Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds

Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds Examining the historical and social trajectories involved in the continuous development of civil society, this volume reveals the contextual nature of the process. Through empirical studies focusing primarily on Denmark and covering the period from 1849 to the present day, it analyses the manner in which civil society has been practised and transformed over time. Presenting a new theoretical framework informed by a relational and processual perspective, the book sheds new light on familiar questions pertaining to civil society, the production of its boundaries and spaces of action, and the means by which these spaces can become causal factors. A fresh intervention in the study of a concept that has been central in defining ideas of solidarity and the common good, and to which researchers and politicians look for solutions to the great challenges of our time, Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics, history and philosophy with interests in civil society. Liv Egholm is Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Lars Bo Kaspersen is Professor in the Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is the co-editor of Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology and the author of Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist. Routledge Advances in Sociology Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds Edited by Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen The Economy of Collaboration The New Digital Platforms of Production and Consumption Francesco Ramella and Cecilia Manzo Rural Youth at the Crossroads Transitional Societies in Central Europe and Beyond Edited by Kai A. Schafft, Sanja Stanić, Renata Horvatek and Annie Maselli Indigenous Invisibility in the City Successful Resurgence and Community Development Hidden in Plain Sight Deirdre Howard-Wagner Socio-gerontechnology Interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Ageing and Technology Alexander Peine, Barbara L. Marshall, Wendy Martin, and Louis Neven Young Refugees and Forced Displacement Navigating Everyday Life in Beirut Liliana Riga, Mary Holmes, Arek Dakessian, Johannes Langer, and David Anderson Urban Secularism Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe Julia Martínez-Ariño COVID-19 Volume I: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions Edited by J. Michael Ryan COVID-19 Volume II: Social Consequences and Cultural Adaptations Edited by J. Michael Ryan For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Advances-in-Sociology/book-series/SE0511 Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds Edited by Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Egholm, Liv, 1970- editor. | Kaspersen, Lars Bo, editor. Title: Civil society : between concepts and empirical grounds / edited by Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020027833 (print) | LCCN 2020027834 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367340957 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429323881 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Civil society–History. | Civil society–Denmark–History. Classification: LCC JC337 .C58 2021 (print) | LCC JC337 (ebook) | DDC 300–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027833 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027834 ISBN: 978-0-367-34095-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32388-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books Contents List of contributors Preface vii x PART 1 Setting the Scene 1 A processual-relational approach to civil society 1 3 LIV EGHOLM AND LARS BO KASPERSEN 2 The modern conceptual history of civil society 31 CHRISTIANE MOSSIN 3 The “long history” of civil society in Denmark and Western Europe: Civil society – in the shadow of the state (eighteenth to the twenty-first century) 48 LARS BO KASPERSEN AND ANDERS SEVELSTED 4 Different states, different shadows: The particular exceptionalism of civil society in the United States 70 ELISABETH S. CLEMENS PART 2 The Emergence of the Danish Civil Society 5 Civil society and the civilizing mission 81 83 MAJ GRASTEN 6 Christianity, state, and voluntarism: Protestant processes of privatization and deprivatization 98 ANDERS SEVELSTED 7 Philanthropy as the co-creator of the welfare state LIV EGHOLM 112 vi Contents 8 Past and present futures of democracy: The Danish peasants’ movement as democracy instigator and cultural mythologizer 128 CHRISTIANE MOSSIN 9 Eclipsed by the welfare state: Understanding the rise and decline of the Danish Workers’ Cooperation, 1871–2000 145 ANDREAS MØLLER MULVAD AND BUE RÜBNER HANSEN 10 Civil society in the shadow of the Danish welfare state 159 MATHIAS HEIN JESSEN 11 Civic action as temporal process-in-relations: Towards an events-based approach 172 DIMITRA MAKRI ANDERSEN PART 3 Epilogue 187 12 Epilogue: Civil society as process and valuation 189 FRANK ADLOFF Index 202 Contributors Frank Adloff is a professor of sociology at the University of Hamburg and the co-director of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability”. His research focuses on gift giving, conviviality, civil society and sustainability. His latest publications include Gifts of Cooperation, Mauss and Pragmatism (Routledge, 2016) and Politik der Gabe. Für ein anderes Zusammenleben (Edition Nautilus, 2018). Dimitra Makri Andersen is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, affiliated to the CISTAS project. Within the frame of the CISTAS subproject ‘Civil Society and Organizational Forms’, her research examines the dynamics of crosssector partnerships between Danish NGOs and businesses, focusing in particular on issues pertaining to time and temporality. Dimitra holds a BA in Business Administration and Sociology and an M.Sc. in Strategy, Organization and Leadership, both from Copenhagen Business School. She has in the past held different positions as a trade union leader and politician (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitramakriandersen/). Elisabeth S. Clemens is William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the current editor of the American Journal of Sociology. Her research explores the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change. Her books and edited volumes include The People's Lobby (Chicago, 1997) and Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America’s Past and Present (Chicago, 2010). Most recently, Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State (Chicago, 2020), traces the tense but powerful entanglements of benevolence and liberalism in American political development. Maj Grasten is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. Her research sits at the intersection of Socio-Legal Studies and Global Governance, with particular focus on international organizations and legal bodies, experts and knowledge production in international law, and the legal foundations of viii List of contributors markets. Among her latest publications is the edited book The Politics of Translation in International Relations (Palgrave, 2020). Liv Egholm is PhD in history, anthropology and semiotics and an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, co-PI of the research program CISTAS, director of CBS’s Centre for Civil Society Studies (CfC) and the co-organizer of the EGOS SWG on Organizing in and Through Civil Society: Perspectives, Issues, Challenges. Her areas of research draw on pragmatism, cultural history and conceptual analysis to study notions and practices of “the common good”, gift-giving and the blurred lines of state, market and civil society. Among her recent publications are Civil Society Organizations: The Site of Legitimizing the Common Good (2019), Complicated Translations (2019), Practicing Civil Society (2020), and Advancing a Post-Sectoral Conception of Civil Society (2020). Bue Rübner Hansen is an intellectual historian and sociologist, working as a postdoc at the University of Jena. His research focuses on ideas and practices of social reproduction, class composition and political ecology. Within that framework, he has published texts about migration, care on social media, social movements, and ecological interest formation. He has recently finished a postdoc project on the “Emergent Ideas of the Good Life in Common” funded by the Danish Council of Independent Research. Mathias Hein Jessen is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. He holds a PhD in The History of Ideas from Aarhus University. He is interested in the relation between state, market and civil society, and between the state, corporations and civil society organizations. He has most recently published articles in Theory, Culture & Society, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations and International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Lars Bo Kaspersen (b. 1961), is currently a Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Formerly Head of the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He is author of, among other publications, Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist (Blackwell), Does War Make States? (co-edited with Jeppe Strandsbjerg; Cambridge University Press), and War, Survival Units, and Citizenship (Routledge forthcoming, 2020). Kaspersen’s research areas are state formation processes in Europe, the transformation of the welfare state, sociology of war, civil society (including the idea of associative democracy), social theory, and in particular relational theory. He is co-director, together with Liv Egholm, of CISTAS. Christiane Mossin is a postdoctoral researcher at Copenhagen Business School. Based in continental philosophical traditions, her work explores political, legal and cultural aspects of societal transformations while building on interdisciplinary approaches in the intersection between List of contributors ix political philosophy and sociology, structural anthropology, law and legal history. Her current research is oriented towards inherited and emerging discourses and manifestations of collectivity, as well as fundamental issues of collective subjectivity, with a view to their implications for social order and change. Andreas Møller Mulvad is an anti-fraud analyst with the Danish tax authorities, and formerly Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. Anders Sevelsted holds a post doc position at the School of Social Work at Lund University and is an Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Anders’ research focuses on the historical development of civil society elites, moral elites, social movements and voluntary organizations, as well as the role of ideas in the development of welfare states that he studies from a mixed methods approach through interpretive methods, Social Network Analysis, and GIS. He has further strong research interests in moral sociology, sociology of religion, elite sociology, historical sociology, and the American Pragmatist tradition. Preface This book results from a major research program named CISTAS. The two editors initiated this project back in 2013. It took its point of departure in an ongoing common interest shared by the two editors in several interrelated issues such as civil society, processual sociology, relational sociology, conceptual history, pragmatism, the relationship between state, civil society, and market, philanthropy, associationism, the relationship between the development of civil society and the Danish welfare state, the future role of civil society etc. At least since 2009, the two editors (then colleagues at the Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School) had exchanged ideas about several of these issues. It led to a process of elaborating an application to the Carlsberg Foundation, which quickly returned with a positive interest in civil society. Our program was named CISTAS – an acronym for Civil society in the shadow of the state – and after a presentation of the key ideas and an interview, we were granted approx. ten million kroner in 2014. In addition to this, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs granted us 1.5 million kroner. Succeeding, we received support from the Tuborg Foundation and EU to expand the research program with more research projects. We are deeply grateful for all this support. The grants made it possible for us to: gather an extraordinarily vibrant and inspiring group of junior researchers, to launch large international conferences inviting outstanding researchers within the field to CBS, hold many