The Scottish Enlightenment’s idea of civil society then travelled to Germany by way of the translation of Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776-8). Thereafter, Hegel was the first philosopher to begin to develop a recognisably modern notion of civil society in his Philosophy of Right, written in 1821. Although Hegel articulated the same tension between individual autonomy and community as the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, he did this without reference to an ethical unity from without. Instant, Hegel sought to resolve the contradictions that existed in civil society as a result of its particularity by reference to the universal state. It is only at this point, then, that the idea of civil society is first concerned with the proper relation between the state and civil society as separate spheres. However, Hegel’s theory of civil society also gave the concept a pejorative hue for the first time. The state, in order to realize its universality, requires the creation though civil society of individual freedoms and the ability to satisfy needs. Yet by an this very process of development, civil society is increasingly characterised by chaos and inequality that undermines ethical unity. Such ethical unity is found only in the universal state, which, although it should not abolish civil society, should rule and guide it.
For Marx, going further than Hegel in criticizing the atomisation unleashed by an unfettered civil society had to be overcome entirely. Marx also rejected Hegel’s account of the supposedly impartial, ‘universal’ state ruling over civil society; as far as he was concerned, this state actually furthered the dominance of the bourgeois class over subordinate classes in civil society. Thus, although Marx retained Adam Smith’s identification of civil society whit economic interactions though the mechanism of the market, he was decidedly less sanguine than Smith about the possibility of the ‘greater good’ emerging from the sum total of these transactions. The formal ‘freedoms’ of civil society were for Marx a sham masking the deep structure of class inequality that defined this sphere in the first place. Real political freedom could only be attained if the working class took over state functions which, in being alienated from civil society, reinforced the latter’s individualistic, egoistic and therefore society atomizing character (see Marx 1977). In this moment of revolution, ‘particularistic’ civil society itself would be abolished by the universal rule of the proletariat. Marx’s damning critique concerning the alienation and exploitation supposedly to be found in the sphere of civil society contributed thereafter dominance of the modern state from the second half of the nineteenth century led anyway to declining interest in the sphere of civil society.