Civil society and small town capitalism: the case of Arni

The paper explores the impact of civil society on India’s capitalist development. While the concept of civil society is controversial, the interpretations of the phenomenon can be reduced to two major views. The first view builds on the optimistic analysis by Alexis de Tocqueville, who introduces the idea of civil society as a partnership of equal individuals that promote the common good, and the second view builds on the analysis by Antonio Gramsci, who sees civil society as the organization that supports the hegemony of the dominant classes pursuing particularistic interests. The paper focuses on India’s civil society having in mind these alternative views in order to explore which one of the two fits better to the case. The paper builds on the hypothesis that, due to the widespread informality of India’s economy, the associations of civil society are a major character in India’s society, playing a crucial regulative role in substitution of the state, and that the analysis of civil society enhances the understanding of capitalist organization and of the power relations governing it. The argument is that it is hardly appropriate to interpret India’s organized society as ‘good’ civil society, while the Gramscian interpretation appears to be more appropriate to the Indian case in which the organizations of civil society are the tools to regulate the economy, managing interest conflicts and building social consensus over the hegemony of the elites. The argument is supported with evidence coming from Arni, a market town in Provincial India in which the economy is vastly informalized and the market is not the prevailing organizing principle, while institutions and structures produced in civil society regulate economic transactions.