Thomas Land gives a working paper on 'The discourse on neo-corporatism as a source of the concept of “civil society”'

In this draft I try to retrace two central aspects of the concept of “civil society” to the debates on neo-corporatism which gained currency in the German social sciences during the 1980s. It was within the debate on neo-corporatism that society was divided into four sectors that exceeded the traditional threefold division of society into state, market and family which was canonical since Hegel´s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820). Although the content of the newly “discovered” fourth sector of associations changed fundamentally during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the fourfold division of society as such became a key element of the discourse of “civil society”. The second aspect deals with the relation between the state and the sector of associations within the debate on neocorporatism. The whole sector (not just particular associations as before) was seen as a functional element which stabilizes the society by assuming essential specific tasks (such as mediating between the other sectors) and must therefore be governed by the state.