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond
egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is an individual withdrawn into

10
Beiser, Frederick, 2005. Hegel, pp.245. New York: Routledge
11
Thus, the movement of mankind from nature to human has been heralded by modernity and the
human reason has been installed in the sovereign epicenter of the world. Hegel celebrates the
same. Of course, Marx also follows the suit.
12
Selingam, Adam B. 1998. ‘Between Public and Private: Towards a sociology of Civil Society’ in
Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Democratic Civility: The History and Cross-Cultural Possibility of a
Modern Political Ideal, pp.79-112. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers.
13
Beiser, Frederick, 2005. Hegel, pp.250. New York: Routledge.
14
Collected Works, 1975. Vol.3 pp.164. Moscow:Progress Publishers. Marx uses the concept of civil
society in his critique of Hegel and German idealism, in such writings as ‘ On Jewish Question’,
‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, and ‘Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts’.
 4

himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the
community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the
contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a frame work external to individuals, as a
restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is the natural
necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves’15.
Marx elaborated the distinction between the citizen and the man. The former is the political man
relevant to the state and the latter is an apolitical man pervading the civil society. Marx sees the
civil society an arena of the non-political. ‘The political emancipation is at the same time the
dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is
based’ (166). For him the political revolution abolished the political character of civil society. It broke
up civil society in to its simple components parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other
hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of life and social position of these
individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned and
dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the
political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as a sphere of the
community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of the particular elements of
civil life.(166)

But the completion of idealism of the state was at the same time the completion of materialism
of the civil society. Throwing off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the
bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of the civil society. Political emancipation was at the
same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from having even the semblance of a
universal content.(166)

The liberty of the egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty, however, is rather the
recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the
content of his life. (167)

Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to
an egoistic, independent individual, and on the other hand, to a citizen, a juristic person. (168)

Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual
human being has become a species-being16 in his every day life, in his particular work, and in his
particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social
forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political
power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished (169). The realization of what
Marx calls ‘true democracy’ entails, according to his analysis, overcoming the alienation between
the individual and the political community, through resolving the dichotomy between the
‘egoistic’ interests of individuals in civil society and the ‘social’ character of political life. This can
only be achieved by effecting concrete changes in the relations between state and society, such
that what at present only ideal (universal political participation) becomes actual17.

Hence in Marx’s analysis the civil society was a Hobbesian nightmare of isolated and aggressive
individuals, bound together precariously by cash nexus18, and unlike in Hegel who celebrated it, it
is to be targeted and destroyed. It is a problem to be solved. In it there can not be any basking

15
Ibid, pp.164
16
Loss of species being is the problem identified by many modern philosophers from Marx to the
contemporary communitarians who began their career in 1960s in USA. But the thing is that none
of these thinkers and movements could realize that the species-being of human being is not just
within itself and the communitarian beingness that existed hitherto was a communitarian beingness
of the whole cosmos in which human was a part and an unconscious part.
17
Giddens. Anthony, 1998. Capitalism & Modern Social Theory, pp.6. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
18
Femia, Joseph. 2001. ‘Civil society and Marxist Tradition’ in Kaviraj, Sudipta & Sunil Khilnani,
Civil Society: History and Possibilities, pp.131-146. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 5

for the human. But this civil society has slowly become heart throb of the sociologists and rights
activists and identiticians. At the same time the world market forces have grasped the real content
of it and proposing building up of civil society in Hegelian terms as a panacea to the ailments of
the third world. Along the civil society Social capital (the ensemble of self centered individuals
yearning for enrichment), an idea that was virtually unheard of outside a small circle of academic
social scientists until 1995, has gained currency worldwide. It has come to be described by
Grootaert, a World Bank expert as ‘the missing link in the development’.19. The micro credit
organized among the folk women is the best example of making dents into the rural society to
spin out economic humans out of the rural masses. Identititicians are the other best example to
pursue self interests of the atomistic individuals whose sole aim is self aggrandizement. Civil
society is celebrated term for the progressivisms of all kind. The root of the problem lies with
Gramsci.

