Civil Society

I agree with what you say above in both instances except a civil society is actually cosmopolitan (it includes strangers). It is where civil actions of reason and peaceful discourse are occurring and that can be anywhere, but it definitely doesn’t include everyone in any given decision making process. You can look around yourself and see the civil society now (except if ex.: crime is occurring, but if justice is working, then harmony is remaining relatively intact). You may not know the people you view or hear about in the region, city, town, farm, or family, but if civility is happening then a person can say the society is being civil. Here’s how that paper I quoted in the OP defines civil society:

“In Aristotle’s polis, politics involved discourse and deliberation between equals in joint pursuit of eudaimonia. Aristotelian politics is not possible in modern democratic and non-democratic states. I will also argue that politics presupposes liberty and therefore the proper locus of politics is civil society, not the state. My account of an explicitly non-statist, eudaimonist politics is to my knowledge unique, although it does receive its inspiration from several disparate sources: Aristotle, libertarian market anarchism, and the New Left. It will aim to show how politics and morality are intimately related but nevertheless that true politics presupposes liberty and so libertarians need not worry that this opens the door for state intervention.”

Further:

“One of these is that Aristotle conflates the state and civil society in his conception of the polis, a conflation that might have been unavoidable in the era of the Greek city-state but can no longer be excusable in light of modern experiences, theory and historical knowledge. The conflation of state (an organization) and civil society (a spontaneous order) can only lead to conceptual confusion, paternalism and totalitarianism.”

One more:

Ronald Hamowy has observed that “For at least two hundred years [owing to the Scottish Enlightenment], social philosophers have known that association does not need government, that, indeed, government is destructive of association.”10 Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Adam Smith as well as modern thinkers like Austrian economist F.A. Hayek have theorized about and described the emergence of society, culture, law, language, and markets as spontaneous orders. Austrian economists, libertarians and others have built up a significant body of literature that demonstrates both theoretically and historically that legislative law and state-provided goods and services are inferior to other institutions in civil society: free markets and free enterprises, cultural norms, customary law and polycentric legal systems, and private organizations such as the family, churches, private schools, clubs, fraternal orders and the like."

Civil society is the spontaneous order of individuals associating. It is defined in that last quote as “…civil society: free markets and free enterprises, cultural norms, customary law and polycentric legal systems, and private organizations such as the family, churches, private schools, clubs, fraternal orders and the like.”

You know you have become a bona fide intellectual when people are having a debate over the meaning of your thought.

lol… That’s why I said to Giles I don’t want to get into the inquiring of “What does Stranger mean?”

But it’s more about Stranger caused confusion.

I wouldn’t get too uppity about it [:P]

The thread is called civil society, not how the state is not the government. I think the state and government are the same still. So, no Stranger, I’m not and I think others are not actually discussing your thought. Did you read the thread?

A good way to draw the line between government and what you call “civil society” is that when you ask a member of the state who they work for, they will answer that they work for the government, not that they are the government. You wouldn’t get the same answer from an actual member of government.

The point being that someone who works for government could just as well work for anyone else. But government, that works for itself.

I completely agree with what you say here. My point is that we need not continue to define it as the “State” if it would join the free market because there is already a valid concept for that: civil society. And from the definition of civil society that I cited in previous posts, the civil society, same as the free market, are active right now and are not completely imagined. What is imagined, admittedly by all that would like to see the government disappear, is that the free markets and civil societies potential is not flourishing due to the government’s suppressants acts.