workshops with practitioners, helping us to understand the challenges and potentials they were facing, inviting guest professors and increase our participation in international conferences, by which we could share and qualify our research. During the last five years, our research program has developed in both empirical, methodological and theoretical ways that were only nascent at the beginning. The CISTAS Research program had a twofold objective: To contribute to the international theoretical and methodological debate by suggesting a slightly different theoretical framework for analyzing civil society issues. Secondly, to investigate the role and position of civil society in the development of the Danish welfare state to discuss the role of civil society for the future of the welfare state. We started asking: What role does civil society Preface xi play in the development of the modern state and the welfare state? And which role will it play in the future? Through an ongoing conversation with both empirical matters and theoretical ideas, we have formulated seven theses that we trace in this book: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Is the state a prerequisite for civil society? Civil society is an ideological concept. The political struggle is centred around its definition. Therefore, civil society is changing both conceptually and empirically all the time. Civil society potentially provides integrative forces as well as dis-integrative forces. Volunteerism and philanthropy are central phenomena, but to grasp their importance and effect, their practices must be understood within their concrete and particular context. The boundaries between state, market, civil society (and the family) are dynamic and fluid and very often blurred and messy. Associations perceived as part of civil society can, in other contexts, be seen as part of the market. It is not an inherent quality of the associations, but an empirical and conceptual question. Voluntary organizations, movements and associations possess—through their practices—the potential to change the configuration between state, market and civil society, and thereby reformulate which questions must be solved in contemporary society. The growing interest in civil society as the solution to contemporary welfare state problems has, at the same time paradoxically, simultaneously provided a politicization and a de-politicization of civil society. These elements have continuously spurred for new ways and practices of doing politics, understanding global challenges, creating social cohesion, organizing and creating different power relations over time. The chapters of this book investigate the consequences of these practices. Denmark is a part of Western Europe, and the Danish state formation process shares some fundamental features with most western European countries. Still, like the other Western European states, it also has its own distinctive and unique development. Our aim is to present “the long history” of the Danish civil society’s particular trajectory and contextualize Denmark as a state in Western Europe. This book is about citizenship discourses, conceptual history, the blurred boundaries between state, market and civil society, practices and the actual development of civil societies in Western Europe mainly illustrated with the Danish/Nordic example. The Danish case is a yardstick revealing when the general trends and trajectories in Western Europe went in a different direction than the Danish. Many inspiring people have played a significant role in making this book, even without knowing it. First, we would like to thank Professor Emeritus Per Øhrgaard, CBS, who encouraged us to do research about the civil society and xii Preface who linked us to the Carlsberg Foundation. We have been very privileged to have enthusiastic, helpful and supportive engagement from Professor Flemming Besenbacher, Chairman of the Carlsberg Foundation and our liaison from The Carlsberg Foundation, professor Nina Smith. Also, our major thanks go to Member of Parliament and Former Minister of Economic Affairs and Minister of Cultural Affairs Marianne Jelved, for her support and willingness to appear at a large number of conferences, events, and workshops. The continuous workshops in the CISTAS Research group, and the civil society group at CBS, have played an immense role in the development of the agenda of the book as well in qualifying the individual chapters. Beside ourselves, the CISTAS group consists of: Christiane Mossin, Anders Sevelsted, Andreas Møller Mulvad, Mathias Hein Jessen, Maj Grasten, Dimitra Makri Andersen, Lara Monticelli, Cristine Dyhrberg Højbjerg, and our loyal, skilful and intelligent student assistants: Olivia Freiesleben Frier and Benjamin Foyn Lausten. The civil society group at CBS has had changing members over time, who all have played a role in the development and refining of our ideas. We want to specially thank Anker Brink Lund for his willingness not just to confront and open up ideas, but also for sharing and nourishing the civil society platform with us. The ample input we have received through workshops with practitioners has qualified our thinking and ensured its knowledge and connection to current trends. We also want to thank our international network for generous feedback. Our special thanks go to a smaller group of scholars, who always have been willing to join seminars, participate in PhD seminars, discuss our ideas and challenge our convictions: Ilana Silber, Frank Adloff, Elisabeth Clement, Jeffrey Alexander, Nina Eliasoph, Phil Gorski, Norman Gabriel, Hans Joas and Jakob Egholm Feldt. We are also grateful for the support and patience from our editor Neil Jordan and editor assistant Alice Salt. Here it is also the place to thank our anonymous reviewers. Their insights, comments and encouragement have pushed the book to a much better place. Caitlin Murphy Brust has copy-edited this book with excellent skills. We are grateful for the time and thoroughness she has put into making the book a more readable collection. Finally, we would like to thank our editorial assistant, Ditte Vilstrup Holm, for her diligence, persistence and not least her patience. Without her, we would not have been able to finish the book. The responsibility of the book as a whole is still ours. Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen Part 1 Setting the Scene 1 A processual-relational approach to civil society Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen Introduction Civil society appears to us as a theoretical, empirical, and normative category. It is infused with meanings that help us to understand the potential of past, current, and future societies. In the literature and in society, civil society is perceived as a privileged place of emancipation, solidarity, social coherence, democracy, and civilizing forces—a locus of the common good. As such, the concept has been heavily disputed by researchers and politicians, and it was recently singled out by the UN Sustainable development goals (SDG) as one of the most significant spaces of action to solve the grand challenges of our time. Since the actualization of the modern state in the nineteenth century, scholars and intellectuals have been scrutinizing and debating the nature of civil society’s shifting tides, as well as its role and placement vis-a-vis the delineation of state, market, and family. The literature on civil society has an immense influence also on how the state and market are and have been conceptualized throughout time. By the same token, the concept elucidates which questions are essential to raise and answer about societal organization, democracy, capitalism, secularism, citizenship, and many other key historical developments—not to mention the defining impact this literature has had on the idea of solidarity and the common good in our societies. The conceptualization of civil society as one of three sectors in society (state, market, and civil society) has become widely used in civil society research. It can be grouped under an umbrella that we label the “sector perspective.” This perspective has helped to analytically characterize each sector and, in particular, establish civil society as a space for the common good, democratization, emancipation, and political critique. Still, the sector perspective also has some severe inherent limitations when it comes to its explanatory and analytical strength. Through a processual-relational approach, the book will open up fruitful lines of inquiry by exploring theoretical and analytical ways to meet these limitations. In so doing, the book will advance new ways of theorizing, investigating, and discussing the role of civil society in past, present, and future society—as well as its ramifications for identifying different questions and potential answers to the role civil society has played, 4 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen currently plays, and potentially can play in order to solve the grand challenges of our time. This chapter has three parts. The first will set the scene by identifying the origin of the sectoral perspective in the 1980s, emphasizing its three main limitations: (1) infusing empirical analysis with strong normative assumptions; (2) employing an a priori definition of civil society; and (3) presuming a rigid dichotomization between civil society and the state. These limitations come to the fore in different ways within the two most dominant traditions in civil society research: the first concerned with the values of civil society, the second with the organizations and institutions of civil society. The second part reviews new strands in present scholarship on civil society, identifying three currents with potential to disentangle civil society research from the limits of the sector perspective: (1) avoiding an a priori definition of civil society; (2) reshaping the unit of analysis; and (3) emphasizing the (historical) processes of defining, performing, and practicing civil society. The third part advances these currents and paves the way forward for a processual-relational approach to understanding civil society at large. This part also links the chapters together and shows how reiterations of inquiries and delineations within multiple temporalities take an active part in the production of civil society in past, present, and future societies. Setting the scene Civil society from a sector perspective The 1980s saw the concept of civil society resurface in the language of Eastern European dissidents, Western political actors, and researchers alike (Arato, 1981; Arato & Cohen, 1988; Gouldner, 1980; Keane, 1988). Even though its relevance was fiercely debated (e.g. Bryant, 1993, 1994; Kumar, 1993, 1994), its prevalence reflected a need for new perspectives on social movements, activism, voluntarism, democracy, and political grassroots. The concept should encompass the widespread experiences of groups that could influence and act democratically in undemocratized countries and create radical and enduring societal change. The collapse of the communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe prompted the assumption that liberal democracy, as it had developed in many parts of the Western world, would be the only legitimate and possible model of governance for the future. Following these developments, “civil society” was deemed to be not only a transformative agent towards liberty and a particular liberal democracy, but also an essential bulwark against the state. As a result, myriad research from various disciplines concerned with civil society and democracy flourished. In 1992, the concept was further revitalized in Cohen & Arato’s book on civil society, Civil Society and Political Theory. This book stands out as one of the most significant from that period, providing a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated analysis of civil A processual-relational approach 5 society, drawing from empirical experiences throughout the developments in Eastern European countries and authoritarian regimes. It firmly links the privileged place of critique and the producer of alternative life-forms to democratization initiatives and voluntary associations, placed outside both state and market. Cohen & Arato gave voice to a new understanding of civil society’s connections to emancipation, critique, justice, and democracy, which comprised and transcended more than current research on social movements, activism, and dissidents. Thus, “civil society” became a concept capable of investigating and pointing at new political and