Legal-philosophic reflections on the status of Civil Society in the context of extraordinary powers implemented by the State
Authors: Stovpets Oleksandr 
Published: September 2022

Modern civilization, regardless of what political system we may talk about, has adopted certain universal constructs of a liberaldemocraticnature, the essence of which is revealed within the narratives of human rights, all kinds of freedoms, common and personalbenefits, individual autonomy, self-organization, civil society, national interests, and finally in the narrative of the «people» as a sourceof power, authority, and a bearer of sovereignty. All these constructs are considered as the ideals of social reality: developing countriesstrive for them, and the same social values are protected (at least at a declarative level) in countries that have already passed a hard pathand reached the heights of democracy, have built an open society, a social and legal state.But against this blissful background, the problem of the state’s extraordinary powers in conditions of existential threats, whenthere’s a reason for introducing a special order, or a state of emergency, contrasts quite sharply. Including some features of the so-called‘restrictions policy’ aimed at countering the spread of coronavirus infection. In the article, we make an attempt to rethink the real statusand opportunities of civil society to influence upon the policy of the state, taking into account the pandemic situation and other globalthreats of our time. In addition, we try to perform a legal-philosophic analysis for the thesis about the fictitiousness of the category «thePeople», i.e. the problem of its loss of political subjectivity in contemporary socio-cultural realities.The article, using the example of Ukraine, contains a brief juridical analysis of how the activation of state mechanisms forrestricting rights and freedoms in an open society may happen in order to secure and protect the life and health of the population, whilethere’s a serious crisis (such as the current pandemic). At the same time, attention is drawn to the possible excess of its powers by the state, due to the substitution of the concepts such as «state of emergency» and «emergency situation», which are not identical in theircontent and legal consequences.In search of answers to the question «who is the sovereign» we turn to the ideas of C. Schmitt and G. Agamben. We do not ignorethe problem of manipulating public opinion, which was developed by W. Lippmann and E. Bernays. The engineering of public consentplays an important role in the explanatory model of the modern political process in a democratic state. Also, some attention is paid tothe problem of voluntary refusal of the masses from responsibility and shifting too many expectations onto the state, as mentioned byJ. Ortega y Gasset and other thinkers.The general conclusion is made that the modern «Leviathan» has not lost the ability to expand, therefore the infantilization ofcivil society, and the primacy of the values of socio-economic comfort eventually provoke the sovereign to usurp political rights of thesociety. Today’s ruling elites use democratic rhetoric successfully, as well as the engineering of public consent technologies, to pursuetheir goals as if under the aegis of «the people» and for the sake of «national interests». And when today (even in the most liberal societies)we appeal to the «People», to the «People’s will», to civil liberties, it may quite turn out that this subject, called «the People»simply no longer exists.