CHAPTER 5
Communicative Institutions:
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
C
IVIL SOCIETY IS defined by a particular kind of social relationship,
one that has to do with universalistic solidarity. In a complex, farflung,
and relatively anonymous social order, this historically unusual
kind of relationship can be widely accessible only if it is articulated
symbolically, as a generalized language that can be spoken by many different
kinds of people. Hence the importance of the discourse of civil society, the
language of binary oppositions I have just described. At the same time,
however, these collective representations of an imagined community can
and must be articulated in more specific and mundane ways. Members of
civil society act not only within a cultural environment but within an
institutional one.
In comparison with generalized symbolic patterns, institutions focus on
goals and norms, rewards and sanctions; in a word, they constitute social
organization. Social organization operates inside of a cultural milieu: An
institution can think only inside of the categories that culture provides.! At
the same time, organizations are as strongly oriented by pragmatic as by ideal
concerns. The actions that unfold inside organizations are much more specific
and contingent than the generalized categories of culture. As a result,
although the structures and activities of institutions are oriented by the
discourse of civil society, they cannot be determined by them.
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
The institutions of civil society crystallize ideals about solidarity with
and against others in specific terms. They transform general conceptions
about the purity and impurity of motives and relations into specific, normative,
sometimes sanctioned, one-time-only social relationships. They articulate
specific claims and binding demands for inclusion and exclusion, for
liberation and for repression. In so doing, they issue orders, arrange bargains,
make exchanges, produce statements, create interpretations, offer rewards,
threaten and often confer punishments. The institutions ofcivil society make
it possible for the pure and impure criteria of civil society to permeate the
other, noncivil spheres of social life. Civil institutions intrude into noncivil
institutions and groups; they are continuously restructuring them and being
restructured by them in turn.
Institutions such as law, office, party organization, and "free and fair"
elections articulate solidarity in concrete and specific ways, not only through
the definitions ofmoral behavior they project but by sanctions and rewards.
These form what I call the regulatory institutions of civil society, and we
will discuss them in chapters 6 and 7 below. These more "material" forms,
however, by no means exhaust the organizational structures of the solidary
sphere. The inclusive and exclusive relationships established by civil society
are articulated by communicative institutions as well. It is important to lay
out their structure and process before we move on to consider civil institutions
of a more regulative kind.
From the cultural and symbolic lifeworld ofcivil society, intuitive criteria
are created that shape behavior in more organized and formal domains. Civil
society in this sense should be understood not merely in terms ofcontrasting
symbolic categories but as structures of feeling, the diffusely sensed obligations
and rights that represent, and are at the same time evoked by, contrasting
solidary ties. Collective representations of such social relationships are
broadcast by civil society institutions specializing in communicative, not
regulative tasks-by the mass media, public opinion polls, and voluntary
organizations. The structures of feeling that such institutions produce must
be conceptualized as influence rather than authoritative control, or power
in a more structural sense. They institutionalize civil society by creating
messages that translate general codes into situationally specific evaluations
and descriptions.2 Before we analyze these organizations ofinfluence, however,
we must discuss the lifeworld of public opinion which anchors communicative
and regulative institutions alike.
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
The Public and Its Opinion
There is an intuitive, phenomenological sense of civil society. This structure
of feeling, which is at the same time a feeling of structure, is evoked and
objectified by the notion of "the public." In the minds of most democratic
theorists, it seems, the notion of the public points to the existence of an
actual group, to actual deliberations, and to an actual place. According to
this concrete notion of the public, members of a closely knit polity meet
with one another in the same physical environment, vigorously debating
the events that affect their lives. Inspired by the ancient Greek polis, Arendt
insisted on the importance of such a concrete understanding-on "being
seen and being heard by others"-in her republican analyses ofdemocracy.3
Influenced by Arendt and the classical aspects of the socialist tradition, the
early Habermas also laid heavy emphasis on the public as a concrete space.4
In his normatively informed historical reconstruction, Habermas claimed
that the republican inclinations ofthe bourgeoisie first emerged in opposition
to the private and hidden activities of the king's private household in patrimonial
absolutist regimes. This bourgeois preference for open, transparent,
and public relationships culminated in the conversation-filled coffeehouses
and salons ofthe eighteenth-century British and French commercial centers.
According to Habermas, it was in these public houses that the emerging
middle classes debated plans for democracy in a straightforward, rational
manner.
This republican equation of public with face-to-face interaction has
extended well beyond the normative and Marxist traditions. Max Weber,
in his neglected essay on the critical significance of the Western city, and
other observers of early modern Europe as well,S have drawn attention to
the manner in which the Renaissance city-states sustained remarkably high
degrees of concrete public life, constructing open places for political discussion
that objectified and focused the postmedieval experiences of expanded
solidarity. Meetings of the aroused publics of these city-states not only
exposed official corruption but allowed demands for greater economic
equality to gain normative legitimation for the first time. The preference
for thinking of publicness in concrete, face-to-face terms extends, in fact,
well beyond the rationalist tradition of Enlightenment thought. Walzer and
Mayhew, for example, have argued for the religious origins of the early
modern public, demonstrating how the dualistic, dialogic nature ofProtes-
71
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
tant religiosity and the egalitarianism of its sect organization opposed the
secrecy and hierarchy of medieval life.6
As my earlier analyses of symbolically articulated solidarity indicate,
however, the civil spheres oflarge, differentiated, and plural societies can no
longer be understood in such concrete terms.7
This does not mean that the
traditional idea ofthe public no longer plays a role in contemporary societies,
but that it now assumes a symbolic rather than concrete form. The symbolic
representation of traditional public functions is a regulating idea, one that
carries with it an obvious force. But it is not the concrete public as a faceto-face
association that is fundamental to contemporary civil societies. It is
the idea of that public as it has inserted itself into social subjectivity as a
structure offeeling. In order to gain influence, actors must speak the language
that makes the democratic public into a regulative ideaLB The normative
reference of the public sphere is a cultural structure, the discourse of civil
society.
It is as "public opinion" that public space has its most fundamental
repercussions in the present day. Tocqueville insisted that it is the peculiar
force of public opinion vis-a-vis the political sphere-not the force of the
concrete public composed of face-to-face associations-that distinguishes
democratic from authoritarian rule. In a democracy, he wrote, "public opinion
is in effect the dominant power." It is because this"guiding power," for
example, "asserts itself through elections and decrees" that "in exercising
executive power, the President of the United States is subject to constant
and jealous scrutiny."9
Public opinion articulates the cultural structure of civil society, defining
democratic and antidemocratic opinions, publics, representative figures, and
regulative institutions. Such binary structuring marks the history ofpolitical
thinking about the role that public opinion can play. Theorists ambivalent
about democracy have conceived the public's opinion in both ways, as
gullible and easily swayed, irrational and emotional, and as constituting the
potential for tyranny, even as, at the same time, they have found inside
public opinion a deep reflection of the rationality, individuality, and independence
that marks democratic life. In The American Commonwealth, James
Bryce recognized in public opinion a "din ofvoices" that "talks incessantly"
and "complains," has an "inability to recognize facts," an "incapacity to
imagine a future," and is "swayed only by such obvious reasons as it needs
little reflection to follow." He claimed to observe that, "quick and strenuous
72
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
in great matters" and "heedless in small matters," public opinion has "dulled
the sense ofresponsibility among the leaders in political life" and "is a danger
to the people themselves." In the next breath, Bryce asserts that "public
opinion is a sort of atmosphere, fresh, keen, and full of sunlight [that] kills
many of those noxious germs which are hatched where politicians congregate."
He continues that "selfishness, injustice, cruelty, tricks ... ofall sorts
shun the light," that "to expose them is to defeat them," that "it is the
existence ofsuch a public opinion as this, the practice offreely and constantly
reading, talking, and judging of public affairs ... that gives to popular government
that educated and stimulative power which is so frequently claimed
as its highest merit."l0 Though Tocqueville preferred democratic opinion to
the particularism of aristocracy, he also spoke darkly ofthe potential tyranny
ofthe majority as the unforeseen product ofthe influence ofpublic opinion.
Emphasizing the binary of dependence-independence, he complained "I
know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and
true freedom of discussion than in America."l1 More optimistic democratic
thinking, by contrast, grants to public opinion the civil qualities that democracy
requires. In his idealistic celebration of the public opinion poll,
published in 1940, George Gallup evoked the central category of truth.
"Public opinion listens to many propagandas, most of them contradictory,"
he writes, insisting that in the clash and conflict of argument and debate
public opinion tries "to separate the true from the false."
Public opinion is critical, not submissive; experimental, not dogmatic;
and oriented to the individual, not the mass. It needs criticism
for its very existence, and through criticism it is constantly being
modified and molded. It acts and learns by action. Its truths are
relative and contingent.... Its chief faith is a faith in experiment. It
believes in the value of every individual's contribution to political
life, and in the right of ordinary human beings to have voice in
deciding their fate. Public opinion, in this sense, is the pulse of
democracy. 12
To the degree that civil society exists, the taken-for-granted, apparently
mundane but enormously important phenomenon of public opinion
emerges. To refer to public opinion is to indicate, to invoke, and to represent
the pure and impure ideas, feelings, and evaluations that members ofsociety
73
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
hold about one another. Commenting upon the ongoing, unpredictable,
and seemingly unstructured events and figures of social life, public opinion
consists of factual accounts, emotional responses, and moral evaluations of
their extent and effect. Tocqueville saw this clearly, but he limited the
phenomenon to American political life. Marx did not see this at all, and
Weber was unable to give to public opinion a theoretical place in his
descriptions of modern life. By contrast, Durkheim insisted on the omnipresence
of opinion, though he ascribed it to the influence of "society" and
identified it with the "collective consciousness" rather than with the civil
sphere and democratic life.13 Gabriel de Tarde, similarly affected by the
effervescence of the new Third Republic in France, also emphasized the
centrality of opinion, relating it the dynamics of fashion, the currents of
conversation, and the institutions of newspapers, all clearly associated with
the communicative domain.14
American social thinkers in the early twentieth century, such as Walter
Lippmann and John Dewey, also recognized the centrality and independent
power of public opinion, but too often their deeply republican normative
suspicions and their insufficiently developed social theories made them believe
this independence to be on the wane.IS Since these early formulations,
and indeed in part because of them, the social scientific discourse about
public opinion has been reduced to quantitative surveys of individual attitudes.
Public opinion is rarely seen as a highly significant macrosociological
topic in its own right. The tradition of Thrasymachus makes it hard to see
this kind of invisible source of influence; only the visible exercise of power
is given free reign.16
Within the constraining yet at the same time nubile structures ofpublic
feeling there flows the economic divisions, ethnic segments, and ideological
polarities that fragment democratic social life. Groups with diverse power,
interests, and capital of various kinds produce and compel sharply differing
views of one another. It has been the stock-in-trade of social scientists to
demonstrate that public opinion depends upon-in technical terms, "varies
in relationship with"-more particularistic groups and concrete structural
processes, such as class formations, ethnic and regional groupings, education,
race, and mobility rates. Even in segmented and multicultural societies,
however, there remains an element of public opinion that orients itself to
the society qua collectivity, to an audience of citizens and to institutional
actors only insofar as they are members thereof To elaborate this proposition
74
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
in theoretical and empirical detail is, indeed, one of the main ambitions of
this book.
Members of different and conflicting groups certainly have their own
opinions about many things, but it is only their "public" opinions that make
these ideas evident. If they are to have broader influence, these opinions
have to be couched in terms of the regulatory idea that a broader society
exists, both as a normative and a real audience, outside of their particular
groups. Publicly broadcast opinions may be expansive or restrictive in their
attribution of the capacity to engage in the discourse of liberty; they may
appeal to the public fact of civil solidarity in order to demonize significant
segments within it and reduce the civil community's size. In either case, the
social role of public opinion is pretty much the same: it mediates between
the broad binaries of civil society discourse and the institutional domains of
social life. Public opinion is the sea within which we swim, the structure
that gives us the feeling of democratic life.
The Mass Media
The media of mass communications-radio, television, newspapers, the
Internet, magazines, best-selling books, and movies-constitute one fundamentally
significant articulation of the imagined and idealized civil domain.
In both fictional and factual forms they create the characters that
people civil society and establish what might be called its communicative
boundaries with noncivil domains.
Fictional Media
The symbolic forms offictional media weave the binary codes ofcivil society
into broad narratives and popular genres. They provide a continuous flow
ofrepresentations about ongoing social events and actors. Yet in comparison
with factual media, such fictional forms operate at a temporal remove from
these other representations of daily life. What they gain in return is a much
greater cathartic impact on the self-understandings of civil society, on the
structures of feeling that define its identity as a civil place. Though their
avowed purpose is entertainment, not enlightenment, this very distinction
75
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
ignores the necessarily aesthetic framing of rational acts.17 Fictional media
create long-lasting frames for democratizing and anticivil processes alike.
They constrain action by constituting a teleology for future events, even as
they seem merely to be telling stories about people and life in an ahistorical
and fictional way.