critical actions, which could control states and markets, keep democracy vibrant, and effectively promote the development of the common good of society. Inspired by a Gramscian analysis of civil society and democracy, Cohen & Arato framed the contours of the sector model that has since triumphed throughout academic disciplines. The critical tradition developed by Gramsci not only problematized the idea that the common good could be safeguarded by the state (following the traditional Hegelian division), but also identified civil society as a space of resistance against the market (and thereby accommodated the general Marxist critique of the concept). Thus, the inspiration from the Gramscian tradition revitalized civil society as a distinctive normative and empirical sector in contrast to both state and market (Cohen & Arato, 1992, pp. 282–284; Gramsci, 1971). Cohen & Arato argued that a “three-part model distinguishing civil society from both state and economy” would create a reconstruction of civil society theory in which civil society entailed “plurality, publicity, legality, and privacy” (Cohen & Arato, 1992, p. 346) and was understood as “a sphere of social interaction between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication. Modern civil society is created through forms of self-constitution and self-mobilization” (Cohen & Arato, 1992, p. ix). Thus, civil society became a concrete, empirical unit of study inhabited by distinct institutions, organizations, actors, and virtues—rather than merely a utopian idea, a quality typically maintained in the earlier normative traditions (Kocka, 2004, pp. 69–70). Cohen & Arato’s concept of civil society draws on a Tocquevillian definition of voluntary action, which emphasizes associational work as essential for democracy—that is, voluntary associations and organizations a priori embody democracy, solidarity, and participation. This framing is linked to a positive version of Habermas’s idealized communicative theory of the public sphere, which is populated by rational citizens striving for peace and consensus through civilized communication (Habermas, 1989). In this way, the authors paved the way for a potential conceptualization of an empirically-grounded, universally “good society” identified as democracy, as well as—to some extent—a peaceful, rational, and enlightened conversation located in civil society. Today, most civil society research is anchored in the sector conceptualization of civil society, understanding state, 6 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen market, and civil society as three distinct sectors, each with their own types of actions (Kocka, 2004, pp. 68–69), organizations (Cohen & Arato, 1992, p. ix), values (Cohen & Arato, 1992), and logics (Reuter, Wijkström, & Meyer, 2014, p. 76). This has given rise to an explanatory and analytical framework in which the lines between state, market, and civil society—as well as their empirical content, to some degree—are predefined. The sectoral framing of civil society has always suffered from ambiguity and incoherence, containing at least three inherent limitations as both an analytical term and an empirical site. First, it tends to fuse the normativity and virtue of the concept of “civil society” with its concrete empirical existence. Second, it ontologizes the analytical categories of state, market, and civil society as empirical sites that are inhabited and defined by specific organizations, actions, virtues, and actors. Third, its separation between state, market, and civil society characterizes civil society as the privileged place for critical voices. This framing has been advanced by many publications using the concept of civil society in their headlines or subtitles. They have studied civil society predominantly as a bounded, empirical sector located between the state and market, consisting of voluntary and social movements with nongovernmental and nonprofit societal actors that are creating a space for critique, social cohesion, and democratic structures based on a distinct logic. There is a tendency we can follow through selected works of two main lines of research— the first concerned with the values of civil society, the second with the organizations and institutions of civil society. In different ways, each have magnified the inherent problems in the sector perspective. Values of civil society During the last few decades, research into values predominantly emphasized how values and virtues of civil society define or represent society at large. They can be divided into two categories. The first line of research often merges a neo-Tocquevillian associative tradition with Ferguson’s idea of a civic society, sometimes spiced up by the Habermasian concept of the public sphere (Cohen & Arato, 1992), emphasizing citizenship and democratic orders (Shils, 1997; Walzer, 1991). This view tends to treat associations as the central element in creating social cohesion, trust, and civic engagement (Putnam, 2000, 2004). As such, associations play a fundamental role in stimulating, engaging, and empowering citizens toward political participation, thereby fostering democracy. Some have stressed associations as society’s bedrock of democracy (Zimmer, 2007). In this conception, associations are the institutionalized part of civil society in which diversity and plurality seek to define a democratic society (Burdsey, 2015; Evans, 2012; Kamali, 2001, 2007; Lipset, 1994; Pousadela, 2016) or secure the common good (Cederström & Fleming, 2016; Graddy & Wang, 2009; Pardo, 1995; Silver, 1998, 2001; Freise & Hallmann, 2014). A processual-relational approach 7 It draws heavily on normative theories of civil society’s value and associations, stressing that people “voluntarily associate to actively pursue the same ideal often defined as the common good or the public wealth” (Zimmer, 2007, p. 45). Following this reasoning, civil society is studied as a distinct moral and empirical sector that consists of voluntary and philanthropic organizations, as well as nongovernmental and nonprofit societal actors representing and creating social cohesion and democratic structures. As a framework of study, it has pushed for measuring the levels of representation (Fraser, 2007; Johansson & Lee, 2014; Johansson & Metzger, 2016; Kutay, 2015; Avritzer, 2008; Oser, 2010; Zimmermann & Favell, 2011) and the amounts of voluntary associational practices and participation in society (Putnam, 1995, 2000; Foley & Edwards, 1996; Fridberg & Henriksen, 2014; Rosenblum, Post, & Post, 2002)—by which society’s strengths and weaknesses can be evaluated. In doing so, this framework has inevitably spurred an a priori understanding of civil society’s virtues as good, thus suggesting that civil society’s organizations and institutions are democratically representing society. The second category is concerned with how the representation and legitimacy of civil society in one sector or arena, or by certain actors, can be strategically utilized or governed. It is often inspired by a Foucauldian perspective on governmentality and the critical assessment of the regulation of actors (Dean & Villadsen, 2016; Villadsen, 2016), by more system-theoretical research focusing on the logics of voluntarism and volunteers (e.g. Jakimow, 2010; La Cour & Højlund, 2011), or by a (neo)institutional approach and its focus on institutional logics (e.g. Friedland & Alford, 1991; Lounsbury, 2002; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Thornton, 2002). This last framework mainly defines the sectors according to their different logics (market, corporation, state, or community) or as autopoietic systems from a macro-perspective (Jessop, 2001). On this basis, there is a tendency to identify civil society as the source of the universal virtue of the “common good”—and as a specific space from which to raise critique against political and economic logics. Accordingly, civil society is easily contaminated by the logics and governmentalities of the other sectors and should be protected against them in order to develop its specific (institutional) logic or system. However, splitting civil society into specific logics or systems often separates civil society’s politics and economy from other forms of politics and economy. In both categories of research, there is a tendency to represent civil society and its varieties of associations and institutions as the creators of the common good, which in turn need to be nourished and protected to secure the possibility of critique and a democratic, good society (Ahn & Ostrom, 2008; Cederström & Fleming, 2016; Putnam & Campbell, 2012). However, the normative assumption that the universal common good and critical voices are located in civil society often conceals the fact that not everything that takes place in civil society can be defined as good—nor are all associations ontologically good, striving towards the common good, or even critical of the 8 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen state and market. Often, the opposite is true. Civil society might also consist of elements that create dissociation instead of social cohesion and trust, undemocratic tendencies that dominate and exclude other interests and groups, and economic measures that enhance specific versions of the “good.” Accordingly, we must raise the discussion about what kind of “good” and “critique” civil society represents, not least for whom. The line of research into civil society’s values and virtues thus contains a double and contradictory assumption about the relationship between the market, state, and civil society. Distinguishing the social and moral qualities of civil society from the social and moral qualities of the state and market has a pronounced effect: the specificity and distinct resources of civil society and its associations are seen as contrasting with both the state and market. For this reason, the relation between civil society and (mainly) the state and market is at stake. This line of research traces two key processes, namely civil society’s shifting autonomy vis-à-vis the state and civil society’s changing status as a potential space of critique of the state, and thus as a political player. This creates a double bind: On the one hand, civil society is taken as a specific location infused with good qualities and virtues that are separated from state and market logics/values, which in turn are seen as disruptive or even destructive of civil society´s raison d’être as the bedrock of democratic values, political activism, critical voices, and the liberal democratic state. On the other hand, civil society is taken as a locus of untapped resources to identify and solve the lack of social cohesion and solidarity created by state and market failures. Consequently, this line of research tends to disregard both the heterogeneity of virtues/values and the volume of transactions and bureaucratic institutions in civil society, thereby concealing the dynamics of interactional fields and their interweaving politics, economy, and morality. The organizations and institutions of civil society The sector perspective is, as the name suggests, prominent within what has been labeled third sector or nonprofit sector research. It is interested in associations and organizational forms characterized by their place as distinct from both the market (nonprofits) and the government (NGOs) (Freise & Hallmann, 2014), as well as welfare governance and social policy (Bode & Brandsen, 2014; Löfler, 2009). This line of research emphasizes the importance of organizational forms of voluntarism and voluntary associations (Anheier & Salamon, 2006; Boje, Fridberg & Ibsen, 2006; Henriksen, Smith & Zimmer, 2012) and the changes in the relationship between the state, market, and nonprofit sectors (Salamon & Toepler, 2015). It links voluntarism closely to the research on civil society organizations as welfare-state providers and resources for society and the state (e.g. Evers & Zimmer, 2010; Trägårdh, 2007; Trägårdh, Witoszek & Taylor, 2013), stressing their political agency (e.g. Frič, 2014; Siemieńska, 2014). This assumption that the three sectors— each with their own organizational forms and institutional logics—tend, in A processual-relational approach 9 practice, to have strong affinities with the (neo)institutional approach and its focus on institutional logics (e.g. Friedland & Alford, 1991; Lounsbury, 2002; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Thornton, 2002), in which it defines the sectors mainly by their different logics (market, corporation, state, or community). This