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CHAPTER EIGHT CONCLUDING REMARKS: PUBLIC SPHERE, CIVIL SOCIETY, AND POLITICAL DYNAMICS IN ISLAMIC SOCIETIES SHMUEL N. EISENSTADT I The chapters collected in this volume were presented and discussed in a workshop that took place in Jerusalem at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. The workshop constituted part of a program on “Collective Identity, Public Sphere, and Political Order,” under the auspices of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala, and the Max Weber Kolleg at Erfurt University, its major aim being to reexamine critically some of the basic assumptions of recent studies of the topic as they bear on the dynamics of different civilizations and contemporary societies. II Notions of civil society were proposed and elaborated in different European contexts in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially within the intellectual tradition of what came to be termed the Scottish Enlightenment, but also earlier by such scholars as Pufendorf. However the revival of interest in this concept in contemporary social science has been largely and somewhat curiously limited to the rather particular conceptualization of civil society, formulated mainly by Hegel, in a continental European setting in the period of transition from absolutist monarchies to nations and states. This conceptualization certainly did not apply to other European societies , such as the Scandinavian countries, Holland, or even England, where, in the relations between “state” and “society,” the influence of the latter on the former was much greater than in the German states or even in France.1 139 Whatever its strengths and limitations, the discourse on civil society was for a long period dormant in the social science literature—to be revived again only after the breakdown of the Soviet Empire and the promulgation of the concept of civil society as a norm for Middle and East European societal reconstruction. This revived discourse was connected with greater attention to the concept of “public spheres” in the period after World War II—a concept presented in Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a book that gained additional recognition in the contemporary discourse .2 In this discourse, the concepts of public sphere and civil society tended to be coupled, overlapped, almost conflated, often without any clear distinction between them. Moreover, in this contemporary discourse a very strong assumption emerged that the development of a public sphere and a civil society constitutes a critical condition for the formation and continuity of constitutional and democratic regimes.3 The available historical and contemporary evidence shows these assumptions to be very problematic. First, the relations between civil society, public sphere, and the political arena are much more variable than is implied in these assumptions. The concept of a public sphere entails that there are at least two other spheres—the official sphere and the private sphere—from which the public sphere is more or less institutionally and culturally differentiated. It is, therefore, a sphere located between the official and the private spheres. It is a sphere where collective improvements, the common good, are at stake. This holds also for the official sphere; but in the public sphere such business is carried out by groups that do not belong to the ruler’s domain. Rather, the public sphere draws its membership from the private sphere. It expands and shrinks according to shifting involvements of such membership, as Albert O. Hirschman has demonstrated with regard to modern development.4 The public sphere is the place of voice rather than of loyalty, to use Hirschman’s famous distinction. Its strength depends on its institutional locus, whether it is dispersed or unified, whether it is close to the center or on the periphery. It is based on oral or written communication. Its influence rests on interpretations of the common good vis-à-vis the ruler on the one hand and the private sphere or spheres of different sectors of the society on the other. The term public sphere therefore denotes the existence of arenas that are not only autonomous from the political order but are also public in the sense that they are accessible to different sectors of society. Public spheres are constructed through several basic processes—namely, those of framing, communicating , and institutionalizing. The first process is one of categorization; it defines a discourse beyond face-to-face interaction. The second process is one of reflexivity; it invites a debate on problems of the common good, on criteria of inclusion and exclusion, on the permeability of boundaries...

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