Expressive media stipulate events and figures that are relevant to members
of civil society. Drawing on the repertoire of dichotomous categories, their
plots make these events and characters "typical," placing them into revealing
and easily interpretable situations that represent civil and uncivil motives and
relations. Insofar as television, movies, and popular fiction depict action in
particular social spheres, they do so by communicating an image of these
actions-sometimes idealized, sometimes extremely harsh-in relation to
the standards for participation in civil society, and they broadcast these
narratives to some of the individuals and groups that compose society at
large.18
Historically, it has been the media of high culture that have played this
aesthetic-educative role. It was through the narrative structures ofits fiction,
in the works ofwriters like Balzac and Flaubert, and not only through their
own actual life experiences, that educated members ofFrench society came
to form an understanding of the harsh class relations and cruel authoritarianism
that distorted French institutions, both civil and uncivil, in
nineteenth-century industrial society. It was through Dickens's extravagant
and wildly popular novels that the English middle classes were not only
informed about the crushing poverty of early capitalism but were taught to
sympathize with the plight of the poor and to support sentimental social
reform. The structures ofthese and other popular narratives, including those
by such influential, socially oriented women novelists as Jane Austin, have
often been called realistic, and their observational detail and down-to-earth
qualities certainly made them seem so at the time. In retrospect, however,
we can see that they were decidedly melodramatic and moralistic in their
representations. The social forces responsible for restrictions on participation,
differences of wealth, and cultural prejudices were explained by narratives
that constructed and punished selfish, greedy, and irrational antagonists. In
so doing, the novels mobilized public opinion against polluting threats to
the ideals of civil society.19 In her enormously influential novel, Uncle TOm ~
Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe represented race relations to antebellum
Americans in exactly the same melodramatic and empathy-provoking way.
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
Her narrative greatly affected public opinion. "Less than a year after its
publication in March 1852," writes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "more
than three hundred thousand copies of the novel had sold in the United
States, a sales rate rivaled only by the Bible." Beecher's novel stimulated the
formation of antislavery civil associations and social movements. Frederick
Douglass, the abolitionist leader, described it as a "flash" that lit "a million
camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery." In this cultural but
very real manner, this fictional reconstruction helped to trigger the Civil
War, and thus to abolish the slave relationships that so severely undermined
the civil pretensions ofAmerican society.20
Such sociological students ofliterature as George Lukacs, Leo Lowenthal,
and Ian Watt have argued that novels like these merely reflected actual social
life. Nineteenth-century novels were realistic, or moralistic, because they
depicted the nature of capitalist society, its class domination, patriarchy,
poverty, and racism. Such a perspective, however, ignores the existence of
civil society as a differentiated social sphere. Iffictional writers were indeed
deeply affected by the deprivations of economic, racial, and familial life,
they were responding not only to actual situations outside ofthemselves but
to their own inner desires, as members ofthe civil sphere, to speak on behalf
of oppressed groups to society at large. Through their fictional work, in
other words, they gave voice to the idealized aspirations of civil society
itself As Peter Brooks writes in Realist Visions, "The discovery of the ugly
is part ofthe process ofdisillusioning in which realism deals," with the result
that "realism as the ugly stands close to realism as the shocking, that which
transgresses the bounds of the acceptable." This exploration of the aesthetically
profane fuels the nineteenth-century novel's broader social and moral
ambitions.
England develops a recognizable "industrial novel," one that takes
on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has
its "roman social" ... Balzac and Zola, for instance, both write their
principle works following a revolution that ... confronts them with
the stark question: To whom does France belong?21
Elizabeth Long studied the fictional heroes that peopled post-World War II
American best-sellers.22 She found that these collective representations reflected
not only the economic strains in American society, but also broad
77
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
cultural themes of individual achievement and independence. In the 1960s,
she found, these characterizations gave way to heroes who experienced
anguish about this very individualism and who wanted to live in a more
collective and socially involved way. These representations contributed to
the turn toward more activistic and critical interpretations of American
culture at a time when the boundaries ofcivil society were being aggressively
challenged as unfairly restrictive.
Until recently, scholarly attention remained focused on such high culture.
To understand the expressive media ofcontemporary civil society, however,
one must see that popular folklore and folk dramas have always performed
similar kinds of sentimental education for the less educated members of
society. In the postmodern era of television and digital communication, in
fact, the long-standing relation between high and low culture has been
inverted. Mass entertainment has increasingly displaced high culture as the
principal medium of expressive communication for members of contemporary
civil societies, a fact that postmodern concerns with "mediatization"
have identified but understood in an overly critical way.23
The racially bifurcated civil society of America in the 1950S was symbolized,
and reinforced, by such family television dramas as the Ozzie and
Harriet Show, which represented the idealized qualities ofAmerican civil life
in the dramas ofwhite families only. At the same time, such satiric comedies
as Amos and Andy represented African-Americans in polluted terms that
implicitly justified their exclusion from the civil sphere. During this same
period, the violent colonization of the native peoples of North America,
which had created the grossly unequal relations between white European
settlers and American Indians, was represented by the Western genre. Because
these plots largely associated Indians with violence and cunning and
allowed civility to be represented primarily by white settlers, they implicitly
justified the exclusion ofIndians, their subjugation, and even their murder
by representatives of white civil society. As Americans experienced the
shocks of the 1960s and 1970s, the conflicts between movements for liberation
and the repressive backlash movements against a more inclusive society
found their symbolic expression, and explanation, in such popular evening
sitcoms as the All in the Family, which depicted the conflict between a
conservative and prejudiced white working-class male and his long-haired,
rebellious, but ultimately sympathetic son. During the years of the highly
polarizing Vietnam War, anticolonial and antiwar sentiments were broadcast
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
not only through rational arguments and social movements, but through
such expressive and popular television entertainments as M.A.S.H., which
featured the cynical portrayal of Army physicians in the Korean War and
interpreted American military intervention in comedic and often critical
terms.
Americans experienced the protagonists and antagonists ofsuch televised
dramas as personal acquaintances. Iconographic symbols of collective sentiments,
they became part of everyday speech in those turbulent years. Such
representations communicated in direct and emotionally powerful ways,
allowing Americans to express their civil judgments in figurative rather than
intellectual language, which made it easier, in turn, to identify with one or
another solidary group. When the patriarchal distortions of American civil
life were being challenged in the 197os, the Mary Tyler Moore Show provided
an attractive, widely influential representation of the new woman in the
form of the comedy's doughty, resilient, anxious but always independent
and competent heroine. Thirty years later, when the incorporation of
women had deepened, the stars of Sex and the City celebrated a female
version of civil society in which personal autonomy and moral obligations
were continuously recombined. New understandings of gay and lesbian
Americans were symbolically configured through increasingly insistent and
normalizing fictional reconstructions of their civil competence. Sometimes
these were assimilative and normalizing, as in Will and Grace, but often, as
in Queer EyeJor the Straight Guy, they were multicultural and pluralistic.24
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, and its transforming effects
on the class structure ofthe African-American community, The Cosby Show
emerged as the dominant American entertainment program of the 1980s.
Sympathetically interpreting the greatly expanded black middle and professional
class to white Americans, this televised entertainment can be seen as
critical to the civil reconstruction of a group that had earlier been seen in
almost entirely repressive terms. For the first time, an African-American
adult male was represented as the warm, wise, loving, intelligent, and highly
successful breadwinner of a "normal American family." The contrast to the
restrictive racial representations ofthe family broadcast by Ozzie and Harriet
three decades earlier could not have been more evident. During the same
decade, Alex Haley's television miniseries, Roots, watched by record audiences
in 1977 and rebroadcast several times since, performed a similar civilaesthetic
function. Reconstructing black Americans as rooted rather than
79
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
rootless, as resistant victims of oppression fiercely committed to selfimprovement
and worldly success, the drama allowed white ethnic Americans
to experience a new solidarity with their black contemporaries.
25
Two
decades after Cosby, the Latino family comedy George Lopez became the
longest-running series with a Hispanic cast in television history. Interviewed
by the Daily News about the show's success, the actress who played the main
character's wife suggested that "people just see us as people" and "funny is
funny. "26 In the midst of this new interracial climate, the Western genre
pitting cowboys against Indians virtually disappeared. Its themes of violent
race-based conflict and civilizational vulnerability were displaced into battles
between democratic Americans, or earthlings, and threatening invaders from
imperial, anticivil empires located somewhere in outer space.
27
Factual Media
In contrast to this fictive manner, the news side ofthe mass media articulates
public opinion and specifies the solidarities of civil society in a less visibly
constructivist and much more immediately influential manner. For most
members ofcivil society, and even for members ofits institutional elites, the
news is the only source of firsthand experience they will ever have about
their follow citizens, about their motives for acting the way they do, the
kinds of relationships they form, and the nature of the institutions they
might potentially create. The factual as compared with fictional status ofthe
news media makes them more significant in affecting immediate social
decisions, from the formation of social movements to affairs of state. The
reputation of news media-their very ability to represent the public to
itself-depends on the belief by their audiences that they are merely reporting
on the social world, not constructing it, that they are describing the
social world factually, in an objective manner, rather than representing it in
artistic or moral terms. In creating the world of society immediately and
without remove, news draws upon what the French film theorist Andre
Bazin called the ontology of realism.28
Emphasizing speed, accuracy, and
neutrality, news presents itself as homologous with the real world, as the
New York Times' slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print," so vividly
suggests.
Yet every news judgment remains an interpretation of significance, one
80
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
that is achieved by typifYing previously unrecognized events in discursive
categories that are already understood.29
News media select a tiny range of
sites from the enormous onrush of people and events that characterizes
everyday social life. Merely by informing members of society about what
events "exist," they have already made decisions about which events matter,
about what is happening and what is at stake in social life. In their very
representation ofsocial facts, in other words, the news media represent public
opinion as weIpa In answering their famous four questions-"who, what,
where, and why"-the lead paragraphs of news reports characterize the
people who make these events, why they acted in the way they have, and
what effect their actions will have on the structure ofsociety. Do these newly
observed actors deserve to be inside or outside of civil society? Do they
threaten "us"-the news audience-in a manner that suggests we should
mobilize against them, or do· they allow us to feel good about ourselves, so
much so that we might wish to reach out and lend them a helping hand?
The role of binary oppositions is critical here. Contrasts between purifYing
and polluting motives, relations, and institutions permeate news accounts,
linking the presuppositions of civil society to the seemingly random outpouring
of social events. Sensationalist, yellow journalism presents overtly
exaggerated judgments, emphasizing the negative and frightening figures
and events ofsocial life. It would be a mistake, however, to think that more
professional and sophisticated journalism fails to adhere to the structured
pathways of civil society discourse as well.
From the structured and generalized categories of civil society discourse
to the diffuse but more historically and socially directed phenomenon of
public opinion to the institutions ofnews, there stretches a continuum from
synchronic to diachronic, from structure to process, from inflexible to flexible,
from general to specific, and from unresponsive to flexible. Even in
regard to an ongoing event, news media may shift in their interpretations,
moving from civil to uncivil framing devices from one week to the next,
from one day to another, even from hour to hour.3
! These discursive constructions
create reactions in civil society itself They can trigger violent
actions, or the formation of social movements. They can reach deep into
the inner workings of noncivil spheres and prepare the path for reconstructive
repair. Media interpretations can roll back and make more restrictive
the solidarities of civil society in turn.
Because they control such vital interpretive tasks, the factually oriented
81
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
institutions of mass communication, more than the fictional ones, create
chronic tensions between the utopian aspirations and relationships of civil
society and the powers and authorities outside the civil sphere. When they
apply polluting categories to an event or actor, news reports create public
relations problems for "sectarian" religious institutions, "abusive" family
relationships, "secretive" or "greedy" corporations, "elitist" scientific institutions,
and the "partisan" or "manipulative" actors of political life. To
broadcast news reports that construct groups and institutions in such profane
terms is to problematize their relation to civil society.32 Even the occasional
news report, or expose, can lead to a torrent ofpublic demands for internal
reforms. Once the reforms are made, factual media often monitor the affected
institutions to make sure that their reconstructed relationships remain
congruent with the idealized standards of civil society.
The argument over whether news media first emerged from the bourgeois
sphere, from private economic life, during the early days of capitalist
society is controversial and important precisely because it calls into question
the very capacity of such communicative media to create tension between
civil and noncivil spheres. If news originated merely as a means to promote
commerce, how could it function as anything other than a commodity,
particularly inside the advertising-saturated milieu that marks television and
print news today? Habermas may be the best-known critical theorist to have
tried this strategy of genealogical deflation, but he is by no means the only
influential voice who has taken aim at the news media in this way. From
Karl Marx to C. Wright Mills and Pierre Bourdieu, social scientists have
proclaimed that the news media cannot be factual, that they cannot obtain
the relative autonomy from market demands that would allow this potentially
critical interpretive medium to sustain the moral autonomy ofthe civil
sphere.33
In fact, however, news media first emerged as a means to advance not
only economic claims but political, religious, and ethnic ones.34 As early
modern societies began to cohere in wider and more inclusive communities,
moreover, public declarations about the factual nature of social life did, in
fact, come to have much greater effect. As diverse and competing publicsplebian,
Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, immigrant, black, socialist, and conservative-formed
to contest particularistic and restrictive forms of social
control, they created more independent news media in turn.