has prompted specific interest in problems arising from mixing uneven logics across partnerships that blur the boundaries between sectors (Austin, Stevenson & Wei-Skillern, 2012; Austin, 2006; Dees & Anderson, 2006; Mair, Mayer & Lutz, 2015). In this vein, practitioners and academics alike have determined that civil society has a fragile logic in constant danger of being contaminated by the logic from (mainly) the market sector in the neo-liberal area (Brandsen, van de Donk & Putters, 2005; Dees & Anderson, 2003; Ebrahim, Battilana & Mair, 2014; Evers, 2009; Evers & Laville, 2004)— but also to the state’s increasing bureaucracy (Almog-Bar & Young, 2016; Steen-Johnsen et al., 2011; Brinkerhoff, 2002; Herlin, 2015). Central to this view is the threat of commercialization and the logic of business-like organizational forms that might jeopardize the specific, a priori characteristics and values of philanthropy, charity, and voluntarism (Meyer & Simsa, 2014), as well as the associations that work against the omnipotent state’s intervention into private life (e.g. Fung, 2003, p. 522). This line of research has typically led to studying how voluntary and NGO associations and nonprofit organizations handle the balance between involvement, cooperation, and freedom in their relationship with the state (e.g. Fung, 2003; Salamon, 1998). It has also led to studying the pros and cons of growing “professionalization” (Hwang & Powell, 2009) and business-like practices in philanthropic and voluntary organizations to enhance civil society organizations and their space for maneuver (e.g. Dart, 2004). Most boundary- and sector-crossing research takes place within this line of research, which focuses on current trends of hybridization inherent in, for example, social investments (Anheier & Archambault, 2014), social economy, and social enterprises, as well as other organizational forms mixing state, business, and civil-society logics (e.g. state-financed voluntarism), drawing on logics of “doing good” and covering the welfare provisions required by financial crises and neo-liberal ideology (Austin et al., 2012; Austin, 2006; Dees & Anderson, 2006). This research mainly identifies civil society actions by their differences from state and market actions, thus tracing how these actions and their conditions have been transformed over time. It has, in general, a double concern: on the one hand, how the hybridity of civil society organizations avoids “contamination” from the other sectors and maintains the specificity of the third sector, which voluntarily organizes through civil actions toward a common purpose; and, on the other hand, how third-sector organizations operate to handle both the lacking welfare provisions through state-financed, nonprofit organizations and the growing professionalization of voluntary-based, thirdsector organizations. While this research has an empirical and theoretical interest in boundary-spanning organizational forms, it also, to some extent, provides an a priori definition of civil actions and voluntary organizing for a 10 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen common purpose at the empirical site of specific civil society organizations. Thus, other kinds of organizing practices outside the bounds of civil society are seen as inherent to logics that work against the common good—and so, should be kept at bay. When civil society organizations are separated from other forms of organizing, the civic actions outside civil society or generated through blurred boundaries are often concealed or overlooked. Inherent problems in the sector perspective The sector perspective has mainly been studied from a political philosophical, organizational and sociological angle. Consequently, it has separated politics of the state from politics of civil society, civil society organizations from other types of organizations, the virtues and values of civil society from other virtues and values, and the economy of the market from the economy of civil society—discarding the intertwined historical and social trajectories of, especially, cultural and moral components. A distorted conception of civil society has thus triumphed: as an unquestioned locus for creating integration, democracy, consisting of the common and public good. This view overshadows the idea that civil society might also consist of “bad” components, promoting dissociation instead of social cohesion and trust, undemocratic tendencies that dominate and exclude other interests and groups, and economic measures that enhance specific versions of the “good”—a fact stressed through a still-growing research interest in the uncivil or bad part of civil society (ex. Alexander, 1998, 2006; Alexander, Stack & Khosrokhavar, 2019; Armony, 2004; Chambers & Kopstein, 2001; Kopecky & Mudde, 2003; Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014; Lipset & Lakin, 2004; Pérez-Díaz, 2002, 2014). Notably, the sector model tends to infuse empirical analysis with normative assumptions that locate democratization, critique, and the common good a priori within civil society and specific forms of organizing. Even if it is impossible to avoid some normativity within research, the normative conceptualization of the sector model stands in the way of diligent empirical analysis of how particular interests, conceptualizations, politics, economies, and governance of actions and practices were elicited and reassembled in different versions of civil society—and the good society—over time. The sectoral definition of civil society, as an a priori empirical site for civil actions in opposition to state and market actions, not only confines all actions within the civil society as civil and supportive of critical and democratic values, but also defines actions taking place outside the civil society arenas as not civil (Alexander, 2006; Alexander et al., 2019; Alexander & Tognato, 2018) and without critical potential. Relying on these a priori assumptions, it fails to incorporate and discuss central tenets of blurredness and intersections between the sectors, as well as their consequences from historical, sociological, political, and legal perspectives. Implicitly or explicitly, this definition often foregrounds civil society organizations and actions to be recognized not A processual-relational approach 11 by mere actions, but by their intent. This is mainly rooted in substantialism, in which the unit of study—e.g. civil society, state, and market—is seen as prior to relations. These units have an ontological status as real, existing entities that act with capacities and powers. Accordingly, the units generate action and interaction, rather than being constituted in the very process of interacting. Such a focus has made it difficult to generalize insights about the influence of historical and social trajectories on the ongoing formation of civil society at large and its interactional fields, which are created through intersections with market- and government-oriented practices. To meet these challenges, a new research agenda has been developed. Even though it spans disciplines, theoretical standpoints, and empirical interest, the collective approach points to three main currents: (1) moving from an a priori definition of civil society to an a posteriori definition, emphasizing that civil society can and should not be predefined but rather studied through its changing empirical forms; (2) reshaping the unit of analysis from civil society to what is really the center of the analysis, e.g. civil actions, organizing, and values; and (3) emphasizing the (historical) processes of defining, performing, and practicing civil society. Paving the way to a new research agenda on civil society From a priori to a posteriori One way to avoid these inherent assumptions has been to move away from an a priori definition of civil society, its boundaries, and its content. This has resulted in a turn towards an a posteriori definition, taking the starting point within an empirical analysis or using the concept only as a heuristic device (e.g. Kopecky & Mudde, 2003, pp. 1–3). A heuristic use can plainly display the concept’s inherent assumptions and explanatory framework, ensuring that these are not conflated with the concrete empirical analysis of blurred boundaries and relations. An empirical approach has the strengths of challenging the relatively narrow understanding of civil society as mostly prodemocratic, as well as correcting the tendency to discard uncivil and undemocratic movements from the study of civil society (Alexander, 2006; Kopecky & Mudde, 2003; Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014; Pérez-Díaz, 2002). This often goes hand-in-hand with an audit investigating which civil and democratic practices take place and their effects (Alexander, 2006; Lilja, 2015). As such, an a posteriori understanding of civil society potentially transgresses the problems of normativity, universality, and ontologization inherent in the sector model. It paves the way for a reformulation of what, for example, the economy, politics, and morality are and do—and it illuminates intriguing ideas about how organizational forms, as well as political, economic, cultural, and moral actions, were enacted in special and temporal variations across the traditional divides of the state, market, and civil society. 12 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen Unit of analysis Another way to avoid the inherent assumptions of the sector model is to change the unit of analysis. While civil society is the unit of study, an a priori definition of what it is not (state and market)—and of which institutions, organizations, actors, and values belong to it—easily sneaks into the approach. To circumvent this problem, the unit of analysis is shifted either to the issues actually at the center of the analysis (e.g. democratization processes, civil actions, the creation of the common good, or the process of civilizing missions) or to the relational and processual nature of boundary-crossing topics and actions (e.g. social economy, movements, voluntarism, gift-giving, or partnerships). The civic and the civil are typically seen as preconditions for democratization and are commonly analyzed as civil action located in the institutional sector of voluntarism (Cohen & Arato, 1992; Hall, 1995). When the unit of analysis is changed, it is possible to detect and analyze new definitions of civil actions and determine where they take place in everyday practices that link societal, political, economic, and cultural relations (see e.g Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014). Emphasizing the (historical) processes of defining, performing, and practicing civil society Strategies for avoiding the neo-Tocquevillian-inspired sector model can be seen, for example, in the cultural sociology program on the civil sphere developed by Jeffrey Alexander, as well as in the pragmatist approach described by Lichterman & Eliasoph. Instead of dividing the state, market, and civil society into distinct a priori sectors, Alexander’s conceptualization argues for the creation of historically changeable cultural categories, the civil and non-civil spheres (Alexander, 2006, pp. 31–33, 110–111)—not to be confused with civil society. This division is used to analyze and categorize the processes relating to which institutions, relations, and motives (1) can be deemed “pure” in specific periods of time (and thus belong to the civil sphere in which contemporary understandings of universality, common interests, and solidarity are promoted), and (2) contemporarily belong to the non-civil sphere classified as “impure,” as if comprised of unjust categories striving to optimize only particular interests (Alexander, 2006, p. 54f). The analytical division between civil and non-civil spheres thus emphasizes the ongoing (historical) processes of inclusion and exclusion, demonstrating how categorizations, values, and relations are moved from the non-civil to the civil sphere and vice versa throughout history. Lichterman & Eliasoph argue that instead of taking civil society as an a priori starting point, civic action and the common good should be investigated per se, emphasizing that defining the “civic-ness” of an action or the “common” and “good” from an empirical study is more rewarding (2014, pp. 809–810). These are some examples among the growing body of research, which expands the traditional sector boundaries and places A processual-relational approach 13 the study of civic actions, critique, and the common good within the already intertwined societal, political, economic, and