**Part 1**

**Social Welfare: Idealization and Privatization** 

**1** 

*Japan* 

Rosario Laratta

**Contemporary Civil Society Theory** 

*Graduate School of Governance Studies, Meiji University,* 

**Versus Hegel's Understanding of Civil Society** 

Although contemporary literature on civil society appears as a quite heterogeneous group of discourses, following Mcllwaine (1997) we can separate it into two broad perspectives: the Neo-Liberal approach and the Neo-Marxist approach. These two approaches have been based on what Magatti (2005) identifies as a "New-Triadic Model For Development" in which civil society has been posited as a third sector alongside with the first sector, or state, and the second sector, or Market. Advocates of this Triadic Model generally define civil society in an exclusionary way- it is neither state nor market. The model is neutral, so far as it neither really problematizes the relationship of civil society to the market nor does it allow for civil society to say what kind of state is needed, but it praises civil society as an autonomous space of positive freedom in opposition to the other two sectors. As has been pointed out by Gordenker and Weiss (1996), "although recognizing the legitimacy of each sector of society, this view tends to glorify civil society at the expense of states and markets. Individuals in civil society are portrayed as vanguards of the just society, as 'princes' and 'merchants' strive to dominate or to make profits"(19). Maybe one of the scholars who best captures the idealized essence of civil society in the contemporary literature is Fisher (1997). He says that "the optimism of the proponents of the Triadic Model derives from a general sense of goodness attributed to civil society, unencumbered and untainted by the politics of government or the greed of the market…civil society is idealized as the place in which people help others for reasons other than profit or politics."(Fisher, 1997: 442). From here, the warns of some scholars against the anti-political tendencies which commonly

We can find the origin of the Neo-Liberal approach in the period that runs from the late 1970s onwards and through the 1980s when -as further discussed in Section III below- a culture of deregulation and privatization was pushed forward. This culture was peppered throughout by a notion of failed state, or a decrease in the importance of the state and a belief that a liberal economy creates a condition wherein a civil society of associations autonomous from the state can flourish (Fisher, 1997). The proponents of this new

**1. Introduction** 

**1.1 Contemporary civil society theory** 

accompany the celebration of civil society (see, Walzer, 1995).

**1.1.1 The Neo-Liberal perspective** 