4
Gramsci bypassed Marx and hijacked civil society from the domain of the structure to that of the
superstructure. According to Chantel Mouffe, he was one with Hegel in this regard and Bobbio
attributes the deviance to his Hegelian upbringing20. Gramsci revised Marx’s concept of civil
society as a structure of individuated persons and their self centered commercial transactions to
that of superstructure consisting of ideological and cultural domain. Although Gramsci
continues to use the term to refer to the private or non-state sphere, including the economy, his
picture of civil society is very different from that of Marx. It is not simply a sphere of individual
needs but of organizations, and has the potential of rational self-regulation and freedom. Gramsci
insists on its complex organization, as the organizations commonly called ‘private’ where hegemony
and ‘spontaneous consent’ are organized21.

Thus Gramsci transformed the civil society from the domain of target in Marx to that of a
domain where in hegemony can be exercised by the forces destined to have power. Thus he
made the target of attack into a malleable domain of manipulation by ideological indoctrination
and confrontation. Cohen and Arato in a well known definition, refer to a ‘third realm’
differentiated from the economy and the state as ‘civil society’22. Seeking to distinguish civil from
political associations, some have argued that the goal of organizations in civil society should be
seen as the generation of influence, not the conquest of power23. But, even scholar like Neera
Chandhoke in her maiden book on the civil society in 1995 argued with all passion that armed
with these weapons--- rights, rule of law, freedom and citizenship---civil society becomes a site
for the production of a critical rational discourse which possesses the potential to interrogate the
state.24 Even the left along with the right eulogized civil society and thus rights discourse and
identity movements within the sphere of Marxism. Invoked at the same time as the diagnosis and
as the cure for current ills, deployed by conservatives, liberals, and radical utopians alike by
oppositional movements and by international aid donors, civil society has become an ideological
rendezvous for erstwhile antagonists. It is championed across the globe as ‘the idea of the late
twentieth century’25.The activity around civil society in the third world contributed to the
dismantling of communitarian/state of nature existence in the third world and fall pray to the
jargon of democratic politics and marketise peoples’ lives and shattering human bonds to spin

19
Harris. John, 2001. Depoliticising Development, pp.1. New Delhi:Leftword.
20
Ibid, pp.141.
21
Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from Prison Notebooks, pp.12-13. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
22
Cohen, Jean L. 1992. Civil Society and Political Theory, pp.18. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
23
Elliot, Carolyn M. 2003. ‘Civil Society and Democracy: A Comparative Review Essay’, in
Carolyn M. Elliot (ed.), Civil Society and Democracy: A Reader, pp.83-105. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
24
Chandhoke, Neera. 1995, State and Civil Society: Explorations in Political Theory, pp.9. New
delhi: SAGE Publications. Later, being disillusioned she argued differently.
25
National Humanities Center,1992, pp.1. North Corolina: Humanities Research Center, Research
Triangle Park. Quoted in Khilnani, Sunil. 2001, ‘The development of civil society’ in Kaviraj,
Sudipta & Sunil Khilnani, Civil Society: History and Possibilities, pp.11-32. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 6

out atomistic and self centered individuals. Disempowerment of the communities and
corporatisation of the individual has ensued. The artificial juristic person—corporation, has
become the ideal he and the guiding rationale of the individual. And marketisation of human
relations with outsourcing of parenting and commercialization of old-age welfare are few
examples of this squalor of postmodern condition.

None lent their ears to the pertinent question posed by some scholars26: Is the civil society
discourse a part of the neo-liberal politics of globalization? Why there is no discourse ‘to
emancipate people from the instrumental rationality of the market’ though the Habermasian
emancipation of ‘life world’ from the instrumental rationality of the state is yet again on the card.
For intrinsic to the civil society argument was the demand for property rights and the free
market27. Hence, the biggest gainer of the civil society discourse is the world market forces under
the leadership of the World Bank --its political actor as ‘in the “earthly” existence of civil society,
he acts as a private individual, treating other human beings as a means to his own end, and even
reducing himself to a means, the plaything of “alien”, market forces28 and ‘fall pray to the
unsocial nature of civil life, of private property, trade, industry, and the mutual plundering of
different civil groups… this debasement, this slavery of civil society is the natural foundation on
which the modern state rests’29. ‘Social Capital’ and the closely related idea of ‘trust’, and the ideas
and activities around ‘civil society’, ‘participation’, and non-governmental organizations(NGOs)
have come to constitute new weapons in the armoury of ‘the anti-politics machine’ that is
constituted by the practices of ‘international development’30. The result is no real politics but
only, to use the phrase of Zygmunt Bauman, life-politics.