Far from being a threat to the civil and solidarizing function of the
82
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
media, bourgeois commercialization actually encouraged it. News media
that could sustain themselves in their own terms, by their own sales, were
more independent of particularistic publics. Such financially independent
media allowed the members of civil society, who were also members of
these particular groups, to participate vicariously in an anonymous civil
collectivity and, at the same time, to articulate their individual wills as
consumers. So the creation of increasingly large commercial markets for
news from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries actually
pushed the process of media differentiation further along.35 The project of
professionalizing journalism did so as well. Without market sales and mass
advertising, independent media would have had to continue to depend on
private individual wealth or on the financial resources ofsuch particularistic
noncivil spheres as churches, trade unions, and political parties. The emergence
ofprofessional norms of objectivity, while in no sense eliminating the
journalist's interpretive function, relegated the more dogmatic and explicit
political opinions of private media owners to the editorial page.36
To the degree that civil society becomes independent, which marks the
degree to which there is a democratic social life, the audience for media of
mass communication, whether fictional or factual, becomes the broad "society"
rather than particular interests within it.37 This more inclusive social
reference depends, in turn, on the institutional differentiation ofmass media
organizations. This involves, on the one hand, impersonal markets for information
and fictional forms, which allow communication to be acquired
via negotiated exchanges among buyers and sellers rather than through more
personalized and clientalist relations that involve political and ethnic loyalty,
class relationships, or ideological control. Differentiation also depends on the
emergence of professionalized occupational ethics emphasizing objectivity
and creative autonomy. Such ethics, along with self-regulating guilds, allow
producers, writers, directors, and reporters more freedom to offer flexible
interpretations responsive to shifting events. They can focus simply on "what
is real and accurate" and "what will seem believable and dramatic" rather
than on more dogmatic interpretations that merely authenticate loyalties to
particular groups and particular institutional spheres. As the messages they
formulate relate to society at large, they become more truly media of persuasion
and less masked instruments for hegemony and domination. To the
degree that this occurs, fewer groups and categories of person are polluted
by the categories that justifY exclusion from civil society.38
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
Even in this more differentiated and civil situation, however, dichotomous
evaluations of persons and events continue to be made, for pollution
and purification are structural features of civil society as such. Even when
media take society as their reference, their understandings of it are subtly
fused with particularistic ideas and influenced by pressures from other
spheres. Political parties, social classes, economic exigencies, religious faith,
ethnic and racial animosities, gender and sexual groupings-these and other
fissures continue to segment even the most differentiated civil societies.
Institutions of mass communication crystallize the stereotypes and misunderstandings
such fragmentation implies, even when they idealize some
social event or institution in civil societal terms. The very differentiation of
media, moreover, makes them the focus of continuous efforts at manipulation
by elites in other spheres. Their independence makes them vulnerable
to "public relations," to staged events, and to more direct forms of corruption
like bribes. For in the mass markets for influence and symbolic capital,
media are not only sellers but buyers at the same time.
Already in 1835 Tocqueville could discern the intrinsic connection between
newspapers and the independent public opinion upon which democracy
depends. The press, "lays bare the secret springs of politics and
obliges public men to appear before the court of public opinion." It is
"through the press that the parties speak to one another without meeting
face-to-face and understand one another without direct contact." While an
"individual newspaper has little power," the power ofthe press "in general"
is "second only to that of the people. "39 Critics of the media have always
insisted, to the contrary, that their independence gives newspapers and
television license to violate civil norms, to misrepresent, to distort, to pander,
and to stereotype. Not long after Tocqueville's defense of their civil status,
for example, a Virginian congressman objected strenuously to the role played
by Northern newspapers in promoting the antislavery cause, associating
media effects with antidemocratic passions and violence. "Newspapers, pamphlets,
tracts, and pictures," he complained, were"calculated, in an eminent
degree, to rouse and inflame the passions of the slaves against their masters,
to urge them on to deeds of death, and to involve them all in the horrors
of a servile war."40 In response to such efforts at pollution, journalists have
identified their professional autonomy with the positive attributes of civil
discourse, emphasizing the truthfulness oftheir reporting and its promotion
ofrational thought and independent action. In 173 I, when Benjamin FrankPublic
Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
lin was attacked for printing what was considered an offensive advertisement,
he published an "Apology for Printers" that made the case in precisely these
terms.
Printers are educated in the Belief that when men differ in Opinion,
both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by
the publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former
is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they cheerfully serve all
contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which
side they are of the Question in Dispute.41
Public Opinion Polls
Public opinion as an active social force is a relatively recent phenomenon in
human societies, as are the media of mass communication that inform the
public about the "facts" ofsocial life. Public opinion polling is a more recent
institution still. More directly and explicitly than the media, polls define the
contours of the public even as they take the measure of "its" opinion.
Perhaps because polls are so ubiquitous in contemporary life, their broad
theoretical relevance has rarely been conceptualized; when they have been
subjected to attention, their communicative role has scarcely been appreciated.
By aggregating individual opinion into a group form, polls give objectivity
to "public" opinion. In making it visible and numerical, they also
make it constraining, allowing this ephemeral, materially invisible cultural
phenomenon to become a much more specific, politically more powerful
communicative force. Publicized polls provide "hard data" about the lifeworld
ofthe civil sphere, allowing it to be construed independently ofother
exigencies and institutions. Polls represent this lifeworld as friled with reflection,
as based on the responses of independent and thoughtful people.
The very process of polling attributes to its interviewees rationality and
sincerity, converting the members of civil society from a passive, voiceless,
and potentially manipulable "mass" into a collective actor with a voice and
intelligence of its own.42
In 1940, George Gallup published an intellectually ambitious defense of
polling, a few years after his own polling institutions had surfaced as a major
factor in America's national political life. Gallop addressed "the various
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
questions and criticisms" that had been generated by this "new instrument,"
for example the claim that it undermined democracy by making the public
appear "stupid and unreliable."43 Gallup replie'd by linking the new technique
to the liberating rather than the repressive side of civil discourse. The
method of random sampling, he suggested, provides a set of "factual observations"
that are more "realistic" than the merely subjective claims about
public opinion projected by this or that activist group.44 What endangers
public opinion is the possibility that it can be "controlled."45 "One can
never be sure that the letter, telegram, or petition avalanche is the product
of a genuine protest, or merely the organized effort of a small but powerful
pressure group parading as a majority."46 The issue of outside pressure acknowledges
that anticivil motives and relations can pollute the play ofcommunicative
institutions. "When aggressive minorities are On the march,"
Gallup asks, "how is the Congressman to decide where the truth-or where
the greater truth-lies, especially when, as so often happens, the minority
represents itself as the majority?"47 This danger can be addressed, Gallup
argues, only by scientific polling. It purifies public opinion by supplying
truthful information to the people's representatives: "The sampling referendum
offers a gauge of strength for the claims and counterclaims which
reach the American legislator."48 This "new instrument" can "bridge the
gap between the people and those who are responsible for making decisions
in their name," he wrote.49 "The public-opinion polls provide a swift and
efficient method by which legislators, educators experts, and editors, as well
as ordinary citizens throughout the length and breadth of the country, can
have a more reliable measure of the pulse of democracy."5D
In his second book, a decade later, Gallup once again responded to critics
who tried to frame polls in an anticivil way. Acknowledging that a "good
many" of those polled were "ignorant and uninformed"-character traits
that would suggest the necessity of antidemocratic institutions-Gallup argues
that these weaknesses can be overcome by random sampling. Polls
reveal that a majority "usually registers sounds judgment on issues." Polling
is legitimate because "democracy ... requires merely that the sum total of
individual views add up to something that makes sense."51 Polls allow the
collectivity to achieve rationality even when individuals are not rational
themselves.
In reality, of course, polls not only reveal but construct "the public's"
shifting attitudes toward the continuous, fragmented, and difficult-to-
86
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
interpret flow of ongoing social events. Their forced choice questions organize
the public's opinion in a maimer that makes it seem homologous
with, and therefore responsive to, the binary codes ofcivil society. Do whites
think that African-Americans are lazier than whites? More inclined than
whites to steal and to engage in violence, often of a sexual kind? Are Jewish
Americans loyal to their country? Are Communists? Is the president trustworthy
or faithless, deceitful or honest? Is he his own man or likely to rely
on the judgments of others? Clearly these are as much simplifYing constructions
of public opinion as measurements of it; they simultaneously mirror
and apply the pure and impure categories that the discourse of civil society
provides.
It is precisely this circularity that makes polls so fundamentally important
to the independence and self-understanding of civil society. It is also what
allows them to exercise such a diffuse but often decisive form of communicative
control over economic, political, and even cultural spheres. During
the two-year Watergate crisis in American society, an upheaval that decided
the fate of so many powerful individuals, institutions, and elites, decisions
about the precise wording of poll questions triggered large-scale political
effects.52 If it was not literally true that "the public," as revealed through
public opinion polling, ruled during this crisis, it is certainly true that other,
more traditional collective actors could exert their force only by presenting
themselves as acting in the public's name. Political parties, lobbying groups,
institutional elites, and powerful individuals could appeal for theirjust deserts
only ifthey evoked the public's opinionY When public response registered
in small but fateful numerical shifts in the polls, seismic changes in state
institutions would follow.
Insofar as the news media themselves rely increasingly On polls to report
on public opinion, polls become an even more powerful, doubly objectifYing
social force. There develops a kind of sub-rosa dialogue, what literary
theorists call intertextuality,54 between these two communicative institutions.
Because pollsters rely upon news-mediated constructions of recent events,
they are formulating questions not about the public's opinion in some openended
sense, but about what the public wants to know about a situation
that has already been communicatively constructed in reference to the binaries
ofthe civil sphere. Polls are asking, in this way, about what the public
wants to know about itself, insofar as this self has already been symbolically
defined by the news. Rather than asking what people know about a situa-
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
tion, polling questions are directed to what people can be expected to know
in the current situation, given the context of opinion as it has developed
already. The questions of pollsters, then, are not neutral or detached, in the
scientific sense of value-neutrality, but typifications, in the phenomenological
sense, based on information that is already known.55 Polling questions
are collective representations that try to extend the horizon of civil ideas,
the structures of feelings that the public have already expressed, to information
and events that have not yet been processed. It is this already familiar
quality of polling questions that ensures the relevance of polling results to
the diffuse and anxious concerns of public opinion more broadly defined.
It also ensures that polling results will be relevant to news media in turn,
that they will be able to examine polls and report back to civil society about
what "it" thinks about itself
In a detailed study ofHong Kong newspapers and polling agencies during
the high-stakes battle between mainland Chinese officials and the island's
British governor general, Christopher Patten, Agnes Ku has documented
such intertextual dynamics in a crisis that seemed to threaten Hong Kong's
very existence as a civil society.56 Drawing upon long-standing codes and
narratives in Hong Kong political culture, leading newspapers tended initially
to portray Patten as an honest democrat, despite his colonial associations,
and China as an oppressive and threatening force. Polling agencies
relied on these constructions and formulated forced choice questions that
"discovered" increasing public support for Patten's demand that China make
promises about ensuring Hong Kong's democratic status after its ties with
Britain ended. However, as the tension between China and Britain
mounted, and its destabilizing implications became more evident, public
anxiety increased. Newspapers reported Chinese accusations that British
demands for democracy were hypocritical, that they merely masked Great
Britain's continuing colonial intent, and China's suggestions that Patten was
determined to proceed no matter what the consequences for Hong Kong's
economic well-being. In the midst ofthese new factual representations from
the mass media, opinion polls began reporting that Patten's sincerity was
being more frequently questioned and that he was being connected much
more frequently than before to the antidemocratic themes of colonialism.
The percentage of "don't knows" on questions about support for Patten's
suggested reforms increased dramatically. This "fact" was immediately highlighted
by leading newspapers, which now began to represent the crisis not
88
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
as a last-ditch effort to protect Hong Kong's emerging democracy but as an
indication that the island's economic' future, and even its long-term social
viability, was now under siege. The result was a gradual if grudging acceptance
of the authority and strategy of the People's Republic of China in the
transition, an authority that was, in fact, fundamentally ambivalent on the
matter of Hong Kong's democratic aspirations.
Because polls are so often taken as crystallizations of the opinion ofcivil
society as a whole-no matter what the actual fault lines created by the civil
sphere's internal stratification-publishing poll numbers constitutes an event
to which democratically elected politicians must offer a response, either in
words or deeds. In democratic societies, the effects of these public representations
happen quickly, primarily because the electoral franchise, which I
will later discuss as a basic regulating institution, allows public opinion to
directly intrude upon the state. In France, in 1991, only six weeks after
assuming office as the nation's first female Prime Minister, the socialist Edith
Cresson confronted a shocking decline in civil support. The International
Herald- Tribune headlined "Cresson Meets Enemy: Public Opinion Polls" on
its front page. Despite her close association with French President Mitterand,
Cresson's initial moves had "fallen flat," constructed in dangerously anticivil
terms. Her maiden speech to parliament had been "tedious and unfocused"
and her economic policy had "alienated" both workers and middle class
professionals. It was no wonder that, according to the subhead, "Only a
Fourth of Electorate Approves Her Performance in First Six Weeks."57
Cresson left office shortly thereafter.
