CIVIL SOCIETY
Comparing Western and Post-Colonial non-Western Experiences

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Weeks 1-4 | Weeks 5-8 | Weeks 9-11 | Weeks 12-15

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
UGS 302 - freshman seminar
Fall 2010: unique no. 63200
Seminar meets Mondays and Wed. 3-4:30 p.m., Main 220B
Instructor: Clement M. Henry, Batts 4.152, chenry@mail.utexas.edu
Office hrs MW 1:30-3:00, or by appt. (232-7210), or -better- by e-mail.  
Content
"Civil society," like "democracy," is resonating strongly across cultures, but it may require redefinition if it is to engender new publicly shared meanings and significant social and political change in either the Middle East or the West. Mainstream American political science defines civil society as a broad spectrum of secondary associations, ranging from political parties and pressure groups to sporting clubs, and postulates these intermediaries to be the bedrock of democracy. A strong and "vibrant" civil society is supposed to underpin responsible citizenship and make democratic forms of government work. Conversely, a weak civil society is supposed to support authoritarian rule which keeps society weak. By this logic most Middle Eastern societies appeared to be caught in a vicious circle. And if a weakening of the "civility" of civil society invites more authoritarianism, then supposedly stable democracies like America's may also be in trouble.
 
This signature undergraduate seminar will critically examine the concept of civil society both as it developed in the West and as it has traveled, more recently, to the Middle East. The western thinkers who articulated the concept also pioneered an orientalist tradition which idealizes the West at the expense of an allegedly absolutist, socially inert East. Students will read bits of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and more of Tocqueville, to rediscover and critically analyze their conceptions of civil society. They will also read recent samples of Western and Middle Eastern discussions of civil society and try to think more universally.
 
The following questions will be raised:
 
Books available for purchase: *=priority, required reading but all of them except the course pack have been put on PCL reserve. 
Requirements and Grading
Please be prepared for class - for every hour of class devote two more for reading and writing;
you need to save 6 hours each week for homework to supplement your 3 credit hours of class.
Writing Exercises
Short papers due (500 words each):
  1. Aug. 30
  2. Sept. 13
  3. Sept 20
  4. Sept 27
Paper topic: due Oct. 4 (200-500 words)
Annotated Bibliography: due Oct. 18
Term paper: due Nov. 17 
Internet Resources
This on-line syllabus has links to some of your required and recommended readings.
You are also expected to become familiar with the UNDP's Programme on Arab Governance - especially its civil society resources and essays on individual Arab countries. You may also usefully consult our MENA-politics resources and ASSR, where you will find references to servers from and about the various countries of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as news groups, archives, and other useful sources of general information. We are also interested in general references to "civil society" appearing on the Internet and in various electronic communities, like the Well, discussed in your on-line Rheingold reading.
 
Essential Information
 
Academic Honesty
All students are expected to demonstrate high ethical behavior and conform to the terms and conditions of The University of Texas at Austin Honor Code: The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community.
 
Violating University rules on academic honesty can lead to disciplinary penalties, including failing grades and/or dismissal from the University. Because such dishonesty harms the individual, fellow students, and the integrity of the University, policies on scholastic dishonesty will be strictly enforced. The Student Judicial Services Web site has more information in the Office of the Dean of Students section at: http://www.utexas.edu/depts/dos/sjs/.
 
Plagiarism
Part of maintaining academic honesty includes avoiding plagiarism. In your work for this class and all others, you must cite sources if you use words or ideas that are not your own. This obviously includes quoted material, but it also covers works that may have inspired your thinking or ideas you build upon.
 
Undergraduate Writing Center
I strongly encourage you to use the Undergraduate Writing Center (FAC 211, http://uwc.fac.utexas.edu). The Undergraduate Writing Center offers free, individualized, expert help with writing for any UT undergraduate, by appointment or on a drop-in basis. Any undergraduate enrolled in a course at UT can visit the UWC for assistance with any writing project. They work with students from every department on campus, for both academic and non-academic writing. Whether you are writing a lab report, a resume, a term paper, a statement for an application, or your own poetry, UWC consultants will be happy to work with you. Their services are not just for writing with "problems." Getting feedback from an informed audience is a normal part of a successful writing project. Consultants help students develop strategies to improve their writing. The assistance they provide is intended to foster independence. Each student determines how to use the consultant's advice. The consultants are trained to help you work on your writing in ways that preserve the integrity of your work.
 