cultural relations. From different angles over the last decade, scholars have developed an approach to the study of civil society oriented towards agency and culture (e.g. Alexander, 2006, 2017; Adloff, 2016; Bode, 2006; Clemens, 2020; Clemens & Guthrie, 2010; Eliasoph, 2013; Enjolras, 2009; Evers, 2009; Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014; Lilja, 2015; Pérez-Díaz, 2014), seeking to define the actors’ ongoing creation and evaluation of the boundaries between civil society, state, and market spheres (Alexander, 2006; Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014, pp. 851–852; Pérez-Díaz, 2014, p. 823). Even though there are, of course, differences between the scholars and their specific takes on civil society and agency, they all focus on the process of “doing” civil society through actions and practices. This view is often coupled with historical outreach (Alexander, 2006; Clemens, 2010, 2020), an investigation of practices in specific contexts (Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014; Lilja, 2015), a micro-level approach (PérezDíaz, 2014), or a combination of these methods. Central to these collective strategies is the change from an explanatory framework, with a focus on objects from/in civil society, to a more agency-interested framework, with a focus on the relations, activities, and practices creating the civil society action/ sphere. Advancing a processual-relational approach Although promising, these current trends of civil society research fall short of developing a coherent processual-relational approach. Hence, this book advances and extends these trends even further. Our processual-relational approach is rooted in the view that social phenomena and entities emerge as products of boundary-making processes that involve multiple interdependent events and actors (e.g. Abbott, 2001, 2016; Dépelteau, 2018; Elias, 2009). Correspondingly, instead of exploring civil society as a pre-given entity or a substance, deprived of the relations and processes that continually constitute it, we perceive, define, and study civil society as a fluid social process (Abbott, 2016; Dewey & Bentley, 1949; Donati, 2010, 2015; Emirbayer, 1997; Langley & Tsoukas, 2016). We trace how civil society continuously emerges as an entity throughout changing figurations, treating the dynamics of social processes as networks of interwoven interdependencies, in which all social actors are mutually constituted (see also Elias, 2012). Our aim is to capture the complexities and contexts involved in how civil society emerges at many levels and in many social processes at once, as well as which practical effects arise in the past, present, and future. Thus, the chapters of this book will show how central aspects of civil society take their forms through the rich tapestry of concepts, events, and practices. Civil society is continuously created as a stable, recognizable, and identifiable social entity through ongoing boundary-drawing processes, which distinguish it from other social entities. However, it does not become a social 14 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen entity—or Wirklichkeit, in Hegel´s terminology—only because of its endurance and seeming stability. Besides its apparent enduring constancy over time, civil society also needs to be experienced as a viable solution to present trajectories that stabilize structures, timelines, and causalities (Mills, 1959, pp. 143–164; Abbott, 1995). It must be acted upon as a matter of fact to gain its entity-ness. It must become an explanatory or defining factor in talking about societal developments, such as democracy, solidarity, secularism, or equality. Civil society as a social entity, then, influences and co-defines the boundaries of other social entities, like the market and state, and proposes acceptable solutions to the grand challenges of our time. Instead of searching for a stable definition of civil society, we approach the concept as an empirical question that takes the multiple historical processes into account. Accordingly, civil society as an entity is neither denied nor ignored, but the fixation upon its definition and identity is diminished, while the processes and relations creating its entity-ness come to the fore. To put it bluntly, our central claim, which is to disentangle the concept of civil society from the sector model and its inherent substantialism and replace it with a processualrelational approach, is more than an alternative course of action—it is a promising avenue. The Danish case as the universalities of the particular The Danish example is used to show “the universalities of the particular,” in the sense that the particular example of the Danish civil society is useful for demonstrating more generally how patterns of delineation and their boundary-making processes engage with the continuous emergence of civil societies at large. Traditionally, theories of civil society point to its growth as a response to poorly functioning welfare states. Yet, Denmark, as a very successful welfare state with a strong and flourishing civil society, is often used as an example to follow by researchers and politicians alike (see, for example, the call for a Danish model in the Democrats’ election campaign in 2016). The Danish case will be our “example,” yet not in the sense of uniqueness nor as one example, representing the many concrete and particular manifestations of how and why interlinked social and historical trajectories generally form constitutional figurations of civil society over time. In other words, we are seeing the particular, to paraphrase Hegel, “as a concrete manifestation of the universal.” The Danish case is chosen as an entry point and can be seen as a “normal exception” (Grendi, 1977). This provides a viewpoint from which to examine aspects of society that are not extraordinary, but shed light on widespread social practices and do justice to the unpredictability and contingencies of often-contradictory trajectories and events—exactly the vulnerability to which the general theories fall. Thus, we seek to reformulate the study of civil society and point to the analytical advantages of studying what is generally conceived as universal concepts, such as “democracy,” “the common good,” “voluntarism” and “critique,” A processual-relational approach 15 within their empirical historical contexts—in which their particular meanings as well as their universal aspirations are produced. Reiterated inquires This line of research, in which the emergence of past, present, and future civil societies as social entities can be seen as a continuous response to social and historical trajectories and events, emphasises the study of problems and new approaches to handle them. This aspiration to address resurfacing problems stems from what Haydu (1998) calls “reiterated problem-solving” or, more precisely, from Dewey and Peirce’s notion of “inquiries” (Dewey, 1938, pp. 104–105; Peirce, 1877, pp. 5–6), which emphasizes that the inquiries must be thought of as productive, stressing certain solutions rather than others at particular times (Haydu, 2010, p. 33). Inquiry is the process of knowledge seeking, which entails the processes of transforming knowledge from a situation of “doubt” (Peirce, 1878, p. 291), or “an indeterminate situation” (Dewey, 1938, p. 34), to a situation of “belief” (Peirce, 1878, p. 291), or new understanding. Reiterated inquiries are the ongoing struggle to make sense of and solve the particular encounters with problems related to specific clusters of conceptualizations, practices, and actions. The way these problems are solved is by recombining new and older knowledge, explanations, and understandings, which can redraw the relations between challenges, resources, understandings, and opportunities. This approach places the understanding of particular events and trajectories within broader patterns, which opens up potentials for different actions in the future. Tracing the ongoing relations between past and present trajectories and their potential solutions does not lead to universal conclusions. Instead, particular responses to indeterminate situations of doubt come from the recombination of processes over time—and through such recombinations, new relations become visible and practiced, and a new language is formed for generating the problems (Abbott, 2001). It provides a way of thinking about the relations between trajectories of present realities and processes of becoming entities, which stabilize structures, timelines, and patterns of causalities (Mills, 1959, pp. 143–164; Abbott, 1995; See also Feldt & Petersen, 2020). Our specific research question asks why and how the ongoing emergence of civil society appears to be a solution to these indeterminant situations of doubt. This encompasses other key questions: Why and how do the reiterated indeterminate situations of doubt emerge? And how do their solutions constantly reconfigure potential past, current, and future societies? Presently, civil society has been treated as a way to solve the indeterminate tensions that arise between solidarity, democracy, and citizenship. It helps to settle both the particular feeling experienced in a current indeterminate situation and the general feeling of powerlessness against the grand challenges we face. It therefore works as an explanatory repository for understanding how particular events and trajectories are parts of larger societal patterns. The enactment of the 16 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen Danish Constitution of 1849 was one of the events that sought to resolve the indeterminate relation between solidarity, democracy, and citizenship. Like those in other national states, the social and historical trajectories of the Danish Constitution are an obvious entry point into tracing the ongoing creation of civil society. The Constitution developed new inquiries and solutions to the conundrum of solidarity, democracy, and citizenship relations—and it manifested civil society as an economic, political, and social solution. Following the reiterated inquiry into solving the indeterminate tensions between solidarity, democracy, and citizenship, we can trace how two recurrent lines of difference were drawn in practical management to reorganize challenges, resources, understandings, and opportunities. The first line of difference is the distinction between the private and the public in all aspects: e.g. state, law, rights, needs, and religions. The second distinction is between who is included in the “common,” and thus earns the right to solidarity, and who is not. Such lines of difference are precarious, and their specific boundaries are changeable over time. Thus, their stabilizations are ongoing processes, which work concurrently on different levels and have different outcomes. These two lines of difference—reframed within this inquiry into the relationship between solidarity, democracy, and citizenship—can be traced back to the beginning of colonization in the sixteenth century (Chapter 5) and the Reformation (Chapter 6), and they are reaching into current discussions of state governance (Chapter 10) and the characterization of the needy (Chapter 7). Even more, these lines of difference are used to “solve” current inquiries by reordering and creating practical applications for how the economic, political, cultural, and moral dimensions of experience could be handled within the inner dialectics of what Hegel defined as significant elements of modern society. They thus seek to solve what could be described as the tension between the “smaller” civil society (based on organized solidarity and moral concerns of the common) within the “larger” civil society (the brutal market relations and concern of the individual) (see Chapter 2). In line with this framework, the book will not outline one single narrative of the emergence of the Danish civil society from the Danish Constitution’s enactment onwards; it will instead show how ongoing reiterated inquiries around solidarity, democracy, and citizenship used past and new lines of difference to manage economic, political, and moral dimensions of society. These tactics reinforced certain tensions and solved others in different social processes. The chapters of the book show how over time, pivotal groups of actions and actors reiterated the inquiries around citizenship, solidarity, and democracy—thus highlighting specific parts in different contexts, prompting some contradictions, and exploiting possibilities towards future action. The delineation of public and