Debates in Political Theory

State Intervention in the Institution of the Family: The family is really the smallest unit of any society. A society is composed of these small units, called families and therefore studying the role and position of the family is very important in any social analysis. The family is where we are nurtured into adulthood and without whose support we would be unable to survive after birth. The family plays many roles - biological, economic, moral, legal, psychological and societal. The values and attitudes that a society will have ultimately built to the major extent at the level of the family unit of society. The family it has been argued holds the society together as without it there would be a breakdown of the values a certain minimum of which is absolutely necessary for society to function viably.

The Classic definition of family, according to sociologist George Murdock, is a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults.

Within the society traditionally there have also been many ills. Particularly with respect to treatment of women and girl children for instance. Many scholars have throughout history commented on the family but it was only starting in the 60s and 70s that social commentators who were of a feminist persuasion started commenting on the fact that everything within the family may not be as fair and sacred as was assumed and there may be the need for intervention within the family unit in the interest of justice. Feminism is a subject of study that emerged out of the womens liberation movement and deals with the study of womens position in society and how women can be liberated from patriarchal male domination. Many feminist scholars have analyzed the position of women throughout history and have again and again come to the conclusion that women are denied an equal treatment and position as a consequence of the whole structure of society which is dominated by male patriarchal attitudes and the level of women have to lifted by state and societal interventions if necessary. The differences in the position of the men and women which has been traditionally sought to be explained on biological differences and by way of sometimes religion ordained stereotypical male and female roles within and outside the family, are referred to as gender inequality.

In general Feminism refers to social theories, political movements and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concered with the liberation of women. Feminism is especially concerned with social, political and economic inequality between men and women (in the context of it being to the disadvantage of women). Feminists have even argued that gender stereotypical identities, such as man and woman, are socially constructed and not natural. Feminists differ over the sources of inequality, how to attain equality, and the extent to which gender and gender-based identities should be questioned and critiqued. Generally feminism is the ideological belief in social, political and economic equality of the sexes, and the movement organized around the belief that gender should not be the pre-determinant factor shaping a persons social identity, or socio-political or economic rights.

Gender inequality is also about power and the wide difference in power of men and women and the arguments can be made if democracy treats all adults as equal citizens with equal power inherently then how can half the society be less empowered than the other half for democracy to be real. Feminists have argued it the mans access to and first call on resources both within and outside the family in the world of work that is at the heart of womens subordinate position. According to feminist scholars the process of domination over women in society happens through many ways a follows:

(a) through an indoctrination of gender roles to children from an early age,

(b) depriving girl children from a proper and full education,

(c) denying to women the knowledge of their own history, (d) by restraint, coercion and violence on women,

(e) by restricting access to economic resources and political power and by

(f) creating a general environment of female inferiority to males. Gender differences can be seen everywhere from within the homes to the place of work and places like educational institutions. Feminists argue only a social transformation can remove this inequality and suppression of half the population of any society.

Feminist theories question basic assumptions about gender, gender difference and sexuality, including the concept of woman itself as a holistic concept, other theories question the male/female dichotomy and suggest that there needs to be recognized instead a multiplicity of genders. Some other feminist theories take for granted the concept of woman and provide specific analyses and critiques of gender inequality . But most feminist social movements promote womens rights, interests and issues. Several subtypes of feminist ideology have developed over the years. Early feminists and primary feminist movements are often called the first-wave feminists, and feminists after about 1960 the second-wave feminists. More recently, some younger feminists have identified themselves as third-wave feminists.

The Case against State Intervention in the Family: There is much disagreement among feminists on different feminist issues and even on the question of where the state should intervene there is a lot of difference in views too. The feminists of the liberal schools have argued that the family is basically a private institution and should not be subject to any intervention from the state. They have argued that male domination is not sever a problem as is sometimes assumed and can be tackled without state intervention or activism.

