The Private, the Public and Civil Society: Social Realms and Power Structures

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Abstract
This paper will attempt to show how, in contemporary societies, civil society is related to other social fields, in particular (a) the private and the public spheres; (b) the most organized areas of the social and those areas where the most informal relationships predominate; (c) the structural relations of civil society with the state and the major economic and socio- cultural systems of control and power. Various models of differentiation of social fields will be examined: (1) the dualistic model of state-civil society (which is unsatisfactory because it makes civil society the rag-bag for everything that does not belong to the state); (2) Freund's model opposing the public and the private spheres; (3) the concept of public space, and the thesis of mutual infiltration of public and private spheres; (4) the opposition of systemic regulation (automatisms resulting from the coordination of politics and administration) and self- regulation (natural automatisms); (5) Habermas's model of System- Lifeworld. This analysis should yield a better understanding of (1) the specificity of civil society as the interface between the public and the private and the locus of public opinion formation; (2) the expansion and contraction of public and private domains, and of civil society in a given historical period.

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