In the summer of 2005, U.S. news media sympathetically broadcast, as
"factual information," the drama of Cindy Sheehan staging an antiwar vigil
outside the Texas White House of President Bush to protest her son's death
in Iraq. The palpable effect of their construction on the American civil
sphere, however, became apparent only with the nation-wide publication
ofopinion polls. The lead story in the Philadelphia Inquirer broadcast "Public's
Support of War Faltering," reporting that support for the war had fallen
from two-thirds to 44 percent in just one year. Large pictures of "average
citizens" with block quotations indicating their skepticism were splashed
artfully across an inside page. "These sentiments are mirrored in the polls,"
the paper assured its readers, providing copious charts and graphs that documented
the public's change of mind. The Inquirer reported as fact the
growing separation between state power and civil sphere: "Bush is losing
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
his domestic battle for hearts and minds." If in a democratic society politicians
are representatives ofthe civil power, they must win not only the heart
but the mind of the public to their side.58
In antidemocratic societies, political officials use their power to prevent
the influence of civil society and its opinions from being separated from the
state. They make polling illegal or, if that is impossible, they repress or
manipulate poll results, or pollute and undermine their claims. For more
than half a century, Mexico had been essentially a one-party state, ruled
by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRJ. As the date approached
for the modern nation's first freely contested Presidential election, in July,
2000, the PRI made it impossible for accurate polling data to be published,
making it more difficult for the civil sphere to be organized against the state.
When pollster Rafael Gimenez's surveys suggested merely that challenger
Vicente Fox was running strongly against the PRI candidate, the government
allowed the results to be published in the newspaper Milenio. In April,
however, when Gimenez's survey found that Fox has taken a surprising lead,
Milenio announced that they had found a new pollster. Gimenez's results
were never published, and he was denounced as either inept or careless, or
as having sold out. When a second pollster did report Mr. Fox in the lead,
PRI officials ridiculed him and publicly criticized his technical abilities. After
a third pollster was blocked, she published her anti-PRI results in the Dallas
Morning News. She later recalled the results, "suddenly my phone went
silent" and "the PRI put out the order to the radio and TV stations: bury
that witch."59 Despite these efforts to block this key communicative institution,
however, Fox won the election. The other communicative institutions,
most notably the newspapers, but also civil associations, were able to
sustain the independence of the civil sphere in a still powerful way.
In the Soviet Union's transition to democracy, the establishment ofpublic
opinion polls also played a fundamental role.60
During Perestroika, the sociologist
Yuri Levada, once a disgraced dissident, was allowed to establish
the All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion on Social and Economic
Issues. In February 1989, the center inserted a full-page questionnaire
on social and political conditions in the Soviet Writer Union's weekly
newsmagazine, the Literary Gazette. The poll triggered an immediate reaction
among Gazette readers, who considered themselves part of the emerging
civil sphere. The magazine received two hundred thousand responses, whose
90
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
aggregated opinions described degradation in a wide range ofdifferent services
and called for fundamental changes in the moral fabric of institutional
life. Because it allowed the public to speak in an apparently authoritative,
scientific, and measurable manner, these results helped legitimate President
Michael Gorbachev in his drive to reform state power.
In the long run, the shock value of this poll had even deeper effects.
Employing some of the central categories of the discourse of civil society,
an associate director ofthe All-Union Center attested that the polling process
served to crystallize the democratic self-image of the Soviet people.
"Through the decades people have never been asked anything," he remarked.
"All of a sudden their opinion is being counted-someone is
seeking their answers." His conclusion was revealing: "They feel this is some
sign of trust toward them, a demonstration of their worth." Polling suggests
trust in the sincerity, honesty, and intelligence of the people, the interviewees.
When public polls are systematically conducted and publicized for the
first time, it is hardly surprising that the members of a nascent civil society
can experience a new sense of worth. Yuri Levada was subsequently interviewed
about the incident, and he emphasized the qualities of active independence
that this communicative institution of civil society brings out.
"Russia was deep in sleep, nothing was happening," Levada remarked.
When the poll results were published, "for the first time we saw that our
people are not only ready to answer a bold question but they actively want
to speak out."61
Even in democratic societies that have institutionalized the regular publication
of opinion polls, the results are often distorted in ways that reflect
the strains of fragmenting forces like class, gender, race, and internal colonialism.
This was illustrated in a particularly dramatic manner in Israel in
the summer of 1989, when Elihu Katz, Hebrew University professor and
newly appointed director ofthe Israel Institute for Applied Social Research,
and Majid Al-Haj, sociology professor from Haifa University, announced
that, for the first time, Israel's Arab citizens would be included in the sample
upon which the monthly Continuing Survey of Israel citizens was based.
The Israeli public's opinion had until then excluded the views ofits subordinated
but legally enfranchised Arab group. According to theJerusalem Post,
when Israeli-Arabs were included, poll results revealed a striking shift in
"Israeli Opinion."
91
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
Taking account of the usually unsolicited voice of Israeli Arabs tilts
nationwide opinion in a "dovish" direction. If a referendum were
held today on the question, "Are you, on the whole, more inclined
towards a solution that favors annexation ofthe territories or towards
a solution that favours yielding the territories," 53% of Israeli Jews
would favor annexation [and] 44% would favor yielding territories
... If the Arab vote is added to this distribution, the dominant
position shifts ... from holding the territories to giving them up ...
A majority (52%) of all Israelis would favour yielding territory.62
Civil Associations
There is still another source of the situationally specific symbolic communication
that permeates the civil sphere. In response to long-term shifts in
social structure and short-term alterations in social circumstances, issueoriented
associations form to affect public opinion and its representatives in
the civil sphere. These can be long-established lobbying groups that represent
private economic or political interests, such as trade associations or the public
arm of trade unions. They can be groups more explicitly oriented to public
goods, such as environmental and taxpayer lobbies, or city manager associations.
They can be large, relatively bureaucratized associations representing
broad categories of persons, such as the National Organization of Women
(NOW), Mothers against Drunk Driving (MADD), the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), or the American
Association for Retired Persons (AARP). They can be much more intimate
associations that form in response to a local "issue"-an offshore oil spill, a
threatening toxic waste dump, the poisoning of an underground water
reserve. They can be middling organizations that, though large in scale, have
arisen in more time-sensitive ways, for example, "Historians against the
War," a group within the Organization ofAmerican Historians that opposed
the Vietnam War, or the "Citizens Trade Committee," a group formed to
oppose the North American Free Trade Act.
What these groups have in common is that they have stepped outside
the role structures of noncivil institutions-outside of economic organizations,
families, churches, and local communities-to press their arguments
in the "court of public opinion." What defines such associations, in other
92
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
words, is their communicative intent. One could say they have, in accomplishing
a particular task, gone beyond purely functional interests to broader,
civil concerns; one could equally say that they have decided that, in order
to accomplish some particular interest, they have found it necessary to
address civil concerns.63 In making their case for the particular, functional
interests they represent, these associations are compelled to make an appeal
to the entire civil community or to those mandated to represent it.64
In
launching these appeals, they will employ whatever clout they can muster,
whether financial, political, religious, familial, or ethnic resources. But these
resources can be effective only insofar as they allow the group more persuasively
to justifY its particular interests in universalizing terms.
Issue-oriented associations can make this case only in terms ofthe binary
discourse of civil society. In doing so, they crystallize this broad and general
set of ideals about self and others vis-a-vis particular situations, particular
conflicts, and particular groups. These associations translate the codes ofcivil
society into specific claims for, and against, the expansion of rights, the
execution of new government policies, and the undertaking of new social
actions. They may do so by creating conflict and intensifYing opposition, or
by trying to create greater cooperation and political or social harmony. They
may translate and specify these general codes by impugning the motives of
the individuals and groups who oppose their claims; the relations that these
claims would putatively establish; or the kinds of institutions that would
supposedly result. They may also do so by idealizing, even apotheosizing,
the motives, relations, and institutions that they claim to be associated with
the policies, actions, and rights of their own groUp.65
In September 1993, the newly elected administration of president Bill
Clinton proposed a sweeping reorganization of the nation's largely private,
and increasingly expensive and restricted, health care delivery system. Armies
of insurance, hospital, and doctor associations set out to defeat the Democratic
president and his wife, Hilary Rodham Clinton, whose task force had
developed the reform proposal. For many members of these associations,
the stakes were material and institutional: if the reforms went through, they
would lose their jobs. For many others, the interests were political and
ideological: they aimed to prevent a significant expansion ofthe welfare state,
the success ofwhich would have increased public support for the Democratic
Party at the expense ofthe Republican Party. Whatever the reasons for their
resistance, one thing was clear: they could not block the Clinton reforms
93
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
by using their resources directly, by disrupting the state or by blocking the
measure inside the medical profession or the health care delivery spheres.
Instead, they would have to enter into the civil sphere and engage in
communicative action. If they had simply presented public opinion with
the importance of their particular interests, however, they would have generated
little solidarity. Without support from wider public opinion, their
particular, functional interests might have been viewed unfavorably by the
journalists who articulated factual frames for interpreting the health reforms,
by the polls presenting the public's shifting opinions, and by the civil officers,
such as congressmen, who acted in the public's name. They would have
gained little influence, in other words, if they had simply complained that
the Clinton reforms would undermine their organizational authority, reduce
their incomes, or challenge their ethical ideals in a narrowly institutional
sense. What these civil associations set out to do, instead, was to intertwine
their interests and ethics with the broader civil sphere.
When President Clinton unveiled his reform package to the American
people, he presented it as a "health security" measure that would extend civil
solidarity by repairing a deeply stratified, unequal, and unfair distribution of
medical care. He was also careful to root this collective theme deeply inside
the discourse ofliberty. In the run-up to presenting the reforms, the Clinton
team had worked hard to avoid any hint of the coercive and bureaucratic,
rejecting public characterizations that mentioned such words as "plan,"
"managed care," or even "program," and in the speech proposing his new
legislation, the president criticized the status quo as giving the American
people "few choices."66 The success of this initial civil construction was
immediately evident. Public opinion strongly supported the measure, and
an influential television pollster and political analyst praised the president for
his "intellect" and "conviction" and the first lady for her "compassion and
concern."67 Six months later, the tables had been turned, with 15 percent
of poll respondents changing from positive to negative. By August 1994,
Democratic congressional leaders declared the reform package dead in the
water, and the same influential television commentator now accused the
Clinton administration of"awesome political stupidity." He polluted the reform
plan as "the living embodiment ofBig Government-or Big Brother,"
describing it as having been hatched by a group of "self-anointed experts"
in "secret" meetings "chaired by a sinister ... and a driven First Lady. "68
94
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
This defeat was historic. It set the stage for the neoconservative seizure of
power in congressional elections in November of that year.
Pundits during the debacle, and academic analysts for long after, attributed
the defeat of the liberal proposal to material force, to the power of the
medical and insurance lobbies and the vast sums of money they had at their
disposal. The truth was quite different. The most active lobbying group, the
Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), had actually lost power
and money in the months preceding the struggle; the "big five" insurance
companies had withdrawn from that lobbying association, declaring that the
HIAA was "paralyzed by small insurers who are opposed to national health
care reforms."69 The force in this situation was discursive, not material.
In the eleven months between the reform proposal's birth and death,
there had ensued one ofthe most frenzied public relations contests in modern
American history.7o Health plan opponents had prepared rhetorical strategies
for months, and hard-hitting advertisements and press conferences appeared
virtually the day after the president's speech. By contrast, the administration's
own public relations campaign, which could have provided crucial rhetorical
leadership, took months to get in gear.71 In the interlude, opponents succeeded
in constructing the reform proposal in repressive, anticivil terms.
They argued that the newly proposed health system would be antidemocratic;
that it would take control of health decisions away from the individual;
that it reflected an authoritarian distrust for common sense and rationality;
that its proposed regulations were confusing and opaque. According
to a social science student of the debacle, Theda Skocpol, one series ofTV
ads in particular became "veritable icons" of the conservatives' rhetorical
success.72
Between September 1993, and summer 1994, the HIAA released
three waves of advertisements featuring "Harry and Louise," a fictional
middle-class couple who gravely discussed the merits ofthe Clinton reforms
and, after much seeming goodwill and erstwhile hesitation, always ended
up coming down on the negative side. "This plan forces us to buy our
insurance through those new mandatory government health alliances," Louise
lamented, to which Harry readily assented, adding that the alliances
would be "run by tens of thousands of new bureaucrats. "73 The factual and
the fictional media of communication bleed together; both are directed by
the binary discourse of civil society.
After the health care measures were defeated, the American health care
95
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
system still was compelled to undergo drastic change. The difference was
that these changes were organized by the private economic sphere alone
instead of being subject to the control of civilly regulated state authority.
For-profit health maintenance organizations (HMOs) became omnipresent,
and they introduced cost-cutting measures without the scrutiny of civil
society. When consumers of this reduced yet more expensive care began to
feel the strain, local groups formed to protest particular HMO practices,
and, eventually, nationwide consumer lobbies arose, demanding regulation
and reform. To do so, they entered communicatively into the civil sphere.
