The Role of Civil Societies
What makes a society civil? This is surely one of the most important questions to ponder in macro-political theory. For so much else depends on our view of civilized behavior. The meaning and purpose of society, what we ought to do, and what we hope to accomplish - all these are fundamentally affected by what we think is the 'true' behavior of civilized people. Yet even within the most popular views of civil society, there are differences aplenty. Rival beliefs about society and civility are typically embodied in various ways of life and in different political systems. Among them, we shall narrow our focus to the popular views of Locke, Tocqueville, and Marx. Of his most famous writings, Locke's Two Treatises of Civil Government gives us a theory of natural law and natural rights which he used to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate civil governments, and to argue for the legitimacy of revolt against tyrannical governments. Locke equated "the law of nature" with "the rule of morals." He wrote of a God who "show[ed] Himself to us as present everywhere, exhibiting Himself to the eyes of men... in the regular course of nature." His equation underscored his belief that "man alone" could not have "c
In so-called civil societies consisting of natural laws, however, we can easily forget that democratic principles are often embraced to effectively function as a community. Rubel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. " If alienation was a social problem caused by the nature of a capitalist economic system, then the solution was to abolish it and replace it with a better one. Of his major concerns, Locke reasoned that men in their natural condition were "free, equal, and independent. ) Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, translated by T. The class he primarily concerned himself with was, of course, the proletariats, for their extensive use of machinery and division of labor made them lose "all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. We know that the 'will of the people' is synonymous with 'majority,' but even within majorities Tocqueville recognized the disparate interests and characteristics that existed among common folk. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985). Just as Locke asserted we are born into natural law(s) or as Tocqueville claimed that democracy would unavoidably harvest civility and morality, Marx claimed that the resolution of the problems of capitalism were already on their way in the movement of history.
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Acceptance Essays