Disability Documentation
Any student requiring special accommodations must obtain documentation from the Services for Students with Disabilities in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (http://www.utexas.edu/diversity/ddce/ssd/ or 512-471-6259 or VP: 512-232-2937). Please present the letter as soon as possible so that optimal accommodations can be developed.
 
Religious Holidays: UT policy requires students to notify the professor of an upcoming absence due to a religious holiday at least fourteen days prior to the holy day. Work missed as a result of the holiday can be made up within a reasonable period of time following the absence.
 
Use of E-Mail for Official Correspondence to Students: Plan on it being an essential part of how you keep up to date about course happenings. E-mail is an official mode of university correspondence. This means that students must monitor their e-mail for university and course-related information and announcements. This also means you have to be sure that UT has an accurate and functioning e-mail address. Instructions for updating e-mail addresses can be found at: http://www.utexas.edu/its/policies/emailnotify.php.
 
Computers in class: By all means bring your laptop, netbook, ipad, whatever, to class for note taking but please do not browse outside the class materials and please turn off all phones, tweeters, etc. for the duration of the class. Students who use gizmos for non-class related activities will be marked absent and asked to leave for the remainder of that class.
 
Behavior Concerns Advice Line (BCAL: 512-232-5050): BCAL is a phone-in resource that allows UT community members to discuss concerns about another person's behavior. Staff members will work with the caller to explore options and provide referrals to appropriate resources. The line is intended as "a central resource to anyone who is concerned about an individual and may not be sure about how best to help" and operates around the clock, 365 days a year. Callers' identities remain confidential to the extent allowed by law. Emergencies, of course, should still be directed to 911. The BCAL line is 512-232-5050, and more information is available at: http://www.utexas.edu/safety/bcal.
Schedule of Class Meetings and Assignments
 

1st week (Aug. 25): Civil Society, the West, and the Internet

Readings:
 
"The Glue of Society" The Economist, July 14, 2005
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (Simon and Schuster pb. 2001), pp. 148-180 (Abel's course pack pp. 155-180, esp. focusing on pp. 166ff about the Internet)
"Rioters of the World Unite," The Economist, Dec. 20, 2008, p. 98
 
Writing: Have you encountered "civil society" - have you experienced any church, school or local civic activities? Is Facebook a social glue? Please write 500 words about your own experiences that might relate to the above readings.
Paper due Monday, August 30, hard copy in class and please also post to Blackboard.
 
2nd week (Aug. 30, Sept. 1): Back to the classics: Democracy in America

Discussion of Tocqueville: what are voluntary associations supposed to accomplish? How about religion? Is civil religion necessary for a healthy civil society? How do different ethnic groups fit into Tocqueville's view of American democracy?

Readings:

 
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,

Vol One I:
iii. Social Condition of the Anglo-Americans.
ix. HOW IT CAN BE STRICTLY SAID THAT THE PEOPLE GOVERN IN THE UNITED STATES
x. PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES
xi. Liberty of the Press in The United States.
xii. Political Associations in The United States.
xv. Unlimited Power of the Majrity in The United States, and its Consequences
xviii. The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States

Vol Two:
Part II
v.Of the Uses which the Americans Make of Public Associations
vi.Of the Relation of Public Associations and the Newspapers
vii.Relation of Civil to Political Associations

viii. [added] How the Americans combat individualism by the principle of self-interest rightly understood

xii.Why Some Americans Manifest a Sort of Spiritual Fanatacism

 Part III
xxi. Why Democratic Nations Naturally Desire Peace, and Democratic Armies, War.

3rd week (Sept. 8): Tocqueville encore: Despotism in Algeria

Readings:

Jennifer Pitts, Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 14-26, 59-85, 129-146, 236-237, 243-245, 250-253
 
Writing: Write up to 500 words comparing Tocqueville's treatment of various victims of settler colonialism. Was Tocqueville a racist?
Paper due Monday, Sept 13, hard copy in class and please also post to Blackboard.
4th Week (Sept 13, 15) Various definitions of civil society: the West vs. the Rest? 
Readings:
  • S.P. Huntington, " The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, and the various replies, followed by Huntington's reply to his critics.
  • Eva Bellin, "Civil Society" PS, Sept 1994, pp 509-510.
  • Excerpts from a proposal to monitor social capital in Qatar (Abel's course pack, pp. 213-216
  • Salim Nasr, Arab Civil Societies and Public Governance Reform: An Analytic Framework and Overview (2005) -download and view the available country descriptions of media and civil society and other available resources from POGAR.
  • Civil Society in the Arab Region and other articles in The International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, 9: 2 (April 2007)

Writing: Write up to 500 words about Sam Huntington's "clash of civilizations?"--do you think Tocqueville's "art of association" can be practiced in non-Western postcolonial settings?

