The modern concept of civil society. From jusnaturalism to political economy

Abstract

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right presents civil society as the intermediate moment between family and State and as the privileged place of a peculiar kind of sociability connected with the subject of rights (person). The present paper explores how the three moments of Hegel’s civil society (the system of needs, the administration of justice and the police) were conceived in the second half of the eighteenth-century by the then new science of political economy. At the period, the term civil society was starting to be employed in a different way from the tradicional (where civil society is sinonimous to State), meaning a sphere organized around non-political principles demanding new conceptual tools.