Civil life requires a network of institutions. Many of them have to be formal to enable order and orderly conduct of affairs. This is a no-choice situation. Concurrently, with formal institutions co-exist many informal institutions. They derive their strength from practises and social sanctions. Many times the retribution for deviation in informal institutions is far more severe than for deviant behaviour in formal institutions.
These are some of the many ironies of collective human life. Yet life has to go on and collective life has its own inexorable logic. Consider marriage, perhaps the longest lasting human institution born and nurtured in three basic human aspirations: the need to love and be loved; the propensity to demand exclusivity in certain emotions; the need to have identified fatherhood. Long before the civil governance emerged there are records of identified human couples living together and procreating.
It will be perhaps acceptable to suggest that civil society is...
