Under the most tyrannical regime, civil society is hardly even a sociological
category let alone a juridical one. The case of the East European dissidents
under Communism is highly instructive. George Konrad’s celebrated concept
of ‘‘anti-politics,’’ in which people within totalitarian societies attempt to
carve out small niches of autonomy, was a call for citizens to live as if the state
did not exist (Konrad 1984). Konrad considered a normal civil society both in
a sociological and juridical sense to be beyond the realm of the possible.
Similarly, Vaclav Havel’s seminal essay on ‘‘the power of the powerless’’ spoke
of the capacity of isolated individuals to resist the state through ‘‘everyday’’
actions, not through associational life (Havel 1985). Although both Konrad
and Havel hoped that these small acts of autonomy and resistance, acts that
amounted to ‘‘living in truth,’’ would in the long run be subversive of
totalitarian rule, they did not foresee any short-run impact of society on
the state in the Communist world. ‘‘Living in truth,’’ as a personal and
individual disposition, attached to little or no organization, stands at the
outer extreme of what is normally thought to be civil society.