IB Philosophy 7.1.3 Civil Society Notes

State, Nation, Government, and Civil Society

1. Having examined the origins of the state (7.1.1) and the forms that government can take (7.1.2), this final topic in the sub-theme addresses a crucial set of distinctions that underpin political philosophy. The concepts of state, nation, government, and civil society are often conflated in everyday language, yet they refer to fundamentally different things.
2. The state, as defined by Max Weber and discussed in 7.1.1, is a political entity exercising sovereign authority over a defined territory and claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The state is an abstract, enduring institution: it persists regardless of which individuals hold power or which government is in office.
3. A government is the specific set of institutions and individuals that exercise the authority of the state at a given time. Governments come and go through elections, revolutions, or successions, but the state endures.
   1. This distinction matters philosophically because it allows citizens to oppose a particular government without opposing the state itself, a point central to theories of legitimate resistance discussed in 7.1.1.
4. A nation is a community of people bound together by shared characteristics such as language, culture, history, ethnicity, or a sense of common identity. Nations can exist without states (as with the Kurdish people) and states can encompass multiple nations (as with multinational states like India or Nigeria).
   1. The concept of the nation-state, in which the boundaries of the state coincide with those of a single nation, is a modern political ideal that has never been fully realised.
5. Ernest Gellner argued in Nations and Nationalism (1983) that national identity is not ancient or natural. It is a product of the modern era. Nations are built through industrialisation, mass schooling, and political mobilisation (governments organising people around a shared identity), not something people were simply born with.
   1. Benedict Anderson's concept of the imagined community similarly suggests that nations are socially constructed, held together by shared narratives rather than direct personal relationships.

The Construction of Nations and Civil Society

1. The construction of Italian national identity after unification in 1861 vividly illustrates Gellner's point.
   1. Massimo d’Azeglio reportedly declared, ‘We have made Italy; now we must make Italians,’ acknowledging that the nation was a political project requiring a shared language, education system, and military service to transform regional identities into a national one.
   2. This suggests that nations, far from being natural communities, are actively constructed through state institutions.
2. Civil society occupies the space between the individual and the state. It encompasses the networks of voluntary associations through which citizens organise, deliberate, and act collectively outside the formal structures of government.
   1. Understanding civil society is essential for grasping how political life functions beyond the mechanisms of state power.

1. The overarching questions of Unit 7 ask how laws are justified and whether there are aspects of human life that laws should not attempt to regulate. Civil society represents precisely that domain of human activity that lies beyond the legitimate reach of state regulation, yet which is essential to the health of political communities.
2. These four concepts (state, nation, government, civil society) are conceptually separate, meaning each picks out something real and different, even though in practice they always overlap. The philosophical challenge is to understand how they relate to one another and what each contributes to a well-functioning political order.

The Philosophical History of Civil Society

1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was among the first philosophers to develop a systematic account of civil society as distinct from the state. In Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), Hegel located civil society (burgerliche Gesellschaft) between the family and the state.
   1. For Hegel, civil society is the realm of economic activity, individual self-interest, and voluntary association. But this is not enough for genuine human fulfilment. For that, Hegel thought people needed the higher form of community he called ethical life (the shared moral norms, laws, and institutions that make a community feel like more than just a marketplace), which for him was embodied in the state.
2. John Locke's political philosophy implicitly distinguishes between civil society and the state of nature. In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke argued that individuals leave the state of nature and enter civil society by consenting to a common authority.
   1. For Locke, civil society precedes and authorises the government. If the government betrays its trust, civil society has the right to dissolve it and form a new one.