Paper due Monday, Sept 20, hard copy in class and please also post to Blackboard. Be thinking of which Arab country (with readily available materials) you wish to study.
 
Suggested reading to think about the country you may wish to study:
See supplementary update survey of Arab civil society (2007). Making NGOs for civil society is big business in the Arab world for outsiders - take a look at the "NGO Capacity Building Handbook" by the Search for Common Ground, which also makes videos of the Team of "characters on a football team who must overcome their differences – be they cultural, ethnic, religious, tribal, racial or socio-economic – in order to work together to win the game."
And to get a sense of Saad eddin Ibrahim's conception of civil society, you could look at his Civil Society web site
And a quick additional suggested reading about the media in Egypt today: Negar Azimi, Bloggers Against Torture, The Nation, Feb. 19, 2007.  
5th week (Sept 20, 22): Mainstream Civil Society and Western Democracy:
how politics are supposed to work....
 
Reading:
Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1993, page 3 (omitted by accident from Abel's course pack - just right click and rotate to right side up!), pp 4-16 [map of Italy p14], 83-120, 181-185
Writing: As you think about your country, is it more like Northern or Southern Italy? Why? To answer this question, you first need to specify the differences between N and S Italy as depicted by Putnam.
Paper, 500 words, due Monday, Sept 27, hard copy in class and please also post to Blackboard.
6th week (Sept 27, 29): The Challenge of Islam to Civil Society
Must civil society be secular? What did Tocqueville think? What does Ibn Khaldun say about religion and asabiya?
Readings:
 
  • Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah - (An Introduction to History), pp. 5-9, 91-99, 123, 136-138, 141-142, 146-149, 230-242
  • Abdou Filali-Ansari, State, Society and Creed: Reflections on the Maghreb, in Amyn B. Sajoo, Civil Society in the Muslim World (Tauris, 2002), pp. 294-318
Suggested:
 
Ibn Khaldun biography (Encylopedia of Islam, 1999)
Hasan Hanafi, Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society: A Reflective Islamic Approach, in S Chambers and W. Kymlicka, Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton, 2002), pp. 171-189.
Francois Burgat, Islamism in the Shadow of el-Qaeda (UT Press, 2008)
Please take another look at POGAR for further analyses of civil society in the Arab world, also your country sources from Week 4.
 
Writing: your term paper topic - (200-500 words) - due Oct. 4 (hard copy and post to Blackboard)
7th week - Monday, Oct 4: Research Methods behind UT "Gem" of a Library
7th week - Wed., Oct 6: "Islam is the Solution!"
Discussion of various currents of Islam. What is Islamic "fundamentalism" and how united are Islamist political movements? Under what conditions may the more flexible, "liberal" elements control the more radical elements?
 
Readings:
Seyed Mohammad Khatami, Islam, Dialogue and Civil Society, chapter 10
Ellis Goldberg, "Smashing Idols and the State," Comparative Studies in History and Society (1991), 3-35
 
8th week (Oct 11, 13): Review session and midterm exam
 
Writing: Annotated bibliography due Oct. 18
9th week (Oct 18, 20): Civil Society and Democracy?
Readings:
 
Amaney A. Jamal, Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World pp. 1-95 (and my review -optional!)
 
Suggested readings:
Freedom House, FREEDOM IN THE WORLD 2002: THE DEMOCRACY GAP
Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy, Islamists in Politics: the Dynamics of Participation, Carnegie Working Paper, December 2008
 
10th week (Oct. 25, 27): The Algerian Exception?
Discussion of Algeria viewed by an Algerian influenced by Marx and Gramsci. How "exceptional" is Algeria? Does it offer insights into the politics of other countries in the region? Does civil society require an independent intelligentsia? What kind of economy is needed?
Readings:

Amaney A. Jamal, Barriers to Democracy, pp. 96-115 (on Morocco)

Ali El Kenz, Algerian Reflections on Arab Crises, pp. 9-31 (free class handout)
 
