Human-scale civil society has been abandoned to big foundations and bad ideas.

Why Conservatives 

Should Reform Philanthropy

By BRIAN BROWN

On paper, conservatives have always valued civil society. After all, as Yuval Levin put it earlier this summer,

The premise of conservatism has always been that what matters most about society happens in the space between the individual and the state—the space occupied by families, communities, civic and religious institutions, and the private economy—and that creating, sustaining, and protecting that space and helping all Americans take part in what happens there are among the foremost purposes of government.

Yet while today’s conservatives agree that the space is important, they are much more interested in the “protecting” part than creating and sustaining. They fiercely man the wall, defending the citadel against all threats, while the city inside decays. They do this because they have a flawed understanding of what civil society is, and what is has to offer the social problems of American society. If they had half an idea, they would be leading the charge to reform “the space between.”

What is civil society?

In recent years I’ve seen two (related) flaws in how conservatives approach civil society.

The first is that, to put it quite bluntly, they don’t seem to understand what civil society is. In most of D.C. think tankery as much as in an after-church conversation in Oklahoma, “civil society” seems to be a euphemism for “religion and family” (example here). There are lots of conversations about those things in conservative circles. There aren’t many about the countless other pieces that make up, or have made up, civil society: philanthropy, nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurship, fraternal organizations, and the like (a list that is constantly changing with time, contrary to conservative conceptions of civil society as a monolithic thing).

The second is that across this board, caring about civil society usually seems to amount to protecting its existence, rather than shaping how it works. The primary reason for the “space between,” the assumption goes, is to serve as a buffer between the individual and government. Civil society is a naturally occurring collection of “spontaneous orders” (libertarian hero Friedrich Hayek’s words) that need not and should not be shaped or directed intentionally (at least not by the government); as with the free market itself, simply preserving it will allow it to fulfill its purpose. The irony here is that this conception of civil society dates back to Enlightenment liberals—eventually Hegel and Marx would understand civil society as essentially market forces that insulate the individual from the state (and God forbid conservatives should mess with market forces!).

Yet the notion of civil society is much older than Hegel, and much older than the Enlightenment individual-vs.-state conceptual dynamic. It dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Cicero viewed it as one of two ways (along with republican government) in which civilized people worked together to shape their collective existence. In this view, it’s not enough that civil society exists—how it functions, and to what ends, are questions of importance equal to the legislative debates that make national news today. In a healthy view of civil society, arguing that government shouldn’t solve a problem because “civil society can do it” isn’t enough—the conversation must continue into how civil society will solve it, and it must continue in the institutions of civil society itself.

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