Civil society in the social class mirror

Abstract

The idea of civil society occupies an important place in the public debate in Poland. In the article, we propose looking at this discourse through the prism of social classes. On the one hand, we recognise that – as with any interpretation of social reality – the one addressing the question of civicness is socially conditioned. On the other hand, we argue that the process of interpretation can be treated as part of the symbolic production or reproduction of class differences. One of the relevant practices in this context is social criticism, the practice of which is also facilitated by the value-laden nature of the concept of civil society itself. Our research is based on the analysis of the discourse of symbolic elites who diagnose the state of the Polish civic society in the press between 1989 and 2019. The results indicate the crucial importance of the distinction between active and inactive, as well as civic and non-civic citizens in these diagnoses. As we conclude, images based on these distinctions are often created using strictly the descriptions of class differences, although their authors not always directly refer to the notion of classes