Bedeutungswandel der Zivilgesellschaft oder das Elend der Ideengeschichte: Eine kommentierte Übersetzung von Kiyoaki Hiratas Aufsatz zum Begriff shimin shakai bei Antonio Gramsci (Teil 2)
Authors: Kremers Daniel , Izuta Shunsuke 
Published: May 2018

Anmerkungen zu Übersetzung und Zitationsweise: Namen werden mit dem Vornamen voran wiedergegeben. Die Umschrift japanischer Begriffe in lateinischen Lettern (rōmaji) erfolgt nach dem Hepburn-System. Alle typografischen Sonderzeichen innerhalb der Übersetzung entsprechen Hervorhebungen des Autors im Original. Anmerkungen und Kommentare der Übersetzer befinden sich in den Fußnoten.

The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for old phenomena and attributing new phenomena to old words. In this commented translation from a Japanese source text, this historical process is demonstrated for the term civil society and the languages German, French, Italian and Japanese. In his 1989 article “On Gramsci’s notion of civil society”, Japanese Marxist Kiyoaki Hirata compared the use of the term by Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, while translating it to Japanese as shimin shakai 市民社会, today a highly popular term in Japan. After having published a translation of the first part of Hirata’s article, in which he endeavors on the connections and differences between Hegel and Marx, we have now translated the second part, in which Hirata reconstructs how Gramsci relied on Hegel and Marx in redefining the concept of civil society (società civile). We have pointed out why the global resurgence of the term civil society during the 1990s was accompanied by the invention of the neologism Zivilgesellschaft, while the classic term bürgerliche Gesellschaft almost fell into disuse in the German language. As both the English and the Japanese discourse on civil society (shimin shakai) continued unaffected by this translative-turn however, we have decided to translate shimin shakai in this pre-1990 text as bürgerliche Gesellschaft. This way we are able underline the fact that Hegel, Marx and Gramsci were writing on and further developing the same concept and that just because they have highlighted different aspects and attributed different functions to it, we do not necessarily need different words for each concept in order to properly understand these continuities and differences. More so we argue that neologisms like Zivilgesellschaft and Bürgergesellschaft have in the German discourse obscured continuities in the history of ideas on civil society. Hiratas text – despite of its weaknesses, such as a neglect of scientific documentation standards and a highly metaphoric and speculative language – is therefore a valuable contribution to highlighting such continuities and worth to be made accessible to a non-Japanese speaking readership. By pointing out the dialectic heritage in Gramsci’s writings, Hirata – much differently from many post-1990 authors – shows that Gramsci’s civil society is not constituted by a set of more or less organized so-called “non-state” actors that enclose and limit government authority, but rather forms an integral part of the state in which a government’s political force is bolstered by an ethical hegemony. It is in civil society that leading groups stabilize their authority over the whole society by educating and persuading the subaltern groups to an active consent to social and economic rules that benefit the interests of the leading group, while on the other hand no subaltern group can ever become politically leading before having established ethical hegemony in civil society.