The Role of Civil Societies: Three Approaches

Paper Summary:

This paper considers different views about what makes a civil society and civilzed behavior. In particular, the paper discusses what the role of a civil society is according to political thinkers John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx.

From the Paper:

"Of his major concerns, Locke reasoned that men in their natural condition were "free, equal, and independent." It was not a matter of their thinking themselves independent, for property was a physical relationship to external nature, and it was within the limits provided by this physical relationship that each individual could equally find room or space to exercise his freedom independently of other men. By being masters of themselves and proprietors of their own actions and labor, men had in themselves a great foundation of property and independence. "Every man has property of his own person," Locke reasoned. "This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided and left it in mixed his labour with, and joined to do it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." At the level of subject matter, civil societies consisted of individuals who acquired by their physical actions something as their own, which was distant and separate from what other individuals had."

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