To gain solidarity with U.S. citizens who did not share their particular
concerns, they had to frame the medical and economic interests of their
members in the democratic language of civil society. The groups lobbying
for HMO reform packaged their reforms as a "patient's bill ofrights." They
complained to politicians and reporters that HMOs were hierarchical and
repressive in the face ofreasonable demands for medical treatment; that they
were greedy and self-centered; that they were secretive in responding to
patients' requests for procedural information and deceitful in their accounting
practices and public representations.74
Oscillating in this manner between particular interests and cultural coding,
civil associations scan public opinion, make efforts to affect the symbolic
constructions of the civil sphere projected by factual and fictional media,
and gauge the choices and intensities of the public's opinions as measured
by polls. They are, in other words, inextricably interconnected with the
other communicative institutions of civil life and the phenomenological
lifeworld of intuitive civil sensibility-the structures of civil feeling-that
supports and restricts them.
By naming these kinds of groups civil associations, I am differentiating
them from the much more general category of "voluntary associations,"
which has played such a pronounced role in democratic theory and empirical
debate. In the era of civil society I, when democratic thinkers linked civil
society to virtually every association outside of the authoritarian state, associations
were defined as voluntary insofar as they were not state-directed.
They were voluntary, that is, in the sense that citizens were free to form
them, and members free to join them or leave them, without being subject
to political coercion. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville made a great deal
of such formations, seeming to praise the new American democracy for the
fact that its citizens took matters into their own hands by forming associaPublic
Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
tions rather than simply waiting upon the beneficence of a paternalistic
state.75
But Tocqueville was hardly ~lone. In The Division ifLabor in Society,
and particularly in his preface to its second edition, Durkheim heralded the
significance of what he called secondary associations for providing mediations
between the impersonal bureaucratic state and the individual,76 Such
face-to-face groupings were also praised by such republican thinkers as
Hannah Arendt, who idealized the local and spontaneous political associations
of direct democracy, and by Jiirgen Habermas, who enthusiastically
evoked the intimacy and conversation of eighteenth-century coffeehouses
and salons.77
This broad and inclusive approach to voluntary association crystallized
in American social scientific thinking about democracy that emerged in the
mid-twentieth century, particularly in the evolutionary and idealizing strand
I criticized in chapters 2 and 3. Against the conservative and radical theories
that posited the inevitability of mass society and elite domination,78 and in
contrast to the big-state theories that romanticized state Communism and
its totalitarian control, liberals championed the intermediate level of voluntary
associations. These were conceptualized very broadly, simply as "voluntary,"
in the sense of not subject to direct control, either from the state
or from other powerful social hierarchies. In The International Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences, for example, a leading anthropologist defined voluntary
associations as a "group organized for a pursuit of one interest or ofseveral
interests in common," which could be "contrasted with involuntary groupings
serving a greater variety ofends, such as kin groups, castes, social classes,
and communities."79 In the same set ofvolumes, in an equally broad fashion,
the best-known sociological student of this organizational form stressed
simply that a group "is voluntary in the sense that it is neither mandatory
nor acquired through birth" and, in addition, "exists independently of the
state."80
In recent decades, this civil society I approach to voluntary association
has formed the heart of the so-called "neo-Tocquevillian" theory of civil
society developed by the American political scientist Robert Putnam, a
perspective that, in the United States at least, has found sympathetic responses
in both academic circles and the popular press. From his sweeping
empirical study of democratic and authoritarian tendencies in Italy to his
attacks on television viewing and his pithy observations about the dangers
of bowling alone,S! Putnam has vigorously argued that such organizations
97
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
as the Boy Scouts, church support groups, women's clubs, the PTA, and
bowling leagues are the key to a lively civil sphere and thus to democracy
itself
The problem with such theorizing, no matter how well-intended and
civic-minded, is that, like civil society I theory more generally, it seems
rather out of date. Developed to address the possibilities of democracy in
earlier and much simpler societies, it suffers from the diffuseness that makes
it congenitally unsuited to providing a critical approach to democracy in the
present day. Of course, pluralism and diversity remain vital for complex
societies, and the legal freedom to form and unform associations essential.
But the neo-Tocquevillian approach paints with a brush that is much too
broad to delineate the requisites for contemporary civil society.
To include every possible kind ofnonstate grouping under the umbrella
ofvoluntary association-to say, in effect, that every such nonstate grouping
teaches the art of civil association-is to say little about the variable relation
between association and expansive solidarity. Cooking societies, shooting
associations, dog training clubs, star-gazing groups, and hunting clubs permeate
democratic and nondemocratic nations alike. So do organizations like
the Boy Scouts, which not only have nothing intrinsically democratic about
them but, rather, teach values and model social relationships that, it might
be argued, are anticivil in some vital ways. Though revolutionary secret
societies, such as the Weathermen of the late 1960s or the American militia
of the 1990S, are much more political in their activities, they do not seek to
achieve power by entering communicatively into the civil sphere; they wish,
instead, to use force to overthrow it. In other words, it is not the mere fact
of associating that defines a grouping as civil, but what is associated with it,
and whether these other factors orient an association to engage with the
broader solidarity groupings that exists outside itself As Cohen remarked in
her criticism of such neo-Tocquevillian theory, the question is, What generalizes
the social trust that exists within voluntary organizations? How does
the trust that sustains a particular association "become trust of strangers
outside the group?"82 Of course, this is a normative rather than an empirical
formulation. In empirical terms, the generalizing of trust beyond the confines
of any particular organization may actually be done in a manner that
increases feelings of strangeness and antagonism among broader settings and
large groups. But Cohen's critical point remains well taken. It is not the
existence of a group per se, even if the associating it spawns is enthusiastic
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
and face-to-face. It is whether the group is oriented to issues outside of
itself, and whether in relation to these it displays a communicative intent.83
If we revisit Tocqueville, whose writings are so fundamental to the
current revival of voluntary association theory, we find that he was much
more attuned to these subtleties than the contemporary school that bears
his name. Tocqueville did indeed laud Americans for "forever forming
associations," as Putnam put it,84 but he showed much more sensitivity than
his contemporary American interlocutors to the fact that such associations
could promote not only civil but anticivil solidarities. Tocqueville did not
actually praise Americans for frenetically forming nonstate groups. He called
attention, instead, to their having "perfected the art ofpursuing their common
desires in common. "85 It was, in other words, an orientation to wider
civil solidarity, not the act of associating per se, that Tocqueville wished to
underscore.
This interpretive distinction may seem subtle, but the variable relationship
between association and democracy is not. It is instructive to scrutinize
Tocqueville's formal definition of associations, for it consists of two parts,
neither of which contemporary neo-Tocquevillians emphasize. An association,
Tocqueville writes, "consists solely in the decision ofa certain number
ofindividuals to adhere publicly to certain doctrines," on the one hand, and
in the engagement "to commit themselves to seek the triumph of those
doctrines in a certain way," on the other.86
By public adherence, Tocqueville
means that, to be part of the civil sphere, associations must have a civil
orientation, a communicative interest in influencing public opinion. By
qualifYing this definition still further, by emphasizing that these publicly
oriented associations must spread their doctrines in a "certain way," Tocqueville
draws attention to the binary possibilities of communicative action.
Civil associations can articulate their interests in both civil and anticivil
terms.
These ambiguous possibilities were illustrated when Tocqueville undertook
to demonstrate that, in his time, voluntary associations actually occurred
just as frequently in nondemocratic as in democratic societies. By
doing so, he shows that the effects of association are not decided only
by whether association takes a communicative, public-oriented form, but
by whether, and to what degree, they seek to expand or contract social
solidarity. It would come as a surprise to his contemporary interpreters to
learn that Tocqueville did not argue that civil associations were more prom-
99
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
inent in democratic America than in nondemocratic Europe. What he
claimed, rather, is that in Europe associations were more particularistic and
divisive, tending to short-circuit public discussion in order to engage in
more direct exercises in power. European associations, Tocqueville claimed,
treated members of other groups not as potential partners in a wider solidarity,
but as enemies.
Most Europeans look upon association as a weapon of war, to be
organized in haste and im'ipediately tried out on some field ofbattle.
People do indeed associate for the purpose of discussion, but the
thought of impending action weighs on everyone's mind. An association
is an army. Discussio~~ffers an opportunity to count heads
and stir spirits, after which it ~ time to march out and meet the
enemy. The members of an association may regard legal resources as
a useful means of action but never as the only path to successY
The result, as Tocqueville himself put it, was that in nondemocratic
Europe, associations "eschew civil norms" and "adopt military habits and
principles."88 In the United States, by contrast, "association is understood
differently." Their energies were directed, Tocqueville believed, to challenging
the "moral ascendancy" ofthe majority, not its power in the physical
or administrative sense. Rather than taking action and seizing power, their
communicative actions aimed at engaging the wider solidarity, "to discover
which arguments are most likely to make an impression on the majority."
Because American associations oriented themselves to public opinion and
to creating a wider, more encompassing solidarity, "the minority always
hopes to attract enough additional support to become the majority."89
In order to explain this fundamental difference between European and
American association, Tocqueville must look beyond the simple existence
of voluntary association in the civil society I sense of the term. Though
allowing that "the obvious differences between us and the Americans in this
respect are explained by several things," he ultimately connects the different
forms ofvoluntary association to the extent ofunderlying solidarity. Whereas
in Europe, the associations out of power "are so different from the majority
that they can never hope to gain its support," in America "only shades of
difference separate one opinion from another." One thing that contributes
to the greater solidary feeling among American voluntary associations is
100
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
widespread voting rights: "Of all the causes that help to moderate the
violence of political association in the United States, the most powerful,
perhaps, is universal suffrage." It is universal suffrage, which I will later
define as one of the principal regulatory institutions of civil society, that
allows a majority to acquire "moral force," and it is this moral status that
leads civic associations away from extrademocratic violence to engagement
in civil communication.90
Later in his discussion, Tocqueville writes that
"the laws do more to maintain a democratic republic in the United States
than physical causes do, and mores do more than laws." In a footnote, he
"remind[s] the reader of the general sense in which I use the word mores":
"I mean the whole range of intellectual and moral dispositions that men
bring to the state of society. "91
Tocqueville's understanding of the necessity for democratic associations
to be oriented to public engagement, rather than simply to be voluntary, is
critical; so is his perception that even such publicly oriented associations can
engage in communicative action that pollutes opponents as anticivil ene-
mies.92
What mars his argument is its one-sided application. He treats American
associations in an idealized way. The national distinction he draws has
the effect of camouflaging the empirical variation within civil associations.
By the time Tocqueville visited America, there had already been centuries
of anticivil efforts by publicly oriented associations. This did not mean that
they became putschist, violence-oriented conspiracies, as Tocqueville suggested
was frequently the case in France. It did mean that, even in America,
associations entered the civil sphere, and engaged public opinion, as often
to narrow social solidarity as to broaden it. Indeed, whether their ambition
was to broaden or to narrow solidarity, associations could accomplish their
aims by evoking repressive categories and creating polluting associations, not
just by utilizing liberating categories and creating purification.
Tocqueville was by no means the first social theorist to recognize the
anticivil possibilities of civil associations, nor was he by any means the last.
In Federalist Paper 51, James Madison wrote eloquently about the dangers
offactions, and he insisted on the separation ofpowers as a counterbalancing
institutional system ofregulatory control. In fact, those who crafted the U.S.
Constitution focused on the divisive aggressiveness of civil associations,93 as
have passionate critics of "special interests" ever since. Employing the adjective
"special" is designed, of course, to designate a group's narrow and
constricting aims.
101
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
Sociologists have often related the antidemocratic effects of voluntary
associations to their internal organizational form. Seymour Lipset, Martin
Trow, and James Coleman made this internal antagonism to democracy the
foil for their classic study, Union Democracy. At the very beginning of their
book, they noted that "the pattern which characterizes almost all voluntary
organizations was generalized over forty years by the German sociologist,
Robert Michels, when he laid down his famous 'iron law of oligarchy.' "94
In "their trade unions, professional societies, business associations, and cooperatives-in
the myriad [of] nominally democratic voluntary organizations,
the experience of most people," Lipset and his colleagues assert,
"would tend to confirm Michels' generalization."95
Since Michels first wrote, many books and articles have been written
about oligarchy in voluntary organizations, but almost invariably they
have documented the operation of his iron law in another set of
circumstances. They have shown how control of the organization
machinery, combined with membership passivity, operates to perpetuate
oligarchic control.96
In their effort to find out what might counteract this anticivil tendency in
associations, the authors of Union Democracy point, as Tocqueville had before
them, to the offsetting role that can be played by the other communicative
and regulatory institutions of civil society, emphasizing the role of democratic
elections and competing outlets for public opinion, such as newsletters
and newspapers. If these other institutions are present, they suggest, associations
are more willing to reign in their competition, to obey overarching
rules of the game, to allow power to change hands in a peaceful way.