private Tensions between the smaller and larger civil societies re-emerged after the Danish Constitution in 1849 and defined the democratic rights of citizens: A processual-relational approach 17 Freedom of religion and political orientation (§71.1), freedom of speech (§77), freedom of association (§78), and freedom of assembly (§79). At the outset, these rights introduced a distinction between the state’s authority and the freedom of citizens in order to reconfigure the ongoing trajectories of delineating the private from the public, as well as who were considered to be good citizens and part of the common. Notably, reflecting a general tendency in Constitutions, it portrayed the state as representing its citizens, while simultaneously drawing a boundary between the state and its citizens. As a consequence, the state authority granted the citizens’ rights and protection to form communities and associations, while stimulating the citizens’ need for protection against the state. Even though different practices were already in place before the Constitution (See Chapter 3), civil society and the communities with legally endorsed rights by the Constitution not only became places to protect the individual or particular interests, but also carved out spaces that could rein in the masses as a more regulated collective and foster good citizenship and the “good citizen.” Since the Constitution was written, the concrete lines of difference were centered around questions of how to handle the seemingly unsolvable tension between individual private freedom and the collective public good within a societal design of democracy, citizenship, and solidarity. The book demonstrates how both the experiences of these tensions and their solutions were infused with and affected by past experiences and explanations—recombining challenges, resources, understandings, and opportunities to pave the way for new practices. Importantly, the line of difference between the private and public was an ongoing problem embedded within different arenas of society: from the legal understanding of property and sovereignty (Chapter 5) to an analysis of how religious movements gained access to societal organization by oscillating between promoting and downplaying their religious elements (Chapter 6)—thus, playing a central role in the battle of defining what can be public and private. The distinction between included and excluded The chapters in the book show how current and past lines of difference between the private and public were often imbued with the distinction between what was included and excluded. Thus, the inclusion/exclusion divide played an essential role in practicing civil society and the definition of citizenship and solidarity. In chapter 5, we follow how colonization in the sixteenth century sparked an ongoing debate about what was considered to be natural law and what was considered to be public law—a delineation that, by the seventeenth century, identified the just society as a rule-governed civil society populated with civil, rational citizens. Thus, the inclusion/exclusion delineation was produced around the concepts of civil/uncivil. The distinction between what is deemed inside or outside citizenship and solidarity is an important line of difference in many of the chapters. 18 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen The chapter on the peasant movement from Mossin traces the purification of the categorization and conceptualization of peasants over time. The chapter demonstrates how the category of the “peasant” was transposed from an uneducated, blurred mob into the authentic, natural provenance of the Danish people’s character through the assemblages of specific religious, moral, political, and economic events. In Egholm’s chapter on philanthropic practices, the delineation is reiterated into the distinction between the deserving needy and the undeserving needy. Even though the line of difference—through ongoing social and historical events and actors—consistently produces new boundaries and new assemblages of moral, political, and economic dimensions, the delineation works as an evaluative tool even today. As Andersen describes in the chapter on private-public partnerships, the understanding of the civil in civil action has potential to simultaneously reinforce and/or cross current boundaries between civil society and market logics. With their explanatory thrust, these potentials can have a tremendous effect on the success of the partnerships and, consequently, the civility of their actions. The contradiction between the state and civil society The assumption of a sharp contradiction between the state and civil society, which is nested in the sectoral approach, is derived from contemporary theoretical developments on civil society, mainly from an American perspective. This view treats civil society as an opponent of the state, linking it even more strongly to the pursuit of the common good, critique, virtue, and democracy. Although the conceptual history of civil society originally comes from a European tradition (see also Chapter 2), the concept of civil society—since the 1980s–1990s, thanks to Cohen & Arato’s reintroduction (1992), as well as the work of Arato (1981) and Walzer (1991, 1992), among others—has been developed and influenced by an American tradition and experience. This is because European thinkers from Tocqueville to Gramsci (Stearns, 1999) used the American version of civil society to describe and underline their views of it as the privileged place in opposition to the overly powerful state, the barbarism of order, and the absence of governmental order (Heins, 2004, p. 501). However, there are significant empirical differences in social and historical trajectories between the American and the European state traditions, especially when it comes to the welfare societies and traditions of Northern Europe. Unlike the United States (US), where the general approach is quite hostile towards the state—perceiving it as a depriver of freedom and encouraging individual pursuit of happiness due to the governmental setup— the Northern welfare societies generally see the state as a protector of the common good and a provider of social cohesion. It has been developed into a “civil state” (Alexander et al., 2019; See also Egholm’s chapter). The strong Americanization within this research area, alongside the practical and empirical understandings of civil society and its voluntary and philanthropic endeavors, has often conceptualized civil society as essential in contrast to the A processual-relational approach 19 state. This take has perpetuated ignorance of both past and present coordination, collaboration, and complementarity between state and civil society— mainly in Europe, but also in the US (see Chapter 4). Our alternative approach, transgressing and reformulating the sector model, advances a different and more complex story about the relations between state and non-state spheres. As stated above, the reiteration of inquiries after the Danish Constitution especially emphasizes how the ambiguities of democracy, citizenship, and solidarity constantly recreated lines of difference between the state and non-state areas, as well as how ongoing social and historical trajectories and events produced new figurations of economic, political, and moral relations. These figurations and their processes are captured from different angles across the chapters. In their chapter on the workers’ movement, Mulvad & Hansen show how the workers’ movement— through economic (e.g. co-operations) and political (e.g. unions and the Social Democratic party) actions—generated a specific moral economy with a “pillar” version of civil society for the workers after the Constitution. The movement located the worker as a central concept around which politics could and should be formed. Its seeming success notwithstanding, the authors also show how this particular social intervention became stripped of power in 1924. They argue that the reason can be found in the lack of political support from the Social Democrats, which, due to their newly-won access to the statebuilding project, emphasized the universal state and capitalistic order—not just the particular worker’s corporative economy—as their target. This “pillar” formation invoked the previous lines of difference from the peasant movement’s attempt to gain economic, political, and moral strength, as described in Mossin’s chapter 8, by merging the concept of the peasant—as the authentic, natural provenance of the Danish people—with the concept of worker. In contrast to the workers’ movement, the peasant movement in the late nineteenth century was motivated by a moral ambition fused with governmental acknowledgement of the need for economic growth after the Danish defeat in 1864 (see Chapter 3). It was later driven into the political realm by strong actors and the shifting state apparatus. The chapters by Sevelsted and Egholm show how public partnerships were already in place before the Constitution and flourished from its enactment onwards, still holding influence today, albeit in new forms. Notably, the moral components of the religious, voluntary, and philanthropic organizations were intertwined with economic resources and crucial political power—enabling them to help define as well as partner and battle with the growing welfare state. What at the outset might have looked like state-initiated rules and regulations from the Constitution were often initiated and promoted by religious voluntarism and philanthropic gift-giving endeavors. These practices created permeable boundaries between the state and civil society, and they still play a decisive role today. The state did not necessarily initiate the practices behind legislative work, but the laws were defined and maintained through state power. The state thus spurred a 20 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen simultaneous politicization and de-politicization of civil society—trajectories that have grown even stronger, as Clemens shows in her chapter. The careful regulation of civil society inevitably carves out its political space. We can follow such a tendency in Jessen’s chapter, which describes how, from 1976 until today, the state regulated civil society into an acceptable unit, depriving it of its political force and transforming the struggles of the social into an administrative, legal-corporate form that could be recognized and governed. The entanglement of multiple contexts and temporalities Highlighting how concepts (e.g. peasant, worker, needy, self-help, civil), actors (e.g. lawyers, NGOs, non-state actors, politicians, corporations, co-operations, volunteers, farmers, workers, priests, businesses) and practices (e.g. legislation, gift-giving, cooperativism, deprivatization, governance, partnerships) interact, our approach examines how the reiteration of inquiries over time continuously recreates both lines of difference and the connections between them. Accordingly, the past is always present in the now, and we must understand a processual-relational approach as the interweaving of multiple presents, multiple pasts, and multiple futures (Koselleck, 2002). We continuously make sense of our presents by reinventing or restructuring the past lines of difference as a relational condition of the present (Mead, 1932, p. 52), thereby designing multiple future societies, which do not conform to subjective intentionality but involve some unpredictable transformations (Elias, 2012; Abbott, 2001, p. 227). This point is also emphasized in Andersen’s chapter on the events-based approach to civil action, Egholm’s chapter on gift-giving practices, and Jessen’s chapter on contemporary regulatory and governmental practices. Legitimizing through inaugurating the past The meaning ascribed to civil society must obtain legitimacy in contemporary society to gain broad support. Some of this legitimacy is obtained by the reinterpretation and reordering of past lines of difference to make sense of contemporary trajectories. As we see in Mulvad & Hansen’s chapter, the workers’ movement recollected the past lines of difference from the peasant movement to attain political power. By weaving together multiple temporalities, the political project of the workers acquired new meaning and incited new effects, resulting in the ongoing production of civil society´s boundaries. Similarly, smaller instances of the stabilization of processual relations—as in Andersen’s chapter on the definition of civil action in civil society and business partnerships—significantly influence