World opinion

Civil society is the "aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that manifest interests and will of citizens". Civil society includes the family and the private sphere, referred to as the "third sector" of society, distinct from government and business. By other authors, "civil society" is used in the sense of 1) the aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that manifest interests and will of citizens or 2) individuals and organizations in a society which are independent of the government.

Sometimes the term civil society is used in the more general sense of "the elements such as freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, etc, that make up a democratic society" (Collins English Dictionary). Especially in the discussions among thinkers of Eastern and Central Europe, civil society is seen also as a concept of civic values. One widely known representative of this concept is the Polish former dissident Adam Michnik.

Institutions composing civil society may be for-profit or not-for-profit.

The term civil society goes back to Aristotle's phrase koinōnía politikḗ (κοινωνία πολιτική), occurring in his Politics, where it refers to a ‘community’, commensurate with the Greek city-state (polis) characterized by a shared set of norms and ethos, in which free citizens on an equal footing lived under the rule of law. The telos or end of civil society, thus defined, was common wellbeing (τὸ εὖ ζῆν tò eu zēn), in as man was defined as a ‘political (social) animal’ (ζῷον πολιτικόν zōon politikón). Though the concept was mentioned in Roman writers, such as Cicero, it entered into Western political discourse following the translation of Aristotle’s works into Latin (societas civilis) by late medieval and early Renaissance writers such as William of Moerbeke and Leonardo Bruni, where it often referred to the ancient notion of a republic (res publica). With the rise of a distinction between monarchical autonomy and public law, the term then gained currency to denote the corporate estates (Ständestaat) of a feudal elite of land-holders as opposed to the powers exercised by the prince. It had a long history in state theory, and was revived with particular force in recent times, in Eastern Europe, where dissidents such as Václav Havel employed it to denote the sphere of civic associations threatened by the intrusive holistic state-dominated regimes of Communist Eastern Europe.

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