Interestingly the ideas of non-intervention in the family dates back to ancient times because the traditional notional most worldwide has been that a mans family is his private property and what he does with his property is his business and nobody has the right to intervene. Also there had been religious ideas of the divine sanctity of the family which were not in contradiction but in tune with the traditional notions in practical terms. In the western tradition there has been the patter families doctrine which means a mans family is an extension of his personality. The women was regarded as having lost her identity on marriage and become an adjunct of the identity of the man. Given the strong social and religious backing to the traditional patriarchal notions of family and its unity and autonomy-that challenges to the traditional notions which subordinated and suppressed women have been very difficult. Nevertheless with the evolution of liberal democratic political concepts like rights, liberty and equality and justice and universal adult franchise, which is the basis for one-adult-one-vote democracy, feminist notions of equality became unstoppable. There were many milestones in the womens rights movement but Feminism became an organized movement in the 19th century as people increasingly came to believe that women were being treated unfairly. The feminist movement was rooted in the progressive movement and especially in the reform movement of the 19th century. The Utopian socialist Charles Fourier who has been credited with coining the word feminism in 1837 (but this is disputed) had argued that the extension of womens rights underpinned all social progress as early as 1808. The organized movement dates to the first womens rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. In 1869, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women to demonstrate that the legal subordination of one sex to the; other is wrong...and...one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.

Many countries began to grant women the vote in the late 19th century and early 20th century (New Zealand being first in 1893, with the help of suffragist Kate Sheppard), especially in the final years of the First World War onwards. There were many reasons for women winning the right to vote but it was one of the most important achievements and milestones of the womens movement.

The 1960s onwards the doctrine of family autonomy and privacy was challenged by many feminist thinkers. But feminists of a liberal persuasion continued to hold on to their view that there should be two spheres – the public and the private, and family should be part of the private domain. Also that naturally there is nature ordained or divine plan that women will be partner to the man in running his family and her role is most suited to the home. Even J.S. Mill who had argued for opening all spheres of achievement & women had assumed that women would always manage the domestic side of the family as primary duty. He defended the scheme of hings where women manages the domestic set up as the most suitable division of labour between the two persons

Even contemporary theorists like John Rawls in building his theories of justice talked only about the need for justice for a family and took up no questions of justice within the family. He talks about income distribution but he does not take into account instances for instance where the male head of the household may not allow a sufficiently major part of his earning to his family for the use of the family members but is maybe using it all on alcoholic drinks or other intoxicants. Also that the women in the house is also working and it has an economic value. As the liberal approach treats the family as the centre of the private sphere (as opposed to the public sphere) it automatically means everything that happens in the family is outside the influence of the state and the law. If a wife gets beaten up by her husband cruelly or is not allowed any say in how many children she wants to have etc then theoretically in the liberal scheme of things all of it would be outside state and legal action. Some liberal feminists have accepted some role for church and religious organisations or non-governmental social work organisations but not the state or the law. But extreme liberal would even keep the civil society out and not just the state.

On the whole liberal feminists lay stress on compromising with what they fees as biologically fixed roles. Also some of them feel womens rile as mothers and nurturers are sentimentally and emotionally incompatible with political and social roles in the public space. They accept that women do an unfairly larger share of the domestic chores for instance but their prescription is to encourage men to voluntarily share a larger share of the burden. Also they say all problems should mutually amicably settled between husband and wife. They agree the family institution needs reforms but they want it to happen as a process of human evolution without state or public intervention. That is the way to preserve the richness of the family institution in their view which would otherwise be threatened.

The Case for State Intervention in the Family: Other schools of thought like the radical schools of feminism do not agree with the natural separation of public and private spheres as argued by the liberals but argue that women have been subordinated and kept suppressed historically by patriarchal male designed social structures in which women have not been treated as full human beings with full rights and all economic and political power have been cornered by men. Also that the institution of marriage and family as they exists fundamentally supports the oppression of women and encourages patriarchy. The family is basically a receptacle for traditional values that ordain women to a life of chains like in a prison. This is so because the family breeds economic dependency in women and encourages her subtly to devalue her work and not demand full credit for it. It is not enough to have neutral policies for recruitment etc in educational institutions and work places or absence of public discrimination but it also important to enter the arena of the family and deal with the devaluation of womens work inside the home or the absence of its recognition and issues like domestic violence etc. They have argued the personal of the women is also political because otherwise there is injustice that will be allowed to go on. They reject e notion that a right to privacy means nobody outside the family can interfere into the family whatever happens. The state according to them should intervene via legislations and state policy. Privacy should not be allowed to stop reform measures from working out for the benefit of women and to liberate and protect women. Privacy and similar traditional notions associated with the family institution has only deprived women from realising their identity, autonomy, control of their lives and capacity to define themselves as persons. Further there is no formal public recognition, economic or social, of the work that women do inside homes. They argue the devaluation of womens work in the home is part of the general devaluation of the work that women do. Women are not paid for the work they do either by the state or by the families. In fact the women just is positioned like a slave to her husband who is the master of her body and soul. The fact that men dont share house-work is not a matter of lack of balance in the relationship between husband and wife but is just an aspect of the general oppression of women which also includes such things as wife beating or assault. Women are almost like a separate class of oppressed human beings.