longer durations of the stabilization of the boundaries of civil society. Through complex figurations interlinking economic, political, and moral elements of society, new boundaries between civil society, market, and state are produced and thus affect how to solve the grand challenges of our time. A processual-relational approach 21 The production of civil society from a processual-relational approach Producing civil society as a social entity This collection of chapters teaches us at least two things. First, it gives us empirical evidence that entanglements, partnerships, and ambiguities across different sectors have always been and still are in place. Thus, neither hybridity nor mixed institutional logics can be said to be a current or new phenomenon. Moreover, we learn that political, economic, or moral principles should not be predefined in specific sectors or institutions; rather, their delineation is tied to ongoing inquiries and is subject to change over time. This indicates that the sector perspective is merely a current method for practically managing inquiries. Secondly, we learn that the production of civil society is an ongoing process throughout social and historical trajectories. Civil society becomes a social “entity” whose boundaries are delineated by the multitude of differences produced through ongoing practices, trajectories, and events. How does it become a social entity? What does it mean? What are the implications? To address these questions, the chapters of this book trace how civil society became a seemingly stable entity and a matter of concern for other social entities over time, causing a variety of effects. Through a variety of historical experiences, events, interpretations, and practices, previous and new lines of difference brought together concepts, meanings, practices, and actors—which collectively forged a recognizable social entity of civil society. Thus, civil society became a social “entity” and a matter of concern for other social entities through a series of temporal sequences that produced an identifiable social imaginary and a recognizable set of relevant inquiries. Since the Constitution’s enactment, the reiterated inquiry of the tensions between democracy, citizenship, and solidarity has been a persistent challenge, so as a possible resolution, political, economic, and moral essences were distilled into specific arenas of the state, market, and civil society. This analysis brings forth a rich and intriguing explanation of how lines of difference did not necessarily imply discontinuity, but often quite the opposite—namely, opportunities to form new assemblages by mobilizing resources and efforts across diverse domains. Civil society´s recognizability and legitimacy grew through this process of recollection, which increased the potential to mobilize new meanings for and effects on projects like state legislation, economic organization, and political action. Civil society gradually became an argument used by other social entities to legitimate their specific actions— including state legislation and governance, NGO-business partnerships, the development of new political agendas, new economic forms of organization, philanthropic gift-giving, and religious practices, to name a few. Stability and changing figurations At the crux of this book is an account of how civil society manages to stay seemingly stable and act as a social entity despite the complexity of its 22 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen construction. Its seeming stability notwithstanding, we can see how ongoing reconfigurations changed the social entity itself and affected other social entities. For instance, we can see that earlier concepts—such as the worker (Mulvad & Hansen’s chapter), the peasant (Mossin’s chapter), and the deserving (Egholm’s chapter)—have disappeared as useful and effective concepts. They lost their legitimacy as explanatory and transforming ideas upon the reiteration of the inquiry into the complicated interactions between democracy, citizenship, and solidarity. Their disappearance might indicate a change in the importance of particular inquiries and practical solutions today, even though the social entity of civil society still represents earlier lines of difference to galvanize its legitimacy. There are many such examples, especially when new concepts gain ground and embody the distinction between inclusion and exclusion—as shown in the discussion of civil action’s regulation and legitimation (as in Andersen’s chapter) or the emergence of the third sector as a practical concept guiding legislation (Clemens’ chapter). These reconfigurations expose the continuity of civil society as a social entity that attends to the same bundle of inquiries, more or less, around democracy, citizenship, and solidarity. At the same time, they challenge earlier ways of managing these concrete figurations, thus offering new solutions to the conundrum. The ongoing reiteration of inquiries shows that current inquiries cannot be resolved by looking back to past experiences for their explanatory force. Ongoing social trajectories and events also distort the potentialities of future actions by reconfiguring new and old lines of difference into new patterns as answers to current challenges. This can be seen in how the lines of difference are reused in new forms. The distinction between what is private and what is public, as well as who belongs to the common and who does not, have changed over time. For instance, today the market has re-emerged as an essential partner with civil society. On the one hand, this connection elucidates how capitalism is flooding its borders, exploiting civil society’s distinction between public and private and thus the right to remain unregulated and protected by the state. On the other hand, this re-emergence calls attention to new potentials for how to handle the tension between the “smaller” and “larger” civil societies, effectively centering issues of solidarity and moral concerns of the common while minimizing the brutal market relations and focus on the individual. New forms of economic organizations, partnerships across nonprofit and forprofit, and demands for democratic governance in economic enterprises all surface in different periods in response to the inquiry into the tension between democracy and solidarity. Even more, the still closer collaboration between the “civil” state and traditional voluntary and philanthropic organizations has spurred inquiry into the tension between solidarity and citizenship, provoking new forms of plug-in voluntarism, network communities, and repurposed religious-based organizations. These changing concepts, events, and practices tell us that the reiteration of inquiries might have transformed from the social design of democracy, citizenship, and solidarity to more diverse A processual-relational approach 23 forms of tensions (e.g. between democracy and solidarity, as well as citizenship and solidarity). Thus, new constellations of lines of difference, drawing on both past and newly developed conundrums, are morphing into other figurations pointing at different future avenues. The processual-relational approach to understanding civil society not only rejects the substantialist view (Emirbayer, 1997, p. 281) that maintains the a priori existence of civil society inherent in most sector perspectives, but also advances a framework that assumes the emergence of social entities must be understood from the historical and social trajectories that are encoded into them. The chapters in this book show that civil society must be conceptualized as an ever-changing figuration of intertwined pasts, presents, and anticipated trajectories and reiterations of inquiries. While social processes are challenging to study—given that the analytical gaze tends to freeze moments in order to study them—the collection of chapters will reflect upon multiple potentially suitable methods for “capturing reality in-flight” (Pettigrew, 1990, p. 270). The approaches applied throughout this book strive to capture, combine, and compare multiple temporalities, trajectories, and events at the same time—thus standing in opposition to a path-dependency approach, which searches for critical junctures in temporal sequences that serve as explanatory forces steering history and accounting for contingencies (Haydu, 2010, p. 32). The search for ways to manage the reiterations of inquiries and their concomitant lines of difference can reveal how such critical junctures arise over time and crosscut, penetrate, divide, or rejoin the many potential, coexisting paths. Correspondingly, the processualrelational project helps to understand and scrutinize the mechanisms and circumstances when social entities, inquiries, and patterns of conflicts are kept stable and durable. Civil society has mainly been studied within monodisciplinary traditions, which have inadvertently advanced the sector perspective, designating specific forms of politics, economy, morality, and organizations into specific empirical areas. The processual-relational approach embraces a transdisciplinary path by emphasizing that the emergence of social entities takes place through social and historical trajectories and events, blending multiple forms of handling politics, economy, morality and organizations. Overview of the book With this collection, we propose a new theoretical approach to old questions about civil society, with the intention of guiding a way forward to understand how its boundaries and spaces of action are produced—and how such boundaries and spaces turn into important causal factors. Even though all the authors of this book do not explicitly use the vocabulary presented above, the collective chapters share the assumption that the social world must be understood through processes, and these processes must be conceptualized as relations. The object of our investigation is “relations,” which again can be seen 24 Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen as interdependent or transactional actors—a web of social relations in process. The different researchers in this book subscribe at large to these theoretical-methodological principles. It is our aim, then, to advance the processualrelational approach into civil society research through exemplifications of what such sources of inspiration could mean for different angles of civil society research. The chapters deal with different themes, sites, and research questions that stress different aspects of the processual-relational approach and strengthen, refine, and challenge the approach. The book is divided into three blocks. The first is setting the scene: Discussing our theoretical and methodological take, offering a processualrelational approach to the conceptual history of civil society, providing an overview of the “long history” of civil society in Western Europe, and discussing the paradoxical de-politicization of civil society. The second part zooms in to empirical investigations at relevant sites of historical contingencies and their effects as boundary-spanning practices. It scrutinizes philanthropy, religious voluntarism, the peasant and workers’ movements’ importance for democratic practices, and the proposition of a different economic model. This part also investigates how civil society as a social “entity” currently raises questions involving the governability of civil society and new organizational forms’ redefinition of civil action. These empirical analyses study how current trajectories and interlinkages have raised and answered questions of civil society in contemporary society. 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Also, Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of social structures as symbolic, unconscious collective structures constitutes a source of inspiration (Lévi-Strauss orients himself within a Durkheimian-Maussian—only indirectly Hegelian—tradition). Although Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism would seem less torn by negativity than Zizek’s approach to ”the symbolic,” one should not overlook the inherent instability of any structural system according to Lévi-Strauss due to fundamental signifier-surpluses (2013). 3 In contrast, McKeon argues that Ferguson’s understanding of “civil society” oscillates between “the precedent and coherent unit that encompasses divergent part” and “the product of the divergence” (2005, pp. 3–4). 