The emergence of civil society--Is Social Enterprise Sustainable?--III.A

Earlier we noted that the rhetoric of social movements is turbulent.  This semantic turbulence, like that in financial markets or the generation of hybrid ventures, exhibits fractal properties—its swings and spikes are self-similar, flowing from the expression of a common value.  The impulse to hybridize is the root of all forms, and not merely  coincidence or some vague mystery of the world.  Rather, it is the defining property of corporate form.

The phrase “social enterprise” provides a clue as to the how this came to be.  The term is actually not new; it’s just the latest variation of a long series of constructs that attempt to integrate reductionistic and emergent values.  The most influential of those constructs is “civil society,” a term that in its recent heyday proved to be susceptible to interpretation as social enterprise.  Contrary to what today’s so-called experts claim, however, civil society does not refer narrowly to such things as NGOs, nonprofits or a voluntary sector between state and market.  Rather, civil society is a programmatic legal metaphor designed to model emergence—as is the corporation itself.

That civil society is a metaphor for emergence becomes apparent when we look past its present use among NGO advocates.   Aristotle coined the phrase in the treatise commonly known as The Politics, although this too obscures the true significance of the work.  The word translated “politics”—in Greek, politike—literally refers to the “city,” or polis, a phenomenon that Aristotle is struggling to understand.
 
Aristotle’s fascination with the city lies in what he perceives to be its metaphysical distinctiveness (I). Apart from the city, people enter into cooperative arrangements that are at base reductionistic aggregates akin to a koinonia, or legal partnership.  In a business partnership, two or more individuals enter into a contract to share the profits from commerce—unlike the modern corporation, the partnership was not a discrete entity but an aggregate of individuals whose rights and responsibilities were set by the agreement.  A family, for Aristotle, is merely a koinonia in which two individuals unite to produce offspring and to manage household assets.  A village is a koinonia connecting several households; like other partnerships, the village is nothing more than a simple aggregate, with no distinct properties or values beyond its constituent parts.

The city is different.  It consists of businesses, families and villages, yet it is “self-sufficient, so to speak, emerging for the sake of life but existing for the sake of the good life”  (I:8). This root of this higher ethical purpose is the city’s distinct metaphysical character; the koinonia politike—the partnership of the city—is not merely the sum of it parts, but it is a “whole” that is “prior by nature” to its constituent elements (I:11).  This, Aristotle observes, makes the city the interpersonal extension of human identity.  Just as the human is a self-sufficient unity with its own distinct—and ethical—existence beyond the mere components of its body, the koinonia politike emerges out of the routine interactions of connected elements to create a higher meaning for them all.

Two thousand years later the city’s defining paradox—a discrete whole irreducible to the mere sum of its parts—is routinely described today with far less metaphysical baggage.  The city, with its order and identity spontaneously appearing from the discrete interactions among its constituent parts, has a become a familiar example of the natural phenomenon now known as emergence, in which “the behavior of large and complex aggregates . . . is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few” separate parts (222).

We now know enough about the emergence of collective properties that we do not feel the need to ground them in a distinct prior essence, and we are able to recognize the phenomenon in a wide array of contexts, from families and small towns to animals, plants and inanimate natural forces.   Rather than making the city an object of philosophical speculation, we can sing of a city that never sleeps without feeling the urge to meditate on the paradox of a city that never sleeps even though all its denizens do. 

Nonetheless that should not obscure the historic significance of Aristotle’s description.   His use of a programmatic legal metaphor is a classical analogue to contemporary scientific approaches to analyzing emergent properties in complex systems—it is, in its way, a direct predecessor of current research in understanding cities through cellular automata, agent-based modeling and fractals. 

Previously the metaphors for a self-sufficient higher order tended to be religious in nature, most notably the Hebrew “divine contract” that linked separate family tribes into a sacred unity.  The “partnership of the city,” on the other hand, provided a replicable model for emergent identity that transcended cultic loyalties.  It did so by describing key elements of the process of emergence in accessible non-mystical terms—by connecting and constraining agents in a certain context, such as large-scale population bounded by its physical geography and common name, a city could function as a supervenient order that shaped the very people and relationships from which it emerged.