Radical feminists stress on lack of economic empowerment but also on domestic violence to understand how women are oppressed. Gloria Steinem, a radical feminist has commented: Patriarchy requires violence or the threat of violence in order maintain itself. The most dangerous situation for women is not an unknown man in the street or even the enemy in war time, but a husband or lover in the isolation of her home.

Persistence of domestic violence worldwide has made the case of radical feminists stronger that the family is nothing but a socia-political power domination of women as a class. The traditional notion that a family is a place for private nurturing and loving relationships crumbles when women face brutal domestic violence from husbands and lovers and are sometimes even killed mainly because men choose to be violent to exercise power. Men have been conditioned socially to feel they have the right to own and control the women in their lives and can discipline women by resorting to violence. Of course women will tend to suffer this violence much less if women are economically and legally sufficiently empowered.

1949. H. Marshalls Social Citizenship is a political concept first highlighted in his essay, Citizenship and the Social Class in 1949.

Overview

Marshalls concept defines the social responsibilities the state has to its citizens or, as Marshall puts it, from (granting) the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society. One of the key points made by Marshall is his belief in an evolution of rights in England acquired via citizenship, from civil rights in the eighteenth [century], political in the nineteenth, and social in the twentieth. This evolution however, has been criticized by many for only being from the perspective of the white working man. Marshall concludes his essay with three major factors for the evolution of social rights and for their further evolution, listed below:

1. The lessening of the income gap
2. The great extension of the area of common culture and common experience
3. An enlargement of citizenship and more rights granted to these citizens. Many of the social responsibilities of a state have since become a major part of many states policies (see United States Social Security). However, these have also become controversial issues as there is a debate over whether a citizen truly has the right to education and even more so, to social welfare.

Criticism

From neo-liberals: Neo-Liberal (Free-Market) ideology (asserts) that state abstention from economic protection is the foundation of a good society, thus they are diametrically opposed to the social rights proposed by Marshall, Neo-liberals instead suggest that welfare programs (some of the social responsibilities discussed by Marshall to help the poor effectively utilize their civil and political rights), have promoted passivity among the poor, without actually improving their chances, and created a culture of dependency. They instead suggest (and have implemented) welfare requiring fulfillment of obligations.

Proponents of social citizenship are very critical of the Neo-Liberal ideology, suggesting that it is an assault on the very principle of citizenship, and that the Neo-Liberal institution of fulfillment of obligations as requirement for citizenship, because they suggest that citizenship is inherent and that that is only appropriate to demand fulfillment of the responsibilities after the right to participate is achieved.

From feminists: Some feminist scholars argue that Marshalls essay only reflects the perspective of working class white males. His assertion that in England all people were free and had civil rights is false, as only men had any legal freedom or ability to exercise political or civil rights. Thus, they argue that Marshall fails to discuss the issue of second-class citizens and that he takes for granted the gender and racial hierarchies within society is a fundamental flaw in his work.

However, while Marshall did not discuss the problems associated with having second-class citizenry, he did acknowledge that citizenship itself [has) functioned as an architect of social inequality. Additionally, many feminists see the expansion of social rights as an inherently good thing; especially as today; women in many countries have the same civil and political rights as men. And, feminists see social rights as giving an opportunity to many women to utilize their civil and political rights (just as Marshall suggests white men in England in the 1940s are able to do). Especially as current free-market solutions ſembrace] a racialized, genderized, and class-biased vision of social equity and community solidarity that favors the interests of the most privileged members of society. Without resources, traditional hierarchies, with white men at the top, are unable to be combated.

The Contract-Charity Dichotomy: Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon in the essay Contract versus Charity: Why is there no Social Citizenship in the United States? expanded on T. H. Marshalls original proposition to look at how gender inequality has led to a dismissal of social citizenship within the United States. They argue that, because men were more powerful in civil society, within the male sphere contractual relations dominated, especially in regards to work with wage contracts. Gradually, the male sphere began to dominate more and more of human relations, and thus contractual relations encroached on more and more areas. Because of the hegemony of contract... a specifically modern conception of charity was generated as a complementary other. Thus, welfare and helping the unfortunate became seen as a form of charity, rather than as an obligation. Because of this viewpoint, the receivers of charity were stigmatized for not earning the charity.

