Civil society functions as a management apparatus for social domination

Evidence

Civil society, then, is to be understood as the particular ways in which disputes and conflicts are fashioned (“constructed”), approached (“managed”), licensed (“legitimated”), and dissipated (“resolved”). It is the sphere – the mode and manner, the style, the rules and regulations – in, for, and through which “civil” conflict and contrast, dispute and distinction emerge, are classified and conceptualized, comprehended and controlled, massaged and managed. Such a sphere requires a set of emergent or already existing institutional arrangements, premises, modes of thinking and interacting, associations and established forms of engagement filling “the space” – the gap or chasm, field or terrain – at least conceptually, modally, between state and individual, family and economy. The arrangements that became identified as civil society emerged to manage and legitimate the otherwise bald, antagonizing, and often resisting relations of domination – economic, political, legal, cultural – between those occupying differentiated social (class, caste, ethnic, racial) positions. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 229

Categorization

• DEFINE: Redefines civil society away from its commonsense ‘civic participation’ meaning toward a conflict-management and domination-legitimation function.
• XREF: connects to: Social control operates through voluntary organizations rather than formal coercion — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115; Bureaucratic planning and cultural rationalization create a totally administered society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 35; Civil society institutions emerged to absorb and legitimate racialized relations of domination. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 229