Civil Society as a Complex Adaptive Phenomenon

I depict civil society as a complex and adaptive phenomenon. Individuals and groups within civil society interact with each other to achieve mutually agreeable outcomes, and this gives rise to identifiable spontaneous orders of economic, communal and political relationships. Civil society is not a mere aggregation of these sub-orders but a combinatorial ensemble of them in that a multiplicity of dispositions, interests and values, and relevant feedback mechanisms, co-exist tenuously, often contradictorily and in entangled fashion. This paper describes the general processes in which alternative perspectives within civil society continuously vie against each other for widespread support, and critically appraise the suggestion that certain aspects of economic, social or political evolution portend the “decline” of civil society itself. The distinct value of the civil society concept lies in the capacity of diverse individuals to arrange mutually agreeable adjustments in the absence of domination or subjection