Fraser and Gordon also offer a solution to allowing social citizenship to  gain popularity within the United States. They suggest that concentrating the focus of civil citizenship from property-centered to a more solidaristic form would allow citizens to reestablish ties with their community, something they believe is essential for citizens to have in order to believe in welfare and social citizenship as a whole.

Conclusion: T.H. Marshall published his essay in 1949 and it has had a huge impact on many of the citizenship debates which have followed it. Though the original essay fails to view perspectives other than that of a working class white male, social citizenship not only can be but has been applied to myriad peoples. The United States has become disillusioned by  the idea of social citizenship, but many industrialized states view social citizenship as their responsibility, even providing welfare outside of their own borders. Marshalls articulation of the idea of social citizenship was vital to the ideas proliferation.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting or the fact of in such a way as to take control of ones life and realize ones fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivises, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivises.

The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term liberty goes back at least to Kant, and was examined and defended in depth by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and 60s. Discussions about positive and negative liberty normally take place within the context of political and social philosophy. They are distinct from, though sometimes related to, philosophical discussions about free will. Work on the nature of positive liberty often overlaps, however, with work on the nature of autonomy.

As Berlin showed, negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty, they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.Since few people claim to be against liberty, the way this term is interpreted and defined can have important political implications. Political liberalism tends to presuppose a negative definition of liberty: liberals generally claim that if one favors individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. Critics of liberalism often contest this implication by contesting the negative definition of liberty: they argue that the pursuit of liberty understood as self-realization or as self-determination (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed by liberals.

Many authors prefer to talk of positive and negative freedom. This is only a difference of style, and the terms liberty and freedom are normally used interchangeably by political and social philosophers. Although some attempts have been made to distinguish between liberty and freedom (Pitkin 1988; Williams 2001; Dworkin 2011), generally speaking these have not caught on. Neither can they be translated into other European languages, which contain only the one term, of either Latin or Germanic origin (e.g. liberté, Freiheit), where English contains both

1. Two Concepts of Liberty: Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that youre addicted to cigarettes and youre desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel you are being driven, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, youre perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means youll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing.

This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear in this sense, to be untree: you are not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from realizing what you recognize to be your true interests. One might say that while on the first view liberty is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the second view it is more about going through the right doors for the right reasons.

In a famous essay first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin called these two concepts of liberty negative and positive respectively (Berlin 1969)-[1] The reason for using these labels is that in the first case liberty seems to be a mere absence of something (ie, of obstacles, barriers, constraints or interference from others), whereas in the second case it seems to require the presence of something (ie. of control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization). In Berlins words, we use the negative concept of liberty in attempting to answer the question What is the area within which the subject a person or group of persons - is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?, whereas we use the positive concept in attempting to answer the question What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that? (1969, pp. 121-22).

It is useful to think of the difference between the two concepts in terms of the difference between factors that are external and factors that are internal to the agent. While theorists of negative freedom are primarily interested in the degree to which individuals or groups suffer interference from extemal bodies, theorists of positive freedom are more attentive to the internal factors affecting the degree to which individuals or groups act autonomously Given this difference, one might be tempted to think that a political philosopher should concentrate exclusively on negative freedom, a concem with positive freedom being more relevant to psychology or individual morality than to political and social institutions. This, however, would be premature, for among the most hotly debated issues in political philosophy are the following: Is the positive concept of freedom a political concept? Can individuals or groups achieve positive freedom through political action? Is it possible for the state to promote the positive freedom of citizens on their behalf? And if so, is it desirable for the state to do so? The classic texts in the history of westem political thought are divided over how these questions should be answered: theorists in the classical liberal tradition, like Constant, Humboldt, Spencer and Mill, are typically classed as answering no and therefore as defending a negative concept of political freedom; theorists that are critical of this tradition, like Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and TH Green, are typically classed as answering yes and as defending a positive concept of political freedom.

In its political form, positive freedom has often been thought of as necessarily achieved through a collectivity. Perhaps the clearest case is that of Rousseaus theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby ones community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the general Put in the simplest terms, one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it is a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he or she participates in its democratic process. But there are also individualist applications of the concept of positive freedom. For example, it is sometimes said that a government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization. The welfare state has sometimes been defended on this basis, as has the idea of a universal basic income. The negative concept of freedom, on the other hand, is most commonly assumed in liberal defences of the constitutional liberties typical of liberal-democratic societies, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, and in arguments against paternalist or moralist state intervention. It is also often invoked in defences of the right to private property. This said, some philosophers have contested the claim that private property necessarily enhances negative liberty (Cohen 1991, 1995), and still others have tried to show that negative liberty can ground a form of egalitarianism (Steiner 1994).

