In the West civil society is a sturdy fortress behind the state’s outer ditch

Evidence

Ilitch, however, did not have time to expand his formula—though it should be borne in mind that he could only have expanded it theoretically, whereas the fundamental task was a national one; that is to say it required a reconnaissance of the terrain and identification of the elements of trench and fortress represented by the elements of civil society, etc. In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying—but this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 900

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of civil society vs. state as fortress-and-ditch, the central heuristic needed for understanding hegemony as a Western mechanism.
• XREF: This state/civil-society distinction is the load-bearing concept the Islamophobia toolkit will need—how racisms are sedimented in civil society rather than merely the state.
• SEED: Angle: Western Islamophobia is produced and maintained in civil society’s fortresses (education, media, professional associations), not just state policy—a Gramscian read of ‘everyday’ racism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The fortress-earthworks image of civil society is a paradigm-shifting way to think about how durable cultural racism is versus mere legal or political structures.