5
Post-modernity is a life of disjointedness and fragmentation. The isolation is completing with all
its local ills. The society has disintegrated into its components and each component is crusading
for its share in the alienation. The existential void is coming to our experience slowly. Today’s life
is caustically depicted by Michael Schultz and David Lee in the following passage31: ‘The home
itself has grown lean and mean, wider families being broken up into nuclear and single-parent
units where the individual’s desires and interests characteristically take precedence over those of
the group unable to stop treading on each other’s toes in the mega community, we have stepped
into our separate houses and closed the door, and then stepped into our separate rooms and
closed the door. The home becomes a multi-purpose leisure centre where household members
can live, as it were, separately side by side. Not just the gas industry but life in general has been
privatized. Globalisation and privatisation have brought many liberations. The more we are free
the more we are impotent. They have eroded our capacity to think in terms of common interests
and fates, contributing to the decay of an active political argument and action.

The escape from the constraints and impositions of community has been the dominant story of
the last 200 years32. Now the question of disappearance of the society, as it was known to us, is
under consideration. By the end of 20th century, speaking in the British parliament, Margaret
Thatcher declared that there is no society and that there were only individuals. From the

26
Ibid. See also Chandhoke, Neera. 2003. ‘A Critique of the Notion of Civil Society’ in Rajesh
Tandon and Ranjit Mohanty (ed.), ‘Does Civil Society Matter?: Governance in Contemporary
India’, New Delhi: SAGE Publications
27
Chandhoke, Neera. 2003. ‘A Critique of the Notion of Civil Society’ in Rajesh Tandon and Ranjit
Mohanty (ed.), ‘Does Civil Society Matter?: Governance in Contemporary India’, pp 27-58. New
Delhi: SAGE Publications.
29
Marx, Karl. 1844. “Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform”’ in Writings of
Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, pp.348. Quoted in Femia, Joseph. 2001. ‘Civil society
and Marxist Tradition’ in Kaviraj, Sudipta & Sunil Khilnani, Civil Society: History and
Possibilities, pp.131-146. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30
Harris. John, 2001. Depoliticising Development, pp.1. New Delhi:Leftword.
31
Quoted by Bauman, Zygmunt, Alone Again, pp.18. demos.co.uk.
32
Ibid.
 7

Enlightenment on, it has been seen as a commonsensical truth that human emancipation, the
releasing of genuine human potential, required that the bounds of communities should be broken
and individuals set free from the circumstances of their birth.

With the advent of Globalisation there is liquidity in the Modernity that was hitherto a solid one.
Concrete structures and photographic film are the symbols, according to Bauman, of solid
modernity whereas cyber space and erasable video tape are of liquid modernity. By liquid phase
of modernity Bauman meant a condition in which social forms (structures that limit individual
choices, institutions that guard repetition of routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no
longer (and are not expected to) keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt
faster than the time it takes to cast them33. Apart from liquidity, in the present times some other
seminal and closely interconnected departures have happened. Bauman explains graphically in his
Liquid Times. Second one, ‘the separation and pending divorce of power and politics’. Politics
have been moving away from the nation-state to the uncontrolled global space and the state
organs are encouraged to drop and transfer away and to contract out growing volume of the
functions they previously performed. ‘Abandoned by the state, those functions become a play
ground for the notoriously capricious and inherently unpredictable market forces and/or left to
the private initiative and care of individuals’. Third, lack of collective action as “community“, as a
way of referring to the totality of the population inhabiting the sovereign territory of the state,
sounds increasingly hollow. ‘“Society” is increasingly viewed and treated as a”network’” rather
than a structure (let alone a solid totality): it is perceived and treated as a matrix of random
connections and disconnections and of an essentially infinite volume of possible permutations.
Fourth, ‘the collapse of long-term thinking, planning and acting, and the disappearance or
weakening of social structures in which thinking, planning and acting could be inscribed for a
long time to come, leads to a slicing of both political history and individual lives into a series of
short-term projects and episodes’. ‘A life so fragmented stimulates ‘lateral’ rather than ‘vertical’
orientations. Each next step needs to be responsive to a different set of opportunities and a
different distribution of odds, and so it calls for a different set of skills and a different
arrangement of assets’. Fifth, the responsibility for resolving the quandaries generated by vexingly
volatile and constantly changing circumstances is shifted onto the shoulders of individuals who
are now expected to be “free choosers”’ and to bear in full the consequences of their choices.
The forces that produce risks are beyond the comprehension of the individual sufferer. The
virtue is not conformity with rules but flexibility: a readiness to change tactics and style at short
notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret – and to pursue opportunities
according to their current availability. In this situation ‘instead of great expectations and sweet
dreams, “progress” evokes an insomnia full of nightmares of ‘being left behind’ –of missing train,
or falling out of the window of a fast accelerating vehicle. A constant existential insecurity haunts
the individuated self.