After Berlin, the most widely cited and best developed analyses of the negative concept of liberty include Hayek (1960), Day (1971), Oppenheim (1981), Miller (1983) and Steiner (1994). Among the most prominent contemporary analyses of the positive concept of liberty are Milne (1968), Gibbs (1976), C. Taylor (1979) and Christman (1991, 2005).

2. The Paradox of Positive Liberty: Many liberals, including Berlin, have suggested that the positive concept of liberty carries with it a danger of authoritarianism. Consider the fate of a permanent and oppressed minority. Because the members of this minority participate in a democratic process characterized by majority rule, they might be said to be free on the grounds that they are members of a society exercising Seir-control over its own affairs. But they are oppressed, and so are surely unfree. Moreover, it is not necessary to see a society as democratic in order to see it as self-controlled; one might instead adopt an organic conception of society, according to which the collectivity is to be thought of as a living organism, and one might believe that this organism will only act rationally, will only be in control of itself, when its various parts are brought into line with some rational plan devised by its wise governors (who, to extend the metaphor, might be thought of as the organisms brain). In this case, even the majority might be oppressed in the name of liberty.

Such justifications of oppression in the name of liberty are no mere products of the liberal imagination, for there are notorious historical examples of their endorsement by authoritarian political leaders. Berlin, himself a liberal and writing during the cold war, was clearly moved by the way in which the apparently noble ideal of freedom as self-mastery or self-realization had been twisted and distorted by the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century -- most notably those of the Soviet Union - so as to claim that they, rather than the liberal West, were the true champions of freedom. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical conclusion begins, according to Berlin, with the idea of a divided self. To illustrate the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a divided self, for she is both a self that desires to get to an appointment and a self that desires to get to the tobacconists, and these two desires are in conflict. We can now enrich this story in a plausible way by adding that one of these selves -- the keeper of appointments -- is superior to the other the self that is a keeper of appointments is thus a higher self, and the self that is a smoker is a lower self. The higher self is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the true self, for rational reflection and moral responsibility are the features of humans that mark them off from other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting desires and irrational impulses. One is free, then, when ones higher, rational self is in control and one is not a slave to ones passions or to ones merely empirical self. The next step down the slippery slope consists in pointing out that some individuals are more rational than others, and can therefore know best what is in their and others rational interests. This allows them to say that by forcing people less rational than themselves to do the rational thing and thus to realize their true selves, they are in fact liberating them from their merely empirical desires. Occasionally, Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers. Once I take this view, Berlin says, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf of their real selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ... must be identical with his freedom (Berlin 1969, pp. 132-33).

Those in the negative camp try to cut off this line of reasoning at the first step, by denying that there is any necessary relation between ones freedom and ones desires. Since one is free to the extent that one is externally unprevented from doing things, they say, one can be free to do what one does not desire to do. If being free meant being unprevented from realizing ones desires, then one could, again paradoxically, reduce ones unfreedom by coming to desire fewer of the things one is unfree to do. One could become free simply by contenting oneself with ones situation. A perfectly contented slave is perfectly free to realize all of her desires. Nevertheless, we tend to think of slavery as the opposite of freedom. More generally, freedom is not to be confused with happiness, for in logical terms there is nothing to stop a free person from being unhappy or an unfree person from being happy. The happy person might feel free, but whether they are free is another matter (Day, 1970). Negative theorists of freedom therefore tend to say not that having freedom means being unprevented from doing as one desires, but that it means being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do (Steiner 1994. Cf. Van Parijs 1995; Sugden 2006).

Some theorists of positive freedom bite the bullet and say that the contented slave is indeed free - that in order to be free the individual must learn, not so much to dominate certain merely empirical desires, but to rid herself of them. She must, in other words, remove as many of her desires as possible. As Berlin puts it, if I have a wounded leg there are two methods of freeing myself from pain. One is to heal the wound. But if the cure is too difficult or uncertain, there is another method. I can get rid of the wound by cutting off my leg (1969, pp. 135-36). This is the strategy of liberation adopted by ascetics, stoics and Buddhist sages. It involves a retreat into an inner citadel - a soul or a purely noumenal self - in which the individual is immune to any outside forces. But this state, even if it can be achieved, is not one that liberals would want to call one of freedom, for it again risks masking important forms of oppression. It is, after all, often in coming to terms with excessive external limitations in society that individuals retreat into themselves, pretending to themselves that they do not really desire the worldly goods or pleasures they have been denied. Moreover, the removal of desires may also be an effect of outside forces, such as brainwashing, which we should hardly want to call a realization of freedom.

