Western states rest on strong civil society while Russia’s state stood alone

Evidence

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: This is the core definition of civil society as a defensive structure distinct from the state — the fortress/earthwork metaphor is gramscian vocabulary the reader needs verbatim.
• XREF: The civil-society-as-fortresses image feeds directly into later hegemony and common-sense theories of how power is sedimented in everyday institutions rather than only in the state.