Contemporary communitarian versus liberal public policy debates should also not distract us of the fundamental insight embedded in Aristotle’s rhetoric of the good, which foreshadowed contemporary notions of public norms that are ideally irreducible to private interests, particularly those defined by wealth, family or personal influence.  The analog between civic good and individual values reflects how each derives from the ratio of difference implicit in emergent identity—just as personal ideals reflect the impulse, grounded in our very consciousness, to rise above the deterministic drives and limits of our material being, the koinonia politike aspires to something more than the parochial narrowness of subsistence living.

The adaptive capacity of Aristotle’s model of emergent civic form made it well suited as a programmatic construct for cosmopolitan Rome.  The Latin translation, societas civilis, was equally a legal metaphor reflecting a partnership framed by urban citizenship. The full history of the evolution of this concept is beyond the scope of this article—its influence on adaptive Christian networks framed by koinonia, city metaphors and a higher unity “where two or three are gathered in my name” is worthy of its own book; for our purposes suffice it to say that the model of a social order unifying contractual routines with a transformative identity connections took shape in a diverse array of forms.

Arguably the most significant development in the evolution of civil society as an organizational metaphor was the conceptual separation of emergent identity from city, church and empire.  We can trace the direct roots of the modern form to a series of events that now seem unrelated.  One signal moment in this history was the formation of the Cluniac monastic network, which used a common charter, rituals, clothing and structured multi-tiered governance to create what we would now recognize as a multinational corporation with its own distinct brand, autonomous from the jurisdiction of feudal lords, bishops and the Pope (28-9). 

An equally revolutionary moment followed in the twelfth century, when law students in Bologna co-opted the classical Roman law concept of a universitas to create a unified common identity distinct from themselves as residents of their home cities.  These corporate archetypes provided a real-world model of the phenomena discussed in the Aristotelian writings that, not coincidentally, enjoyed a twelfth-century revival of their own.

As Brian Tierney documents in his history of corporate divisions leading up to the Reformation and the rise of fractious nationalism, the notion of a self-sustaining identity transformed out of its constituent elements grew considerably less esoteric with its embodiment in a replicable legal form.  Hybrids and metamorphosis became a recurring theme in scholarly writing; the Church formalized status as a distinct collective entity while churches and secular powers declared themselves distinct from the Church; even cutting-edge artistic theory analogized  the depth created by three-point perspective to the collective will emerging out of interactions in city government.   

By the time Thomas Hobbes wrote his classic analysis of social theory in the mid-seventeenth century, Aristotle’s narrow focus on the city as the archetype of emergent form was no longer viable.  Instead Hobbes describes a nation as made up of private “systemes” of “fictitious” and “artificial” “bodies,” each of which mimics the relation between whole and parts evident in the human sense of self as a well as the collective political order (155-65).  Writing in a time of both global joint-stock trading companies and violent sectarian conflict, Hobbes adapts Aristotle’s metaphor of the koinonia politike to model an ethical identity that keeps the constituent parts in check, as individuals and groups negate their own self-interest to connect within a higher unity.  

In explaining this model Hobbes did not, as is commonly assume, coin a unique new image of a “social contract” the explain the origins of the political order.  To the contrary, he was merely translating the Latin societas civilis into an English phrase that captured the same image of a legal contract and a higher collective identity—an image that the frontispiece to Leviathan illustrates by depicting citizens united literally within the person of the king.

What is most revealing about Hobbes’ reference to a social contract is not the metaphor itself, which would not at all have seemed new to peers literate in Latin, but the way it evinces a subtle yet significant shift in the meaning of “social” itself.  Years earlier the societas—Aristotle’s koinonia—was a mere composite, a partnership that was nothing more than a contractual aggregate of individuals.   By the seventeeth century, however, society bespoke the greater whole, which itself emerged out of self-sufficient legal entities emerging from connections among individuals—each of whom was envisioned as a higher self distinct from its bodily organs and natural drives.  A complex array of self-similar identities patterned on emergence, society, in short, was fractal.
  
Within a relatively short period of time, this acclimation to systems of artificial entities defined by connection and constraint generated a shift in the meaning of civil society itself.  Cultural observers stopped limiting the scope of civil society to the state; instead, it became the corporate “realm of solidarity” that “set men over the animals and the basic life of material existence”  (33-34)—Aristotle’s koinonia politike as the market norm. By the time of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, civil society has become the realm of corporate market relations, through which the atomistic individual makes connections outside the family and in so doing mediates the ethical norms that reach their highest expression in the public good.

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