Think about the country that you live in - what does it take to make that country operate smoothly? The government takes care of law and order and businesses offer goods and services in exchange for money, which both help to keep a society moving. But what about other groups, like churches or the PTA, how do they contribute to your society? These other groups actually play a very big part in how your country operates, and they fall into a category known as civil society.

A civil society is comprised of groups or organizations working in the interest of the citizens but operating outside of the governmental and for-profit sectors. Organizations and institutions that make up civil society include labor unions, non-profit organizations, churches, and other service agencies that provide an important service to society but generally ask for very little in return.

Civil society is sometimes referred to as the civil sector, a term that is used to differentiate it from other sectors that comprise a functioning society. For example, the United States is made up of three sectors: the public sector, which is the government and its branches; the private sector, which includes  businesses and corporations; and the civil sector, which includes the organizations that act in the publics interest but are not motivated by profit or government.

Relationship between state and civil society: The states relationship with civil society is the key issue in political sociology. This article explores how the three most important theoretical positions of political sociology have analyzed this relationship. Marxism, elite theory and pluralism have developed through a dialogue with liberalism, so this article therefore begins with a brief overview of the liberal perspective on the state-civil society relationship

For liberals, the state is a necessary evil that serves civil society, and which is accountable to citizens through political representation. The states functions are primarily to maintain internal social order and to protect civil society from external threats to its security. The state is often portrayed by liberals as a neutral arbiter between conflicting interests. It is not dominated by any section of society, but instead pursues policies that maximise individual liberty.

Although some liberals allow for a more developed state role in such areas as welfare provision, all liberals prioritise a clear separation between state and civil society. This is contrasted with totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany or the USSR, where the division between state and civil society is dissolved and the state, representing a sectional interest, suppresses alternative sites of power.

In liberal societies, it is argued, the state is a site of formal equality between all citizens. Civil society, in contrast, is characterised by freedom, social diversity and competition in the market place, which results in material inequalities. Such competition, it is contended, promotes general prosperity through the encouragement of individual innovation.

This benefits the whole of society by improving the general performance of the economy Within civil society individuals are free to pursue their own desires, as long as this does not encroach upon the liberty of others. Liberals argue for equality of opportunity and meritocracy, and liberalism is an agency based theory in that levels of economic success are seen as proportionate to the level of an indivi-duals effort.

This article will analyse in turn the Marxist, elitist and pluralist alternatives to this liberal model. In order to map a path through the vast bodies of literature produced by the exponents of these positions, our discussion will be loosely structured around the following five questions, all of which are concerned with aspects of the relationship between state and civil society.

1. Is civil society best defined by value consensus or social conflict?
2. What is the role of the state in generating consensus or reconciling conflict in civil society?
3. Is the state autonomous from or dependent upon civil society?
4. Who controls the state, and in whose interest does the state rule?
5. How can we account for changes in the relationship between the state and civil society historically, and for the many variations in the relationship in different countries?

The final section of this article concludes that each of these perspectives, although of continuing influence in political sociology, fails to analyse satisfactorily the autonomous power of the state. Consequently they all present under-theorized accounts of the states relationship with civil society.

Broadly speaking, liberty is the ability to do as one pleases. In modern politics, liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on ones way of life, behavior, or political views. In philosophy, liberty involves free will as contrasted with determinism. In theology, liberty is freedom from the effects of "sin, spiritual servitude, lor] worldly ties". Sometimes liberty is differentiated from freedom by using the word "freedom" primarily, if not exclusively, to mean the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; and using the word "fiberty" to mean the absence of arbitrary restraints, taking into account the rights of all involved. In this sense, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others. Thus liberty entails the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom. Freedom is more broad in that it represents a total lack of restraint or the unrestrained ability to fulfill ones desires. For example, a person can have the freedom to murder, but not have the liberty to murder, as the latter example deprives others of their right not to be harmed. Liberty can be taken away as a form of punishment. In many countries, people can be deprived of their liberty if they are convicted of criminal acts.

The word "liberty" is often used in slogans, such as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" or "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".