The research ofsocial scientists since the publication of Union Democracy
has confirmed the caution that dampened its authors' enthusiasm for association
in its pristine, unadorned form. In the encyclopedia article I noted
above, David Sills addressed the prevailing belief that "since voluntary associations
can exist only in societies in which freedom of association exists,
and since such societies are more or less democratic in their ethos and
political structure, there is an expectation that members will take an active
part in the affairs of the association and that democratic procedures will
govern its conduct." Pointing to a range of different empirical studies,
102
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
however, Sills warned that "this expectation often is not met; although most
voluntary associations have constitutions, bylaws, or oral traditions that call
for full participation by the members, the 'iron law ofoligarchy' formulated
by Robert Michels generally has greater weight."97
Camouflaged beneath his influential encomiums for face-to-face associations,
Putnam actually himself acknowledges the "need to take into account
the fact that closely-knit social, economic, and political organizations
are unfortunately prone to corruption."98 The problem is that, given his
emphasis on association per se, Putnam cannot explain why or how this
antidemocratic tendency might be counteracted. Without acknowledging
that he is doing so, however, Putnam refers to a whole set ofnonassociational
factors that can critically affect the democratic capacities of associations. In
his historical reconstruction of the process that led to the creation of communal
democracies in late medieval northern Italy, he mentions "elaborate
legal codes" that "confine[d] the violence ofthe overmighty,99 and a "public
administration" which, because it was "professionalized," allowed "legitimate
authority in the North" to be "only delegated to public officials, who
remain responsible to those with whose affairs they are entrusted."loo In my
discussion of the regulatory institutions of civil society in chapters 6 and 7,
law and office will be presented as fundamentally important forms ofsocial
control. In fact, Putnam even points beyond these institutions to the cultural
milieu within which associations launch their claims. He stresses the significance
in Italy's late medieval period of a "renewed civic morality" that
mandated "fraternal assistance" and "hospitality toward strangers," a cultural
ethic designed to "prevent the new society from tearing itself apart in
internecine strife."101
In other words, associations can contribute to democracy only if they
are intertwined with the full range of communicative and regulative institutions
and the cultural codes, which crystallize the idealizing normative
commitments ofthe civil sphere. The civil potential ofvoluntary associations
is promoted by these other institutions, even as they provide critical inputs
in turn. If clubs and associations are merely self-referential, they play no
effective role in society's civil sphere, though they may perform important
functions in their respective noncivil spheres. Before the feminist movement
brought women into the paid workforce, for example, hospitals benefited
greatly from their women volunteers. So did elementary and high schools
!O3
STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE
from their largely female Parent-Teacher Associations. To become organs of
civil society, however, such groups must direct their particular interests
outward, into the broader network of solidary ties and claims.
Historical considerations lend support to these theoretical arguments
about the tendencies of contemporary society. As Michael Schudson shows,
civil associations first emerged in a democratic context that put a high
premium on solidary communication. It was in the run-up to the American
Revolution that self-organizing, issue-oriented groups, as compared with
state-directed or ascriptive organizations, first achieved prominence on the
American scene. "With a political crisis looming," Schudson writes, "the
colonists made use of their various means of communication, of which
newspapers were only the most visible."
Colonial elites knew one another through trade; businessmen in one
colony might buy real estate in another. They knew one another
through college experience. Yale attracted many students from New
York and Massachusetts as well as Connecticut [who] did not necessarily
return to their home colonies but chose to settle elsewhere.
... Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers representing most
of the colonies banded together with annual meetings and committees
of correspondence.... A wide variety of social, economic, educational,
and religious contacts transcended colonial borders, and so
did common interests in science, medicine, or the arts.102
Schudson's point is that this new organizational form emerged in response
to demands for greater solidarity and mutual understanding on a
national scale. The fragmentation created by the wide dispersement of
isolated colonies could be overcome only with the help ofcivic association.
If this was true for the problem of creating civil solidarity between colonies,
it was equally the case for breaking down barriers within each colony itself
As for communication with a colony, formal and informal organizations
operated as well as newspapers. Boston's social clubs and
Masonic lodges became centers where people could come together
to talk politics (among other things). A caucus system coordinated
Boston artisans and prepared them to vote ... at town meetings.
104
Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations
While New York had no similarly focused system, its taverns were a
regular site for political talk.103 .
It is actually this outward civil orientation that provides the benefits that
the neo-Tocquevillian civil society I perspective erroneously ascribes to
association in and of itself Putnam traces the striking diminution of some
of America's most beloved voluntary associations and decries what he sees
as its result: the decline of American civil society.104 Only such face-to-face
interactions, he believes, can "foster sturdy norms ofgeneralized reciprocity
and encourage the emergence of social trust."105 As we have learned from
this discussion, however, voluntary associations play this solidarizing role
only if they can assume a communicative form. As sources of situationally
specific applications ofbroad civil discourse, lobbying groups, public service
associations, and clubs of all sorts do playa singular and irreplaceable role in
defining the boundaries of the civil sphere and offering justifications for
placing groups inside and outside it. Such associations represent particular
interests-economic, political, ethnic, religious, racial-and they employ
every possible resource on their behalf. In order to effect such representation,
however, they must develop civil influence. In doing so, regardless oftheir
particular interest, and whether or not they evoke polluting or purifYing
discourse, they reinforce the solidarity of a broader community, contributing
to the normative standards that function to hem these particularistic
interests in.
This approach to civil associations adumbrates my understanding of the
decidedly anti-institutional forces represented by social movements, to
which I will devote chapter 9. In the chapter that immediately follows,
however, we turn to civil institutions in their regulative form.
105
NOTES TO PAGES 65-67
26. Alexander, "Watergate as Democratic Ritual."
27. Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace; Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes,
pp. 354-402.
28. For an insightful fictional representation ofthis tendency in American culture,
see P Roth, Plot against America.
29. For a sweeping historical overview of how "civil society" and "£'maticism'
have been deeply intertwined, indeed constitute nothing less than "conjoined histories"
in political thought from the Greeks to modern times, see D. Colas, Civil
Society and Fanaticism.
In the deeply controversial manifesto TI1e Concept of the Political, which Carl
Schmitt produced on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, we are offered a
sophisticated rationalization for a violently antidemocratic state and its ambitions for
wider domination. In a manner that, at first glance, seems eerily to adumbrate the
position I am putting forward here, Schmitt emphasizes the inevitability of the
discursive binary friend/enemy. The differences between our positions, however,
are dramatic and telling, not only normatively but theoretically and empirically.
Schmitt traces the origins of the friend/enemy binary to the state's struggle for
power and domination, not to the semantics of moral language or the civil sphere's
symbolic construction of solidary boundaries that could, in principle, place moral
regulations over state power and violence. "It is the state as an organized political
entity," he writes, "that decides for itself the friend/enemy distinction" (pp. 29-30).
Rejecting a cultural position theoretically, a democratic position normatively, and
the possibility for an autonomous civil sphere empirically, Schmitt insists that, for a
"realist," politics could not involve "symbolic wrestlings" or "intellectual controversy"
(p. 33). These were concerns only for a weak-kneed liberalism mistakenly
focused "almost solely on the internal struggle against the power of the state," a
move that makes of the state "a compromise and of its institutions a ventilating
system" (70). As compared to a democratic liberalism that seeks to control the state,
Schmitt insists that politics is inevitably associated with violence and war. It is the
"fighting collectivity" that demands the division between friends and enemies, so
that it can provide the "real possibility of physical killing," a "real enemy" that can
be attacked with "the utmost intensity." For further discussion of Schmitt, see
chapter 5, n. 55.
30. R. Smith, Civic Ideals: conflicting Visions ofCitizenship in U.S. History, p. 4. In
his systematic and empirically rich exposure of the ascriptive and exclusionary
dimensions that shadow the better known and "official" democratic, liberal, and
republican strands, Smith's work supports the general thrust of the approach I am
developing here. There are two differences worth noting. One is that Smith sees
the negating, antithetical civil ideals as existing outside ofliberalism and republicanism,
as representing a third tradition that is ascriptive, particularistic, and antidemocratic.
The approach I have developed here suggests, to the contrary, that the
antidemocratic, repressive elements of civic ideals are postulated directly within
democratic discourse itself Second, the source from which Smith reconstructs the
content of civil ideals is different from the one I employ here, and so is his explanation
for their form. In locating the roots of the contradictory and paradoxical
logic of American political culture in legal and legislative decisions, he does not
construct it as a relatively autonomous discourse but sees it as the result, in the first
instance, of "the imperatives of state building" (p. 39) vis-a-vis a complex and
divided social structure. These imperatives express themselves, according to this
notion, in the need that political leaders have to maintain their power by manipulating
the masses; they suggest themes of peoplehood that can satisfY the masses'
need for psychological security and moral worth (pp. 32ff). In his essay "The
Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion," Charles Taylor observes that "there is something
in the dynamic of democracy that pushes toward exclusion," but he, too,
locates the source of this paradox in something outside, rather than inside, democratic
civil discourse. In his case, it is the need for democracies also to maintain
"something like a common identity ... to form an entity and have a personality"
(p. 143).
CHAPTER 5
I. Douglas, How Institutions Think. Compared with those following the classical
Weberian approach to organization, contemporary "neo-institutionalists" have
downplayed purely instrumental-pragmatic concerns and incorporated more culturally
oriented concepts. See, for example, J. W Meyer and Rowan, "Institutionalized
Organizations," and DiMaggio and Powell, "Iron Cage Revisited." Nonetheless,
even those who articulate such an institutional approach tend to homologize
patterns of organization and culture, such that culture qua meaning-the internal
patterning of symbols via codes and narratives-fails to achieve relative autonomy
vis-a-vis organizational restraints. See, for example, Friedland and Alford, "Bringing
Society Back In." For further discussion of these issues, see chapter 6.
2. In her empirical analysis of elites and public opinion, Susan Herbst has emphasizedjust
this specifYing, multilevel process: "Interest groups are more than simple
surrogates for public opinion.... They translate opinion, but during this translation
process they also help to give public opinion a more solid and comprehensible form"
(Reading Public Opinion, p. 53. For the conceptual distinction between influence and
authoritative control or power, see Parsons's important essays on influence and power
as generalized media of exchange in Politics and Social Structure, pp. 352-438, distinctions
that were later elaborated and modified by Jiirgen Habermas in Lifeworld
and System, esp. pp. 266-282. If this distinction is not made-if communicative
institutions are not conceptually differentiated from coercive control, whether in
states or organizations-then power can be conceptualized only as hegemony in the
579
NOTES TO PAGES 70-76
Gramscian sense or power-knowledge in the Foucauldian. In neither case is it
possible to conceptualize an independent civil sphere and, thus, democracy as I have
conceived it here.
3. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 57.
4. Habermas, Structural Traniformation ofthe Public Sphere. For more recent versions
of this critical republican position, see the normative work on deliberative democracy
(chap. 3 n. 8) and the continuing wave ofempirical analyses aimed at reforming
putatively passive public opinion, e.g., Fishkin, Voice of the People.
5. M. Weber, "The City," and Sennett, Classic Essays on the Culture ofCities and
Rise and Fall ofPublic Man.
6. Walzer, Revolution of the Saints; and Mayhew, Public Spirit.
7. Diana C. Mutz makes the same point in her empirical study of the transformation
of the public from direct relationship to impersonal public opinion, which
constitutes a kind of "generalized other" in the sense of George Herbert Mead
(Impe~onal Injluenc~.
8. For a similar criticism of Habermas and Arendt, and the suggestion ofthe idea
of the public as a regulating ideal, see Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism of Hannah
Arendt, pp. 203-206, and Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society (chapter 3, n. 62,
above).
9. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part I, chap. 8, p. 40.
10. Bryce, American Commonwealth, pp. 499-505.
I!. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part II, chap. 7, p. 293.
12. Gallup and Rae, Pulse of Democracy, p. 8. For a comparison of Bryce and
Gallup that evaluates their conflicting writings on public opinion in terms of empirical
accuracy, rather than as reflecting the binary discourse of civil society, see
Voice ofthe People, pp. 71-81.
13. Durkheim, conclusion to Division ofLabor in Society.
14. For example, Tarde, "Opinion and Conversation." For an illuminating reconstruction
ofTarde's public opinion theory in terms of contemporary media and
symbolic action theory, see Katz et aI., "Press-Conversation-Opinion-Action."
15. John Dewey wrote, in The Public and Its Problems: "The confusion which has
resulted in the size and ramifications ofsocial activities has rendered men skeptical.
... Men feel that they are caught in the sweep of forces too vast to understand or
master. Thought is brought to a standstill and action paralyzed" (p. 135). Lippmann,
The Phantom Public, wrote: "The public citizen today has come to feel rather like a
deaf spectator in the back row [who] cannot quite manage to keep awake.... He
is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance.... He does not know for
certain what is going on, or who is doing it.... His sovereignty is a fiction" (p. 13)·
16. But see the recent work by Susan Herbst and Diana Mutz cited in notes 2
and 7.
