The Virtue of Limits?: Theories of Civil Society in 1980s Eastern Europe

• In Event: Revolution, Resistance, and the State

Abstract

The 1980s were a watershed period for the history of civil society in Eastern Europe, both in theory and in practice. The rise of Solidarity in Poland—and the imposition of martial law soon thereafter—inspired a new round of debates about state-society relations and strategies of peaceful opposition throughout the region. Intellectual networks comprised of students, industrial workers and professional writers, and connected through the circulation of underground literature, devoted increasing attention to the fraught relationship between public opinion, political representation and private conscience.

In the West, East European intellectuals were received as ‘dissidents’, and celebrated for their dual role as theorists of civil society and its most ardent defenders. Throughout the 1980s institutions like The New School for Social Research and the Hoover Institution, alongside journals such as Telos and The New York Review of Books devoted fellowships, front pages, archival resources and special issues to dissent in Eastern Europe. Political theorists in particular embraced figures like Adam Michnik, Václav Havel, Mihajlo Mihajlov and János Kis as enviable examples of scholarly activism and harbingers of a new era of democratic renewal. Their discourse coalesced around one key concept: the dissident notion of ‘self-limitation’.

To American political theorists—especially in the burgeoning subfield of ‘participatory democracy’—self-limitation was a promising strategy for defending self-rule. Social movements that limited themselves to politically responsible and morally conscientious actions, and that refused state power, had the potential to ‘democratize democracy’ from the authoritarian ‘peoples’ democracies’ of the Soviet bloc to the conservative welfare states of the West. For Eurocommunists and West European Marxists, the possibility of self-limitation implied an even more radical future: the cooperative self-rule of autogestion or workers’ self-management. But how did East European intellectuals themselves expand on the concept? Did they invest the ‘self-limiting’ civil society—and by extension themselves—with the same kind of transformative power?

This paper reconstructs major theories of civil society—and its limits—developed by intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s, often in conversation with each other. I show that these theorists exhibited far less confidence in civil society’s ethical restraint and capacity for self-rule than their more optimistic Western interpreters. In fact, they typically argued that the most reliable limits on civil society were those introduced by contingencies—of time, human difference, geopolitics, and the market—and not the limits civil society imposed on itself. Civil society’s virtue, then, did not reside in its democratic ethos of self-rule, but in its sensitivity, even vulnerability to the disruptions and dispersions of chance events. In 1988 and 1989, this understanding of civil society and self-limitation would be used to make sense of the processes of neoliberal democratization unfolding in Eastern Europe.

Author

• Sinead J Carolan, Columbia University