Liberty originates from the Latin word libertas, derived from the name of the goddess Libertas, who, along with the Goddess of Liberty, usually portrays the concept, and the archaic Roman god Liber.

Censorship limits Liberty: On the face of it, contemporary society, European, American and further, has easier access to more information and a wider range of opinions than ever before. Yet contrary to appearances, a fair bit of censorship exists - both intentional and unintentional. In On Liberty, Mill provides a defence of freedom of thought and discussion which is at odds with the contemporary legal and cultural forces which promote censorship. His arguments and insights from 150 years ago illuminate what is wrong with these cultural and legal forces.

Mill provides a striking recapitulation of the main reasons he supports freedom of thought and expression of that thought. He summarizes thirty five pages of argument in the following marvellously clear passage:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction from reason or personal experience.

All four of Mills reasons are clearly driven by his commitment to maximizing good consequences in all actions. Mills central consideration is that silencing an opinion will have such negative consequences for the pursuit of truth that it makes the silencing of any opinion unjustifiable. These four reasons also provide insights into how our current situation of censorship and freedom of expression should be conceived.

Illegal Speech: In the contemporary world, limits on freedom of speech are justified on grounds of preventing harm to others. At least on the face of it, such a justification is in line with Mills harm principle and his concern to maximize good consequences and minimize or eliminate harm to others. For example, for quite some time it has been illegal in Germany to deny the Holocaust. In 2005, Germany also made it illegal to celebrate Nazi rule in any way that would disrupt public peace or violate the dignity of the victims. These additional constraints were motivated by the right-wing German National Party (NPD) planning a march marking the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII.

Denials that the Holocaust occurred, or celebrations of Nazi rule, would cause incredible anguish to Holocaust survivors and their loved ones. Hate speech laws are motivated by the same sorts of considerations. If for example these laws actually do more to promote good consequences than not censoring such speech, then Mills argument against censorship would be wrong, and his own commitment to utilitarianism would instead echo contemporary legal forces in justifying censorship.

In any case, cultural forces in the developed world could be described as promoting unintentional censorship of opinions and information. Western intellectual habits currently include declining newspaper readership, as well as a decline in reading generally. Were more likely to utilize new forms of technology to access information: we use Wikipedia to find information online; we read blogs written by freelance journalists, or persons who might kindly be described as amateur journalists; even news stories promulgated by professional news organizations make use of Twitter posts by celebrities as sources. The confluence of these trends has arguably produced a society which unintentionally limits its own access to information and intelligent opinions. This is a type of censorship we inflict on ourselves by failing to make use of available sources, until, by our lack of interest in the sources, they become unavailable - as is happening to many American newspapers.

As is the case with legal sources of censorship, the free action of these cultural forces could be justified in terms of maximizing good consequences. We no longer enjoy reading, and gain convenience by combining the activities of information gathering and entertainment. Unfortunately though, Mill does not explicitly address unintentional censorship, unless we consider the profession of enfeebled dogma, the thoughtless repetition of old ideas so loudly and frequently that other ideas are drowned, as unintentional censorship

The Right To Lie: Weve seen that Mill presents an excellent argument against the justification of censorship; that current legal and social forces in the developed world currently encourage a type of market censorship; and that this censorship might seem to be justifiable on utilitarian grounds. Yet ultimately, censorship is not justifiable, and Mills arguments in on Liberty explain why. Mill reminds us that there is something more important and larger at stake than freedom of speech or the offense someone may feel.

Let us first consider laws against Holocaust denial. According to Michael Whine in Expanding Holocaust Denial and Legislation Against It in Jewish Political Studies Review #20, Spring 2008, a prominent justification for these laws is that people who deny the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis are political extremists likely to advocate Nazi policies themselves (Whine himself argues that education is a better long-term strategy for coping with political extremism than censorship). Another justification is that speech which denies the existence of the Holocaust is offensive and threatening.

Threatening speech is a special category of speech: it is speech which is likely to result in immediate physical harm to someone. Mill deals: "No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions," he writes on p.53, before going on to distinguish between the promulgation of opinions in the unthreatening form of putting up signs or writing for a newspaper (or, we can imagine, posting opinions on ones own blog), and the promulgation of opinions in settings in which a crowd might be convinced to act with violence. He uses the example of the opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, pointing out that there is no justification for censoring this opinion when it is circulated calmly: however, there is justification for censoring the voicing of the opinion outside the house of a corn merchant if an angry mob has gathered there. That would be threatening speech: we can see how it could easily lead to physical harm to the corn dealer, the corn dealers family, and his property.