4 To my knowledge, a reading of the essay building on the points outlined below has not been realized before. Foucault’s excellent interpretation (2008, pp. 291–316) highlights the almost prophetic nature of the essay. But whereas I read Ferguson as a harbinger of inescapable tensions, Foucault reads him as a harbinger of a particular solution to a crucial modern tension: “civil society” as a governmental technique mediating between “the subject of rights” and “homo economicus.” 5 See Chapters 3, 6, 8, and 9 in this book for Danish examples (Kaspersen & Sevelsted, Sevelsted, Mossin, Mulvad & Hansen). 6 See Chapters 7, 8, and 10 in this book concerning Danish developments (Egholm, Mossin, Jessen) 7 For an elaborated critique of this notion of civil society, see Chapter 1 in this book. 8 The premodern status thereof is disputed. McKeon argues convincingly that in “-traditional” cultures, the public-private-relationship is conceived “as a distinction that does not admit of separation,” in “modernity” as “categories susceptible to separation” (2005, p. xix). 9 A point also made by Foucault (2008). Other possible definitions of “public/private” (openness/secrecy; strangers/personal relations; common/particular purposes) were not irrelevant, but ambiguous—and in any case overdetermined by the idea of a society realizing itself according to its own logics. 10 Chapter 5 (Grasten) deals with past and present international law in light of natural law conceptions of civil society. 11 My critique targets solely contemporary manifestations of modern natural law, not necessarily normative conceptualizations of civil society inspired by, for example, Aristotle or Aquinas (Pakaluk, 2002). 1 Family resemblances (see Wittgenstein, 2009). 2 Civil society (or Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Hegel’s terminology) contains both the “free market” with competing businesses and the “Korporations” (or corporations, organized interest groups). 3 Hegel’s most important work on these issues is The Philosophy of Right (1821/ 1991). 4 “The corporation (Korporation) applies especially to the business class, since this class is centered on the particularities of social existence and the corporation functions to bring implicit similarities between various private interests into explicit existence in forms of association. This is not the same as our contemporary business corporation, but rather is a voluntary association of persons based on occupational or social interests (such as professional and trade guilds, educational clubs, religious societies, townships, etc.). Because of the integrating function of the corporation, especially with regard to the social and economic division of labor, their purposes in civil society may appear to be selfish, but they are shown to also be universal through the formation of concretely recognized commonalities.” The definition comes from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the section on Hegel: Social and Political Thought. See https://www.iep. utm.edu/hegelsoc/#SSH6c.ii 1 This starting point diverges from the position taken by Jeffrey Alexander and others working within the framework of “civil society theory” who conceptualize the civil sphere as “a cultural-cum-institutional arena,” defined by the combination of defining values, emotions, and motives with “institutionalized boundaries” that differentiate it from “markets, religions, families, and states” (Alexander et al., 2019). In contrast, the argument sketched here is that there are advantages to separating the questions of legal form and boundaries from strong assumptions with respect to the motives, content, or emotional valence of behavior, although precisely those properties may be invoked to legitimize a particular delineation of legally-recognized organizational form. 2 The title of an earlier edited volume, Private Action and the Public Good, captured the essence of this definition (Powell & Clemens, 1998). 3 For a similar argument with respect to the Nordic cases, see Wijkström and Zimmer (2011, p. 12). On Sweden in particular, see Boli (1991). 4 For an elaboration of this argument, see Clemens (2020b). 5 See, for example, the discussion of Cohen and Arato in Chapter 1 in this volume. 6 For an extended version of this argument, see Clemens (2020a, Chapter 1). 7 This discussion is based on Clemens (2020a). 1 An explosive proliferation of local chapels or “missionary houses” in the final decades of the nineteenth century testifies to its growth in this period. Chapels erected by decade: 1870s: 9, 1880s: 103, 1890s: 323, 1900s: 221, 1910s: 91, 1920s: 102, 1930s: 30 (Larsen, 2005, p. 101). 2 Only one marriage request was ever filed (Thorsen, 1993). 3 The following builds on my 2019 article in Social Science History, and references to the sources can be found here (Sevelsted, 2019). 1 These dangers inherent in modern democracies—atomistic individualization and mass-rule—were noted already by Tocqueville (2000, pp. 407–11), later by Durkheim (2014, pp. 8–32) and Arendt (1973, pp. 305–40, 474–79). 2 See Chapter 2 (Mossin). 3 The formulation of the dilemma is my own, but owes credit to Durkheim’s democracy theorization pivoting on degrees of state-society-penetration (2003, 76–85). 4 Importantly, the Danish peasants’ movement was comprised of various heterogeneous groups (socially, politically and religiously), which were not integrated to an equal extent. As a successful emancipatory movement, it was first and foremost a movement of self-owning farmers. Although smallholders’ demands were 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 raised as well, their conditions were only marginally improved through the struggles of the movement. Even more peripheral were land workers and servants; they remained poor, suppressed, and largely rightless throughout the nineteenth century even if benefitting somewhat from social aid arrangements instigated by the movement. In the first part of the twentieth century, smallholders, land workers, and servants all broke free and formed their own organizations. For reasons of limitation this chapter must refrain from pursuing these differentiated paths of the movement. Primarily, I follow the traces of the Grundtvigian farmers. Not only did they dominate the peasants’ movement; their history reveals most powerfully the dialectical change that constitutes the central interest of this chapter: From despised outcasts to celebrated incarnations of “the national spirit.” Pre-stages of the peasants’ movement can be found in the religious awakening movements of the 1820s–1830s. Supported by laws of 1831 and 1841 increasing peasants’ local and national political influence, the awakenings developed into a political movement in the 1840s—the anchor point of which became “Bondevennerne” (“Society of Friends of Peasants”), founded in 1846. In parliament fractions arose: “Bondevennerne” remained a powerful group until the 1860s, but was accompanied by “Det Nationale Venstre” and “Jyskefolkeparti.” In 1870, a united party, “Det forenede Venstre” saw the light of day—a unification that proved to be fragile. A stable, united party (albeit without smallholders, land workers, and servants) was not achieved until 1910, see below. Nonetheless, the conditions of farmers and smallholders remained hugely different (see notes 4 and 10). Early seeds of an organized Grundtvigian movement can be found in parts of the religious awakening movements of the 1820s. But not until 1860 did the movement appear to be firmly established. Grundtvigianism had advocates in various social groups but found its main support in rural areas. As displayed below, Grundtvigianism and the peasants’ movement came to constitute a powerful historical combination, ultimately transcending political and social distinctions. For which reason its “worldly” social-aid activities caused controversies within the movement, see Chapter 6 (Sevelsted). However, reacting to rumors of upcoming reforms, peasants initiated protests in several parts of the country pushing for an absolute abolition of serfdom. The government sought a balance between interests (taking into account the strong opposition coming from many landlords) and ultimately transformed serfdom into an institution of voluntary agreements between landlords and peasants. Some historians (Bregnsbo, 2000) suggest reform ideas came from local sources, yet contend such ideas were embraced and legislatively realized by the state. Smallholders, subjected to legal discrimination, and unable to benefit from increasing international demands for agricultural products, still faced poverty, and had to supplement farming with work as land workers or craftsmen. The concept of destiny employed is inspired by Benjamin. It implies the power of ”second nature” (historical conditions appearing self-evident, unexplainable and unchangeable) along with mythologization. (Benjamin, 1996, pp. 201–7). It remains contentious to what extent Rødding Højskole was in fact “Grundtvigian in spirit,” or whether its nationalist agenda and the dominance of natural scientific subjects over humanistic bore witness to the contrary. See the debate between Grell (1998) and Lyby (1999). I hereby presume the concept “solidarity” to be applicable not only to socialist/ leftist movements. Solidarity may take different forms: Apart from differences related to the role of the state, collective pathos, enforcement and integration may pursue various kinds of logics. 1 It is worth noting that Marx himself took a positive view on producers’ cooperatives, describing them as “transition[al] forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one” (Marx, 1976, pp. 571f). 2 This movement took off in the 1880s as a response to a crisis over the grain export, as grains from the US and Ukraine began to flood European markets: The Danish farmer class began to organize cooperative dairies, slaughterhouses etc., organized on a “one-farmer, one-vote” basis, to stave off the crisis—and it worked. This paper does not analyze the development of this movement, as the interest lies entirely on cooperativism in the urban working class. However, it is necessary to keep in mind that worker cooperativism emerged, as it were, in the shadow of the earlier self-organizing efforts of the farmer class, who had already by the 1890s constructed a powerful civil society of their own, with both socioeconomic (cooperatives), cultural (Folk high schools), and political associations (not least the political party Venstre, which led the battle for parliamentarism against the conservative Højre, the party of the gentry and urban elites). 3 Bateson (1935) developed the concept of schismogenesis, but he did not observe or thematize its opposite, for which reason we coin the concept of synthogenesis, from the Greek prefix used in words like synthesis. 1 The analyses and empirical material presented in this chapter are based on earlier work (see Jessen, 2018, 2019). All translations from Danish are, unless otherwise stated, the author’s own. 2 There is no doubt that Hegel and Foucault are very different thinkers, and the point here is not to make a theoretical synthesis of the two. However, they do share a critique of the liberal conception of civil society. For a more detailed discussion of Hegel and Foucault and their conceptions of civil society, see Jessen, 2020. 3 As mentioned, the analyses and empirical material presented here are based on earlier work; see Jessen, 2018, 2019. All translations from Danish are, unless otherwise stated, the author’s own. 4 The center-right government consisted of the liberal Venstre, the Conservatives, and the libertarian Liberal Alliance. 5 The Social Democratic government taking over in June 2019 has stated the ambition of a Nærhedsreform (proximity- or closeness reform), that is also meant to be a reform of public sector bureaucracy. 6 This government consisted of Venstre and the Conservatives. This government was ousted in favor of a Social Democratic-led government from 2011–15. The focus here is on the center-right governments’ use of civil society, because they pushed the civil society agenda harder in this period, published two civil society strategies, and saw civil society as central in the Cohesion Reform. 1 To be sure, Lichterman and Eliasoph do not claim that there are only seven styles; they underline the value of searching for more recurrent patterns of style (p. 802). 2 However, this is not an exhaustive toolset, and researchers do not need to invoke each of these devices in every instance of investigating how actors coordinate interaction. 3 For example, much network analysis work; for a critique, see Emirbayer & Goodwin, 1994. 4 For example, Lévi-Strauss, 1963. 5 For example, White, Boorman & Breiger, 1976.