When the real powers that shape the conditions under which we all act these days floe in global
space, while our institutions of political action remain by and large tied to the ground: they are, as
before, local and afflicted with a grave insufficiency of power to act in a sovereign manner. After
much enunciation of the life in liquid modernity, Bauman, in his book, introduces three attitudes
that explain the premodern, solid modern and the liquid modern. ‘ We may say that if the
premodern posture toward the world was akin to that a gamekeeper, it was the gardener’s attitude
that would best serve as a metaphor for the modern world view and practice’. The liquid modern
posture towards the world is that a hunter. He goes on explaining the three. ‘The main task of the
game keeper is to defend the land assigned to his wardenship and to preserve its ‘natural balance’,
that the incarnation of God’s or nature’s infinite wisdom’. He would ward off the trespassers.
The attitude was that things are at best if they are not tinkered with and not meddled with to
disturb the Gods orderliness. Gardner’s attitude is that there was no order in the world at all. So
‘he works on the desirable arrangement in his mind’. He forces his design on the nature to grow
plants of his choice in the pre arranged fashion and destroys other plants now renamed weeds.
He is an expert utopia-maker. Now he is fading away and so also his utopia about human society

33
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, pp.1. Cambridge: Polity.
 8

giving way to that of the hunter. Unlike the two types that happened to prevail before his tenure
started, the hunter could not care less about the overall ‘balance of things’, whether ‘natural’ or
designed and contrived. The sole task the hunters pursue is another ‘kill’, big enough to fill their
bags game-bags to capacity’ irrespective of the danger of emptying of forest. They will move to
different location to repeat the same exercise. Bauman says that ‘we are all hunters now, or told
to be hunters and called and compelled to act as hunters. ‘The prospect of hunting is not
tempting but frightening in a society of hunters – since such an end may arrive only In the form
of a personal defeat and exclusion. Either we must be hunters or being hunted, so we must run,
Bauman elsewhere quotes from Alice in the Wonderland, in order to be at the place where we are
and we must run twice faster than we are in order to move forward, this is the world that is
created in the era of globalization. Being mobile is the mantra and the satiating tool.

There can not be any solid bonds between persons who are running. There can only be floating
coalitions and fleeting bonds, the freedom is a myth and the rights are only in the service of the
liquidity. The society, thus, has been transformed into a society of consumption departing from
that of production and we are homo consumens who can be compared with a virtual species which
thrives in the market-driven atmosphere of capitalism The problem is that a life spent consuming
is essentially an incomplete life; incomplete in its ability to recognize alternative forms of
emancipation. The market is perceived as the freedom giver. Bauman perceived
commercialization of freedom. Increasing freedom in liquid modernity should be consider as ‘to
a large extent illusory’34. Under the heading “how Free is Freedom?” Bauman writes in the same
book: ‘To be an individual does not necessarily mean to be free. The form of individuality on
offer in late-modern or postmodern society…. –privatised individuality – means essentially,
unfreedom’. It is through consumption people perceive that they are best able to exert their
individuality. The existential tremors find their solution in a longing for belongingness and the
carnival communities where for a brief period people will be in a mass of gatherings.

Can we now discard the illusions that we nurtured around the concept of civil society and destroy
it to resuscitate our species-being—not the one envisaged by modern communitarian and
communists including Marx which is limited to human community, but, the one that is related to
a cosmic community.

---------

34
Bauman, Zygmunt 1999, In search of Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press.