Yet it is not at all clear that laws prohibiting Holocaust denying speech are justified on the same grounds. Certainly, the same grounds would justify laws against a speech vilifying Holocaust survivors or historians to an angry mob of Neo-Nazis outside the home or office of the people being vilified. Indeed any speech vilifying someone made to an angry mob outside the home or office of the person concerned would count as threatening under Mills distinction, and would be justifiably suppressed. It is very important to notice, however, that Mill justifies this suppression of speech on the grounds that it constitutes a harmful action, not on the grounds that it constitutes a harmful opinion - because its so closely related to the mob violence that could follow it, not because of the content of the speech per se. Mill is clear to note that the same words can be perfectly legally acceptable if published in newsprint, in a non-threatening situation.

This point is of critical importance. According to Mill, there is no such thing as a harmful opinion: the issue is about how the opinion is expressed, and not about the opinion itself. But the laws against Holocaust denial do not say anything about how the opinions are expressed. If politicians genuinely wanted to prohibit threatening or harmful speech, they would need to make additions to the law concerning the probability of imminent harm. However, even then the law would not be about the opinion expressed, but about the harm being done by it.

Hence the extant laws blanketly prohibiting Holocaust denial cannot be justified on the grounds that it constitutes threatening speech. Similarly, Mill rules out the justification of censorship purely on grounds of offense. He reminds his readers of the case of Socrates. To the concerned leading citizens of Athens, Socrates arguments challenging public heroes and so revealing deficiencies in their judgments, was offensive. Mill remarks that Socrates was honestly guilty of his charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and impiety. Both were legally recognized offenses, and Socrates was justly found guilty, just as someone who denies the occurrence of the Holocaust in Germany today would be justly found guilty of violating the anti-Holocaust- denial laws. At issue is whether this legal censorship is morally justifiable. It is often the case that to a majority of citizens in a community certain types of speech would be offensive; and so communities frequently makes laws censoring such opinions. Yet to Mill, the justification of offense is inadequate for the suppression of speech. The purveyors of odious opinions such as Holocaust deniers have the right to their odious opinions. Do we find them offensive and false? Of course we do. However, that is not sufficient grounds for the suppression of their speech. If we cannot adequately reply to their odious opinions, then as Mill rightly points out, we lose our own justification for finding these views offensive and false. Our own views will become dogmatic, and we will be unable to explain precisely why we think what we do.

Free-Flowing Thought? On the face of it, immediate communication through Twitter, blogs and wikis seems to encourage free speech and the free flow of information. However, the trend for using these in place of traditional slower sources of information which require more review and confirmation, amounts to an unintentional censorship of opinions, as argued. Please note that we are not arguing that new forms of communication are either inherently problematic or should be abandoned. However, the ascent of these sources currently entails replacing more reliable sources of information with less reliable sources of information. Sites such as Twitter are grapevines where news is spread without any of the checks for accuracy upheld by serious newspapers and news magazines, and with minimal repercussions for regular mistakes. Thus, the accountability which is part of traditional media is easily sidestepped by individuals posting information online, or accessing such posts. Unintentional censorship comes increasingly into play, as people become more likely to rely upon these sources for information, news, and opinions.

The most significant point here again, as Mill would point out, is about the consequences of this behavior. As we said, in the US, newspapers have been forced to close across the country. This is a form of unintentional censorship, because reliable sources of information are being silenced. Yet the problem is not primarily that less reliable sources of information are more likely to promulgate falsehoods, but that the less reliable sources of information are less likely to engage in valuable public discourse, exposing readers to a range of opinions and well-checked information. New technologies used to spread opinion and information have not yet managed to duplicate the printed format that plied readers with a healthy range of opinions and facts.

The overall point here is that a healthy, flourishing democracy relies upon access to a wide range of opinions and sources of information. Both laws and cultural trends are currently working to silence opinions in a manner which will impede the ability of democracies to properly function. Mills point about the necessity of freedom of expression for the pursuit of truth is thus intimately connected to the proper functioning of democracy. Although we inay find an opinion offensive, repugnant or vile, silencing that opinion through either laws or cultural forces entails harms so great that the offensive opinions must be allowed to be expressed. Mill is right to object to the silencing of opinions, and his work helps us to see how our modern world is doing harm to the pursuit of truth in ways that we may not be aware.