Cultural dimensions of early modern civil society

Civil society is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state (regardless of that state's political system) and commercial institutions of the market.

The concept of civil society in its pre-modern classical republican understanding is usually connected to the early-modern thought of Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. However, it has much older history in the realm of political thought. Generally, civil society has been referred to as a political association governing social conflict through the imposition of rules that restrain citizens from harming one another

The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is " a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment." The public sphere can be seen as a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed".

The public sphere mediates between the " private sphere" and the " Sphere of Public Authority", " The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor. Whereas the " Sphere of Public Authority" dealt with the State, or realm of the police, and the ruling class, the public sphere crossed over both these realms and " Through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society." ^] " This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state." ^] The public sphere 'is also distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling." The people themselves came to see the public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state.

Most contemporary conceptualizations of the public sphere are based on the ideas expressed in Jü rgen Habermas' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, The work is still considered the foundation of contemporary public sphere theories, and most theorists cite it when discussing their own theories.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. ^]

Habermas stipulates that, due to specific historical circumstances, a new civic society emerged in the eighteenth century. Driven by a need for open commercial arenas where news and matters of common concern could be freely exchanged and discussed - accompanied by growing rates of literacy, accessibility to literature, and a new kind of critical journalism - a separate domain from ruling authorities started to evolve across Europe.

In his historical analysis, Habermas points out three so-called " institutional criteria" as preconditions for the emergence of the new public sphere. The discursive arenas, such as Britain’s coffee houses, France’s salons and Germany’s Tischgesellschaften " may have differed in the size and compositions of their publics, the style of their proceedings, the climate of their debates, and their topical orientations", but " they all organized discussion among people that tended to be ongoing; hence they had a number of institutional criteria in common": ^]

The emergence of bourgeois public sphere was particularly supported by the 18th century liberal democracy making resources available to this new political class to establish a network of institutions like publishing enterprises, newspapers and discussion forums, and the democratic press was a main tool to execute this. The key feature of this public sphere was its separation from the power of both the church and the government due to its access to a variety of resources, both economic and social.