17. It has been common for democratic theory to maintain a sharp distinction
580
NOTES TO PAGE 76
between factual or normative truth, on the one side, and fictional-aesthetic experience
on the other. The roots of this tension can be traced back to Plato's suspicion
oftheater and rhetoric, expressed for example in his Gorgias, but in terms ofmodern
debates it begins with Nietzsche's embrace of the aesthetic-expressive and his sharp
rejection of universalizing morality, as in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of
Morals. In contemporary times, this distrust has been most forcefully and influentially
expressed by Habermas in his polemic against Hans Georg Gadamer ("A Review
ofGadamer's Truth and Method"). In that essay, he insists on associating henneneutic
analysis, or expressive understanding, with tradition, and he portrays the latter as
antimodern and antidemocratic; hermeneutic analysis, he argues, is antithetical to
theorizing that embraces the normative aspiration ofrationality, autonomy, and social
emancipation. For an important alternative philosophical argument, one which
embraces fiction as a source of ethical-moral instruction, see Booth, The Company
TVe Keep. There has been a revisionist movement within the Habermasian tradition
to widen his normative theory to embrace the aesthetic and symbolic, most energetically
by rethinking some of Habermas's key concepts via the philosophy of
Hannah Arendt. In The Reluctant Modernism ofHannah Arendt, for example, Benhabib
argues that "the term communicative action does not quite capture the conceptual
issues that Arendt, as opposed to Habermas, had in mind." Thus, "instead of communicative
action, I shall use the terminology of the narrative model of action," which
depicts "action embedded in a 'web of relationships and enacted stories' " and
combines "the constative as well as the expressive." The "rational core" of this
model, Benhabib writes, "cannot be as clearly extricated as Habermas would like"
(p. 124). For another example of this culturally oriented revisionism, see Cooke,
Re-Presenting the Good Society and also Maria P. Lara, Moral Textures.
18. Fass, "Television as a Cultural Document: Promises and Problems"; Glover
and Kaplan, "Guns in the House of Culture?"; Seyhan, "Ethnic Selves/Ethnic
Signs"; Muketji, "Monsters and Muppets"; T. Rose, "Rewriting the Pleasure/Danger
Dialectic"; Lembo, Thinking through Television, particularly the empirical analyses of
"plausibility" and "narrative-based viewing," pp. 168-185; and Long, Book Clubs.
19· The normative rationalism that has broadly informed Habermas's philosophy
of the public sphere has obscured the fact that at one important moment in his
normative reconstruction of Western history, he actually paid special attention to
the aesthetic domain. The sentimental novel, he wrote, allowed "self-clarification
of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness,"
explaining that "the psychological novel fashioned for the first time the kind of
realism that allowed anyone to enter into the literary action as a substitute for his
own, to use the relationships between the figures, between the author, the characters,
and the readers as a substitute relationship for reality." The notion of a "substitute
relationship for reality," which allows readers to enter into literary action, is complementary
to the argument that I am developing here, though it is hardly limited
NOTES TO PAGES 76-80
to the genre ofliterary realism. The explicitly cultural focus ofthe present discussion
allows me to view such aesthetic projections and identifications as an ongoing and
vital dimension of civil discourse and public opinion formation; the restrictions of
Habermas's rationalist perspective, by contrast, compel him to speak ofsuch literary
identifications as merely a "training ground for a critical public reflection," as a
"literary precursor of the public sphere" (Structural Transformation, pp. 29, 50, emphasis
added). An alternative, less determinately rationalist perspective on the relation
between fiction and emancipation, still broadly within the Marxist-critical tradition,
can be found in Raymond Williams's analysis of the fiction of protest against industrial
society in nineteenth-century England, in his essay titled "A Nineteenth
Century Tradition." For nineteenth-century fiction as realistic, and thus reflecting
industrialism, see Jameson, Political Unconscious; for a contrasting view and an analysis
of Austin's art as a fictional reconstruction of variable moral capacities, see Lara,
"Narrative Cultural Interweavings: Between Fact and Fiction," in Moral Textures,
pp. 92- 104. For nineteenth-century novelist art and narratives about purity and
corruption, see P. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination. For a criticalargument against
reading "realism" as fiction that allows transparent access to truthful observation
rather than as itself a meaning-genre, see Jakobson, "On Realism in Art."
20. Goodwin, Team ofRivals, p. 161. See also W. L. Miller, Arguing about Slavery,
pp. 333-335. For a discussion of moral empathy and the romantic movement in
fiction, see G. Hartmann, "Sympathy Paradox."
21. Peter Brooks, Realist Vision, pp. 8, 13·
22. Long, American Dream and the Popular Novel.
23. Sherwood, "Narrating the Social."
24. In his essay "From the Polluted Homosexual to the Normal Gay," Steven
Seidman has emphasized the importance of fictionalized reconstructions of homosexuality
in American film, and he demonstrates how shifts in such filmic representations
have helped to undermine the repressive"closet" metaphor in gay and lesbian
life (Beyond the Closet, pp. 123-162). One observer of American television commented
that" Will and Grace has taken the classic four-character sitcom format of I
Love Lucy and made gay characters an indispensable part of TV Land" (Bob Smith,
"From Billy to Willy"). For the contrast between assimilative and multicultural, see
chapter 17.
25. Roots ran from January 23 to January 30, 1977, on eight consecutive nights,
and was watched by some 130 million viewers, the largest audience recorded for a
television show up until that time. That same year, the book on which the epochal
TV series was based, Haley's autobiographical Roots: The Saga ofan American Family,
was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
26. Huff, "Viva!"
27. Wright, Six Guns and Society.
28. Bazin, What Is Cinema?
NOTES TO PAGES 81-83
29. Darnton, "Writing News and Telling Stories"; R. Jacobs, "Producing the
News"; Herbst, Reading Public Opinion', p. 64; Lembo, "Narrative-Based Viewing";
M. Schudson, Sociology of News, pp. 177-193.
30. "For many people deeply involved in politics," Susan Herbst reports, "the
phenomena of public opinion and mass media are largely conflated" (Reading Public
Opinion, p. 5).
31. This continuum offlexible responsiveness has been stretched further in recent
years by the gradual appearance of new Web-based sources ofevent-responsiveness,
such as blogs. On the one hand, blogs are even more rapid responders than daily
news institutions, and thus create a new source of civil mediation. On the other
hand, blogs are not informed by professional reporting norms ofneutrality. Because
they have an overtly personal or ideological character, their constructions offactual
reality are less forceful inte·rventions into the civil sphere, even as they constitute a
new source of intervening construction.
32. Ronald Jacobs has conducted a series of detailed empirical analyses of how
American news media in both white and black communities and in different metropolitan
areas have reported on critical events by constructing them in terms ofthe
binary discourse of civil society, and of the repercussions ofsuch representations on
powerful elites and institutions. See R. Jacobs, "Civil Society and Crisis" and Race,
Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society.
33. Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 181-221. Habermas writes: "The disintegration
of the electorate as a public becomes manifest with the realization that
press and radio ... have practically no effect; within the framework of the manufactured
public sphere the mass media are useful only as vehicles of advertising"
(p. 217). See C. Wright Mills, Power Elite; Bourdieu, On Television and "Return to
Television." For a broad overview of democratic theory and media theory, see
Alexander and Jacobs, "Mass Communication, Ritual, and Civil Society."
34. Alexander, "The Mass News Media in Systemic"; Schudson, Discovering the
News.
35. Describing the origins ofcommercial media in the American colonial period,
Michael Schudson (The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life) writes that
"the newspapers advanced a public discourse [that] helped promote a colonies-wide
consciousness." He argues that "the public realm that commercialism and commercial
sentiments shape is different from one dominated by political principle or partisan
engagement, but it is not necessarily retrograde. The newspapers' neutral space was
revolutionary in its own way. That the printers' ambitions were commercial rather
than political may have been a critical step in a growing toleration for conflicting
points of view" (p. 38). Paul Starr has also documented this positive link between
commercial media and civil society in his exhaustive social history, The Creation of
the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. About the rise of the penny
press in the 1820S and 1830s: "Depending entirely on revenue from readers and
NOTES TO PAGES 83-84
advertisers, the publishers of penny papers proclaimed their independence of any
political party and represented themselves as the unfettered champions ofthe public
in reporting the news.... In their quest for circulation, they became the first papers
in the United States to publish extensive coverage of local news" (pp. 132, 134-
135). About the origins of mass circulation magazines in the I890s:
The broadened audience for magazines ... created the preconditions for the
turn toward muckraking in the first decade of the new century.... It made
sense at least for some magazine publishers to use muckraking as a sensationcreating,
circulation-building strategy. In late 1902, when it began publishing
Ida Tarbell's series on John D. Rockefeller's takeover of the oil industry,
McClure's opened a new era in political journalism.... S. S. McClure put
his investigative writers on long-terms salaries, paying them for their research
rather than merely for the copy they produced; Tarbell's fifteen Standard
Oil articles, produced over five years, cost McClure ... $4000 each. No
publisher could have afforded that investment without the mass circulations
then achievable.... Muckraking was, therefore, as much a product of the
rise of the early mass media as it was a result of the distinct political outlook
of the Progressive era. (pp. 260-262)
36. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic David Shaw in "Journalism
Is a Very Different Business," contemporary American journalists speak about "the
Wall" "that has traditionally separated the business side of the news and editorial
side of a good news organization":
Journalists can be a bit self-aggrandizing, even self-righteous, at times about
their mission as truth-tellers-particularly in contrast with what they regard
as the bean counters on the business side. Reporters and editors speak of
their "mission" and "sacred trust" and make it sound like some sort of
mystic priesthood, with rights and rituals incomprehensible to the nonjour-
nalist.
37. Perhaps the most vivid exemplification of this capacity for the representation
ofsociety as such are televised "media events," the liminal moments in which news
media create the sense of "time out of time," a break from routine programming
that represents what is taken to be a dramatic, society changing event. See D. Dayan
and E. Katz, Media Events.
38. For an analysis of the role that media autonomy, based on professional ethics,
played in the construction of a more civil society, see my discussion of the role of
northern journalists in the origins of the Civil Rights movement in chapter 12.
39. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part 2, chap. 3, p. 212.
NOTES TO PAGES 84-90
40. Congressman quoted in Schudson, Good Citizen, p. I05.
41. Benjamin Franklin quoted in S'chudson, Good Citizen, p. 34.
42. In other words, whether the putative public is a "mass" or an independent
and individuated force is as much a matter of construction via the discourse of civil
society as it is of a reality that is independent of cultural coding. This binary
construction mass-versus-public also occurs within the world ofsocial theory, where
it provides antagonistic narratives about democracy and civil society. It is a critical
pivot in arguments about the possibilities for democracy in complex capitalist societies.
For the manner in which C. Wright Mills's insistence on massification
justified his exclusive concentration on elite power rather than on civil communication
and regulation, see chapter 6 of this book. If, by contrast, the force ofpublic
opinion polls is recognized, their civil power can be undermined at a second remove
by claiming that the structure, resources, and interpretation ofpolling are tied to the
power and interests of anticivil actors. This is the theoretical logic that informs the
arguments employed by such widely different thinkers as, for example, Bourdieu,
"L'opinion publique n'existe pas," and L. Mayhew, New Public, e.g., pp. 189-209.
43. Gallup and Rae, Pulse ofDemocracy, p. vi.
44. Ibid., p. vii.
45. Ibid., p. 8.
46. Ibid., p. 26.
47. Ibid., p. 144·
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 14·
50. Ibid.
51. Gallup, Guide to Public Opinion Polls, p. 85.
52. Lang and Lang, Battlefor Public Opinion.
53. Alexander, "Watergate as Democratic Ritual."
54. See chap. 4, n. II.
55. On typification as a mode of action connecting micro and macro social
worlds, see Alexander, "Action and Its Environments." The concept oftypification
was developed by Alfred Shutz in his dialogue with Husserl and Max Weber, in
Phenomenology ofthe Social VVorld, pp. 139-214.
56. Ku, "Boundary Publics in the Public Sphere," "Revisiting the Notion of
'Public' in Habermas's Theory," and Narratives, Politics, and the Public Sphere.
57. William Drozdiak, "Cresson Meets Enemy: Public Opinion Polls," International
Herald Tribune, June 28, 1991, Sec. A, p. 1.
58. Dick Polman, "Public's Support of War Faltering," Philadelphia Inquirer, August
14, 2005, Sec. A, pp. I, 18.
59. Sam Dillon, "Mexican Party Reported to Quash Polls Predicting Its Defeat,"
New York Times, July 17, 2000, Sec. A, p. 9. For a cultural-sociological analysis of
the dynamics of the emerging civil sphere in Mexico that draws from and develops
NOTES TO PAGES 90-93
the framework I have been developing here, see Luis Escala-Rabadan's "The Symbolic
Construction of Human Rights Discourse in Mexico's Media, 1978-1996."
60. Hedrick Smith, New Russians, pp. 84ff.
61. Ibid., p. 88. After the Soviet Union was dismantled, there ensued a utopian
but chaotic and destabilizing period of privatization and democratic experimenta_
tion. Standards of living declined, previously unknown men became billionaires
overnight, and the Russian military drastically declined in its power and prestige.
In this context, it is hardly surprising that polls, often organized by these same
institutions, began to crystallize the public's increasingly antidemocratic opinions,
registering distrust, low expectations, superstition, hero worship, aggressive feelings
toward minorities, and the growing pollution of democracy itself. It was in this
symbolic context that Vladimir Putin first rose to the presidency. Placing increasing
restraints on Russia's communicative and regulative institutions, Putin was reelected
by a landslide vote, and began a campaign to suppress the independence ofRussia's
noncivil elites. See Richard Pipes, "Flight from Freedom."
62. Majid Al-Haj and Elihu Katz, "Peace: Arab and Jewish Attitudes,"Jerusalem
Post, August 4, 1989, p. 8.
