Bin Xu’s The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (published by Polity Press in 2022) is a brave attempt to bring together the notions and concepts of ‘civil society’, ‘culture’ and ‘democracy’. The author engages with democratic culture and analyses it with respect to the civic space and the formulation of civil society. The cultural aspect of civil society is seen to correspond to the culture of democracy, and as such the author argues that there is much to be learnt from further developing the ‘cultural sociology of civil society, including its theoretical ideas, conceptual tools, and empirical studies’ (p. 3).
The book is, fundamentally, an introduction to the basic principles and ideas of civil society and ‘culture’, and it discusses through the use of theoretical and empirical examples, the relationship and the juxtaposition of these to a democratic state of affairs. The book is thus split into what amounts to three main sections: the first section consists of a presentation of what civil society is all about; the second section is concerned with the issue of democratic culture and its emergence around the world; finally, the last section utilizes local and international examples of civil actions, to demonstrate the impact they may have on global democratic culture.
In his, admirably overarching, and well structured, presentation, the author is re-introducing the works of mainstream and well-known academic contributions to the field (for example, Adorno, Alexander, Edwards, Putnam, Kaldor, Keane, Habermas, and so on), to show the variety of facets and interrogations of this topic. As it stands, therefore, the book can be read more as a concise interpolation of those works, rather than as a constructive critique of their possibilities and limitations.
One of the main concerns about the approach the author takes to the issue under examination is that it is firmly rooted in the western philosophical tradition and there is no suggestion presented on whether these concepts – many of which were developed under completely different social and political circumstances – have to be scrutinized in about their relevance for understanding different contexts.
The author correctly identifies that the idea of civil society has been established for several years as one of the most significant and fundamental concepts related to the ideas of inclusive politics and democratization. Despite the overall theoretical and empirical ambiguities regarding the precise nature of the concept, it became fashionable, especially from the 1990s onwards, on various layers of academic and policy discourse both at the national and international levels. For the better part of thirty-odd years, a variety of institutions used the ‘parole’ of civil society. The concept has been linked to a variety of themes from ‘development’, to international aid, and from poverty, to the environment.
In theoretical and political terms, the concept has been related to ‘participatory democracy’ and the mechanisms of (neo) liberal democratization as well as to questions of domestic and global governance, international relations, and, importantly, subaltern politics and the processes of post-colonial and multicultural societal formations.
Notably, although no more, at some point, the enthusiasm for ‘civil society’ was shared by most, if not all, ideological factions. Neoliberals embraced the concept since it meant a shift away from the state into the so-called ‘third sector’ where private individuals and organizations could offer services within the ‘self-regulated’ private economy. The centre-left also embraced the idea of socially responsible capitalism, where civil society can have a positive effect on social solidarity and cohesion. Even hardened critiques of capitalist development saw possibilities in civil society, in the form of activist social movements, as emancipatory social forces acting as platforms for the development of alternative political projects for organizing social and economic space, and as potential driving forces of social transformation.
The book could have had more of an impact if an analysis of the subtle differences between various political and social agendas, was more profound. There is no real and in-depth examination of either the concept of ‘democracy’, it is assumed that liberal democracy is the norm, although, in the contemporary global system, only about 60 or so nation-states can be labelled as such, nor is there a presentation of contemporary ‘identity’ politics that have shaped recent cultural configurations across and within political systems. Fundamentally, and that is something for the reader to consider, there is no presentation or analysis of the exact relationship of contemporary capitalism to political life in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Despite its limitations, however, this book is a welcome addition to the field of cultural social studies as well as to the particular topic of civil society. Students and researchers alike may find this book useful as a synopsis of some of the main streams of thought that have shaped discussions about democracy and the public domain.
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Alex Afouxenidis is a Principal Researcher of Political Sociology at the National Centre for Social Research, Athens.