The Withering Away of “Civil Society” and the Organization of Social Life: The case of Germany from the Wilhelmian era to the GDR

Jay Rowell (1) , Bénédicte Zimmermann (2)

1 PRISME - Politique, religion, institutions et sociétés : Mutations européennes
2 CRIA - Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires sur l'Allemagne

Our paper seeks to understand the current success of “civil society” semantics by first studying the historical conditions of its demise in the late 19th and 20th century. By studying the successive reordering of the social to the political and economic spheres in the fields of employment and housing policy, the paper seeks to engage a critical appraisal of the current uses of “civil society” placing the accent on the potentialities of this procedural reordering of the individual to the collective, but identifying limits, and in particular the risk of ignoring the reality of an uneven distribution of power and resources.

Mots clés: Civil society; employment policy; housing policy; political modernity; procedural democracy; representative democracy

Mots clés: société civile; politiques d'emploi; politiques du logement; modernité politique; démocratie procédurale; démocratie représentative

Domaines: Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences; Sociologie

Jay Rowell, Bénédicte Zimmermann. The Withering Away of “Civil Society” and the Organization of Social Life: The case of Germany from the Wilhelmian era to the GDR. The Languages of Civil Society, sous la direction de Peter Wagner, Berghahn Books, pp.100-130, 2006. ⟨halshs-00112028⟩