63. This distinction recalls the antithesis between functional and communicative
interests that Jurgen Habermas developed in Theory of Communicative Action. My
approach differs because of the cultural-performative perspective I bring to bear:
the critical issue is not whether an organization actually is civil but whether it must
enter into the civil sphere to justifY its aims and interests. Its ambitions may, in fact,
be anticivil, and its discourse may employ highly polluting rhetoric. The issue is not
whether speech is really strategic-being really strategic, in Habermas's perspective,
means it cannot be truly communicative-but whether actors in the civil sphere
must present their strategic interests in terms of an ethical discourse such that the
attribution, e.g., ofbeing "Machiavellian," pollutes them and prevents their strategic
interests from being realized.
64. See Herbst's study of how congressional staffers relate to public opinion:
Staffers find that the public and public opinion are fairly amorphous entities,
and some staffers exhibit a fair degree of impatience with knowledge levels
among the general public, so lobbyists seem to them a reasonable and
appropriate stand-in for the public. In response to my open-ended question
about the meaning of "public," one staffer said: "I immediately think of
interest groups. That's how we gauge our public opinion.... I rarely am
clueless about where that constituency is because of the interest groups
keeping me informed.... I would have to say that from a public opinion
standpoint, we don't really care what the average Joe thinks. I don't say that
as if we're not representing them, but we're representing the people who
586
NOTES TO PAGES 93-97
represent them. It's one step removed from the general public." (Reading
Public Opinion, p. 53)
Herbst concludes that, for these political elites, "lobbyists are perceived to
crystallize or clarifY the content of intensity of vague public moods" (p. 53).
65. For a broader theoretical understanding of this specifYing and translating of
general civil codes, see my discussion of the role that ideological "shifters" play in
the construction and destruction of civil power, in chapter 6.
66. Quoted in Skocpol, Boomerang, pp. I and I 16, emphasis added.
67· Ibid., pp. 4-5 and 75·
68. Ibid., commentator quoted on p. ro.
69. Ibid., p. 136.
70. Ibid., p. 141.
71. Ibid., pp. 134,76.
72. Ibid., p. 136.
73. Ibid. Though Skocpol's careful empirical analysis supplies the data from which
this analysis is drawn, she herself would not agree with the discursive focus and the
emphasis on communicative institutions that I present here. She presents, instead, a
more "structural" focus, suggesting (I) that the fiscal resources and strategy available
to Clinton forced him to offer a complex plan without financial incentives to the
middle class and (2) that the nature of civil associations had changed in a manner
that made citizen involvement in progressive movements more difficult. "The
changing organizational and resource patterns in U.S. politics and society make
certain kinds ofpolitical communication, mobilization, and alliance formation more
or less feasible," she wrote, with the result that "President Clinton's options for
explaining his health care reform plan to his fellow citizens ... were sharply limited
by the groups and technologies at work in the contemporary U.S. civic life" (pp. 83-
84). For criticism of the kind ofstate- and resource-centered approach that Skocpol
has introduced into the contemporary analysis of politics, see my discussion of the
tradition of Thracymachus in chapter 3 and chapter 6.
74. The campaign for the Patient's Bill of Rights was pushed by such issueoriented
civil associations as "Public Citizen." Its Web site (http://www.citizen
.org/), headlined by the banner "Protecting Health, Safety, and Democracy,"justifies
the Bill ofRights by polluting health maintenance organizations in strikinglyanticivil
terms: "When death or serious injury occurs because ofan HMO's decision to deny
necessary or appropriate medical care, the patient or surviving family members
should have the right to go to court to seek redress and the insurer should be held
accountable for the consequences of negligent or reckless decisions."
75. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Part II, chaps. 5-7.
76. Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society, pp. xxxi-lix.
NOTES TO PAGES 97-101
77. Arendt, On Revolution; Habermas, Structural Traniformation, pp. 35-43.
78. Kornhauser, Politics ofMass Society; C. Wright Mills, Power Elite.
79. Banton, "Voluntary Associations."
80. Sills, International Encyclopedia ofthe Social Sciences, p. 363.
81. Putnam, Making Democracy VVork, "Bowling Alone," and Bowling Alone.
82. Jean Cohen, "Does Voluntary Association Make Democracy Work?" p. 268.
83. This purely associational, CSI emphasis on nonstate groups as, in themselves,
carriers of democracy and civil society has also been articulated by contemporary
sociologists in the language of networks. Harrison White, for example, speaks of
publics as "interstitial social spaces which ease transitions between specific domains
[by] decoupling actors from the pattern of specific relations and understandings
embedded with[in] any particular domain and network" ("Where Do Languages
Come From?" Pre-Print Series, Paul E Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences,
Columbia University, 1995, p. 4). Drawing attention to the relevance ofthis network
approach of White, and connecting it more explicitly with the Habermasian idea
of deliberative publics, Emirbayer and Sheller define publics as "interstitial networks,"
or as "open-ended flows of communication that enable socially distant
interlocutors to bridge social network positions, formulate collective orientations,
and generate psychical 'working alliances,' in pursuit of influence over issues of
common concern" ("Publics in History," p. 156.) Despite its technical quality, however,
this broad formulation shares the problem common to CSI approaches and,
specifically, to the voluntary associations approach to civil association I am discussing
here. The approach applies to any communicative process inside any sphere in
society, whether economic, religious, ethnic, familial, or governmental, as long as
there is mobilization ofcommunication among those who inhabit structural network
positions. This definition has, in other words, nothing specifically to do with democratic
theory, much less with the discourse codes that inform the kinds ofsolidarity
community that sustain citizenship. It does not, for example, differentiate the kind
of publicity that might characterize influential market innovation from civil associ-
ation.
84. See Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 48. The reference is to Tocqueville's discussion
in Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Book II, chap. 5, of how "Americans of all ages, all
conditions, and all minds are constantly joining together in groups" (p. 595). (This
and all following quotations from Tocqueville are from the Goldhammer translation.)
85. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Part II, chap. 5, p. 596.
86. Ibid., Vol. I, Part II, chap. 4, p. 216.
87. Ibid., p. 220.
88. Ibid., p. 222.
89. Ibid., p. 220, emphasis added.
90. Ibid., pp. 220-222.
91. Ibid., chap. 9, pp. 352-353·
588
NOTES TO PAGES 101-103
92 . Robert Gannett makes a complementary argument in his analysis ofToequeville's
discussion of the state's role in America as compared to England, from a draft
chapter for Democracy in America not included in the published version of Tocqueville's
book: "Central governments need not automatically usurp associational incentive
or authority, Tocqueville thus argued, provided that they remain mindful of
their proper role ofgiving short-term'help,' not commanding long-term'obedience' "
("Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville's Township," p. 14; emphasis in original). The
critical issue for Tocqueville's view of the state, in other words, is whether it was
civil in its orientation.
93· Schudson, Good Citizen, pp. 48-66.
94· Lipset et aI., Union Democracy, p. 4.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., p. 5.
97· Sills, International Encyclopedia, pp. 368-3 69.
98. Putnam, "Bowling Alone," p. 32. In the book version ofthis argument, there
is a similarly damaging admission, followed by the introduction of a major residual
category that belies the entire thrust of Putnam's argument about the causal line
from association to social capital to democracy:
Social capital ... can be directed toward malevolent, antisocial purposes,
just like any other form of capital. ... Therefore it is important to ask how
the positive consequences of social capital-mutual support, cooperation,
trust, institutional effectiveness-can be maximized and the negative manifestations-sectarianism,
ethnocentrism, corruption-minimized.... Of
all the dimensions along which forms ofsocial capital vary, perhaps the most
important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or
exclusive). Some forms of capital are ... inward looking and tend to reinforce
exclusive identities.... Other networks are outward looking and encompass
people across diverse social cleavages.... It would obviously be
valuable to have distinct measures of the evolution of these various forms
of social capital over time. However[,] like researchers on global warming,
we must make do with the imperfect evidence that we can find.... Exhaustive
descriptions of social networks in America ... do not exist. I have
found no reliable, comprehensive, nationwide measures ofsocial capital that
neatly distinguish "bridgingness" and "bondingness." In our empirical account
of recent trends in this book, therefore, this distinction will be less
prominent that I would prefer. (Bowling Alone, pp. 22-24)
99· Putnam, Making Democracy VVork, p. 125.
lOo. Ibid., pp. 128, 130.
lOI. Ibid., pp. 125-126. AsJean Cohen writes, "Without other mediations, there
NOTES TO PAGES 103-108
is no reason to expect that the forms of reciprocity or trust generated within small
groups would extend beyond the group, or, for that matter, that group demands
would be anything other than particularistic" ("Does Voluntary Association Make
Democracy Work?" pp. 269-270). For an extended empirical criticism of Putnam's
claims about the consequences of voluntary associations for Italian democracy, see
Mabel Berezin's argument that the areas ofgreatest voluntary organization were also
the most likely to become Fascist during the interwar period (M. Berezin, "Uncivil
Society: Putnam's 'Italy' and the Other Side of Association," unpublished paper
presented at the Conference on the Discourses of Civil Society,' University of
California at Los Angeles, Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies, June 12,
1998).
I02. Schudson, Good Citizen, p. 42.
I03· Ibid., p. 43.
104. In "Democratic Liberalism and the Challenge of Diversity in LateTwentieth-Century
America," Robert Wuthnow presents empirical data for an
alternative reading of shifts in American associations, suggesting that, in complex
societies, home and neighborhood have become more "loosely coupled" from work
and formal associations, one result of which is that civil associations have a more
professionalized, less voluntary staff. Current jeremiads about the supposed decline
ofsuch face-to-face groupings and their deleterious effects on democracy, ofcourse,
extend considerably beyond Putnam's singular crusade. As I have suggested several
times here, such alarmist claims have always been the stock-in-trade ofboth radical
and conservative republican critics of modern societies. In Democracy on Trial, for
example, J. Elshtain asserts that "it is no longer possible for us to speak to one
another," and that "we quite literally inhabit our own little islands of bristling
difference where we comport with those just like ourselves." In Trust: The Social
Virtues and the Creation if Prosperity, Francis Fukuyama similarly opines that "the
moral communities that made up American civil society at midcentury, from the
family to neighborhoods to churches to workplaces, have been under assault, and a
number of indicators suggest that the degree of general sociability has declined."
Both of these conservative proclamations are quoted in Wuthnow, "Democratic
Liberalism," p. 20.
105. Putnam, "Bowling Alone," p. 20.
CHAPTER 6
1. M. Weber, "Bureaucracy," pp. 214-215.
2. Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In," "On the Road toward a More Adequate
Understanding of the State," and States and Social Revolutions.
3. Weber, "Bureaucracy," p. 230. Weber continues: "One has to remember that
bureaucracy as such is a precision instrument that can put itself at the disposal of
590
NOTES TO PAGES 108-1 15
quite varied-purely politicaI as well as purely economic, or any other sort-interests
in domination" (p. 231). It is this proposition that allows Weber to open his theory
of modern rationalization to democracy, a process he conceptualizes, however, in
its most minimal sense as plebiscitarian caesarism. He developed this connection
between his bureaucracy theory and democratic politics in "Parliament and Government
in a Reconstructed Germany," esp. pp. 1403-1405 and 1438.
4· It was Weber who first systematically distinguished between economic, political,
and symbolic ("status") forms ofpower in his foundational essay, "Class, Status,
and Party." This distinction was elaborated for elite and class theory by such thinkers
as C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite and as a model of "social power" by Mann in
Sources.
5· For representative analyses, see, e.g., Domhoff. Who Rules America and Powers
That Be; and Miliband, State in Capitalist Society.
6. In addition to the works cited in note 5, see, for example, Michels, Political
Parties; and Poulantzas, "The Problem of the Capitalist State" and "The Capitalist
State."
7· Downs, Economic Theory ofDemocracy, p. 36.
8. Crick, In Defense ifPolitics, p. 23.
9· Polsby and Wildavsky, Presidential Elections, p. 3.
IO. M. Weber, "Class, Status, and Party," p. 194.
11. Michels, Political Parties, pp. 65, 70.
12. Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization, p. 4.
13· Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, pp. 303-304.
14· Polsby and Wildavsky, Presidential Elections, p. 27.
15· Polsby, "Coalition and Faction in American Politics."
16. Lipset, "Elections: The Expression of the Democratic Class Struggle."
17· The classic text here is Bendix and Lipset, Class, Status, and Power, first
published in 1953 and subsequently reprinted several times.
18. Lipset, " 'Fascism'-Left, Right, and Center," and, partly in response, R. F.
Hamilton, Who Votedfor Hitler?
19· Bell, "Interpretation of American Politics," p. 21.
20. Lipset and Ladd, Politics ifUnreason, p. 23.
21. Freidland and Alford, "Bringing Society Back In," pp. 421-422.
22. C. Brooks and J. Manza, "Social and Ideological Bases of Middle-Class
Political Realignment," pp. 204-205.
23· See nn. 5 and 6, and also Zeitlin, "Corporate Ownership and Control."
24· C. Wright Mills, Power Elite, p. 303.
25· Ibid., p. 298.
26. Ibid., p. 302.
27· Ibid., pp. 309, 315.
28. Rokkan et al., Citizens, Elections, Parties, p. 143.
591