Suggested:
Clement Henry, "Algeria's Agonies: Oil Rent Effects in a Bunker State," Journal of North African Studies 9:2 (summer 2004), pp. 68-81
Andreas Liverani, Civil Society in Algeria: the Political Functions of Associational Life (2008) - the book is online at PCL. 
Ali R. Abootalebi and Yahia Zoubir, Is Civil Society being repressed in the Arab world by authoritarian regimes, in David Lesch, ed., History in Dispute, vol 14, pp. 77-85
11th week (Nov 1, 3): "Gentle" Commerce: The Economic Roots of Civil Society:
What do you make of page 12 of the Civicus Civil Society Index? preparations for citizenship and civic participation?
Discussion of contemporary forms of capitalism in Egypt, Algeria, etc. in light of 18th century views of its civilizing effects. Montesquieu thought that the merchants' ability to deploy and relocate capital (capital flight) was a decisive weapon of political reform. What do you think about relationships between debt and development in the countries you are studying? Does more taxation produce demands for greater participation? One argument often made is that economies based on oil rents, by relieving the need for taxes, reinforce authoritarianism. Rentier oil-rich economies would include Algeria, Iran, Iraq Libya, and the GCC states.
Readings:
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, Books 20 parags 2-4 and 21 parag 20 (about gentle commerce)
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, pp. in your course pack - table of contents, end of preface, and paragraphs 245 through 258
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, (ed. O'Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 41-54
12th week (Nov 8, 10): The Public Sphere: from Western bourgeoisies to qat chewing in Yemen
Discussion: What was "civil society" in early nineteenth century Prussia and how might it compare to a contemporary Middle Eastern society? We look at Egypt and Morocco because their associations have been carefully studied. Dare we compare Hegel's "estates" with Egypt's trade unions and professional syndicates? What about the Marxist critique: civil society=bourgeois society? Parallels with Egypt can be pursued: Hegel's political stratum mediating between state and civil society was the Prussian Junkers gentry; we can also trace the rise and fall of large landownership in Egypt....and Binder's analysis of Egypt's "second stratum." Moroccan parallels: the makhzan and colonial land development.
Reading:
Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 57-67, 102-117
Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen, U of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 1-21, 103-147

Suggested:

David Finkel, "Exporting Democracy: A Call From the Sheiks: U.S. Ideals Meet Reality in Yemen," Washington Post, Dec 18-20, 2005.
Robert Bianchi, Unruly Pluralism
 
Writing: Term paper due Nov. 17 - 2 hard copies in class and electronic version to Blackboard
13th week (Nov 15, 17): What is public opinion? Interactive publics or manipulated masses?
Discussion: Back to the "solitary bowler"--who cares about what in the contemporary world and how free are we to develop and express our opinions? Look at John Stuart Mill's classic defense of civil society and why (late in chaps 3 and 5) it is likely to fail in non-Western countries. Habermas suggests that these public spaces for bourgeois deliberation have become mass consumer markets, endangering the very existence of civil society. Is there an emerging Arab public sphere? How manipulated? What are the significant differences between "virtual" and "real" societies?....and between "virtual" and "real" civil society? If most participation is virtual and vicarious in large impersonal societies, is virtual participation becoming the reality of contemporary civil society?
Readings:
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795), Appendix II excerpt pp. 184-185
Mapping the Arab Blogosphere, Harvard Berkman Center, released July 8, 2009 (entire 62 pp paper can be downloaded)
 
Practicum: Discussions (March 18, 2008) of Arab League Broadcasting Charter adopted by the Arab League in 2008, courtesy of Arab Media and Society (from the American University in Cairo). Reporters Without Borders also report on the situation in the countries of the MENA you are researching and present an annual Press Freedom Index. We also have Global Internet Statistics by region and by language.
 
Optional further reading:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Arab Reform Bulletin (Dec 2004) Statistics on Arab Media
World Bank, Better Governance for Development in the Middle East and North Africa (2003), overview.
Al-Hayat, Feb. 13, 2004, draft of US proposal for Middle East reforms to present to G8 June meeting
 
  Suggested: 
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty --skim to ends of chaps 3 and 5...and maybe in Representative Government (optional scan).
Marc Lynch, New Voices of the Arab Public (Columbia UP, 2005)
Jürgen Habermas, “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, pp. 329-387
 
14th week (Nov 22, 24): Paper presentations and critiques
 
15th week (Nov 29, Dec 1): Paper presentations and critiques
 
Writing: 500-word critique of someone else's term paper, due Dec 1
Final exam: Dec. 8, 7 pm in Mezies 1.202 - please bring a bluebook, no comupters.
Nov. 22, 2010
Department of Government, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin.
Questions, Comments, and Suggestions to chenry@mail.utexas.edu
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