New York City is abuzz and still reverberating after Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani—a self-described Democratic socialist—toppled former Governor Andrew Cuomo to clinch the Democratic mayoral nomination based on a Democratic Socialist platform that seeks to transform core economic functions, like food distribution, into government-administered services, subverting the spontaneous order of the market within civil society. Central to Mamdani’s platform is his pledge to launch a network of city-owned, government-run grocery stores as a public “food option” to curb prices and end so-called food deserts.

Democratic socialism rose to prominence in the wake of the collapse of twentieth-century control-and-command economies. With the discrediting of central planning and the glaring authoritarianism of Maoist-Stalinist regimes, proponents of democratic socialism sought to dissociate their vision from past socialist state controls. Their rhetorical strategy relied on prefixing “democratic” to socialism, as if the procedure of decision-making could redeem the substance of coercion. In distancing itself from the totalitarian legacies of state socialism, it recasts socialism as a participatory ethic rather than a blueprint for social organization. It adopts the language of freedom, participation, and justice; thereby arising less as a concrete program for institutional design and more as a moral imperative: to democratize the economy, restore equality, and remove the alienation caused by profit-driven hierarchies.

But this verbal recalibration conceals rather than resolves the deeper structural continuity with older socialist models. This move created the illusion that coercive collectivism—when filtered through majoritarian consent—was no longer coercive. The adjective appeared to soften the noun and, in doing so, not only obscured the coercive structural dynamics that remained unchanged but also, in a conceptual blunder, fundamentally misallocates power by misunderstanding the source of order that it aims to tackle. The result is not simply a set of economic reforms but a reversal of the entire logic of organization of civil society itself: the displacement of normative institutional frameworks by procedural politicization of daily life, the replacement of spontaneous coordination with electoral control, and the systematic hollowing out of those historic structures—private property, common law, associational life, and constitutional checks—that make civil society possible in the first place.

This inversion, however, is not just rhetorical but architectural in its organization: democratic socialism does not merely intervene in civil society towards the achievement of certain ends through democratic means, but rather it reprograms its fundamental operating logic. Civil society, in both ancient and modern English and Scottish Enlightenment perspectives, is not a domain of state action but a spontaneous order of coordination, contestation, and continuity, characterized as a dispersed ecology where norms and order emerge from decentralized interaction, rather than centralized fiat.

From Associational Grounds to Democratic Socialism’s Dual Engine: Populist Consent and Bureaucratic Control

For much of the Western political tradition, civil society was understood—whether or not being used explicitly—as the inner architecture of political life itself. It was the ground from which coordination, judgment, and legitimacy arose; the dense ecology of offices, laws, associations, and public deliberation that was the polity. Aristotle saw no categorical separation between the civic and the political: the polis was an organic community coming together, and all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life in a network of civic order.

Even when early modern contractarians broke with Aristotelian naturalism, they preserved this identity of civil society with the commonwealth. Hobbes, for all his absolutism, located civic unity in the moment when the multitude conferred its authority onto a sovereign: “This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a Commonwealth; in Latin, Civitas as the embodiment of their combined will.” Therefore, even Hobbes—for whom sovereignty was absolute—saw civil society as the act of constituting a commonwealth, not as a set of functions delegated downward from an administrative apex.

Similarly, Locke, who rejected Hobbes’s foundations, still saw civil society as an organic whole bound by common law and a shared judicature, the structure within which disputes were resolved and justice was enforced. He writes, “Those who are united into one body, and have a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them and punish offenders, are in civil society one with another.”

The Scottish Enlightenment further deepened this view. Adam Ferguson treated civil society not as a voluntary adjunct to the state, but as the historically differentiated tissue of political life, which treats civil society not as a realm outside the state but as the differentiated fabric of the polity itself, formed historically as manners, markets, associations, and offices coevolve within a single civic order. Law and magistracy articulated norms that predated them, just as those norms depended on legal adjudication and recognition to remain credible and effective. Civil society was not a playground for the government’s benevolence; it was the very fabric that disciplined self-interest, oriented commerce, and guarded coordination from corruption. Ferguson writes, in the absence of these organic ordering principles of civil life,

…they would enter, if not restrained by the laws of civil society, on a scene of violence or meanness, which would exhibit our species, by turns, under an aspect more terrible and odious, or more vile and contemptible, than that of any animal which inherits the earth.

Hegel marks the first decisive philosophical otherization of the civic from the polity. Where Ferguson saw civil society as the evolving tissue of political life—norms, judgment, and coordination arising from human action without design. Hegel reframes bürgerliche  Gesellschaft (civil society) instead as a contradictory stage between unity in the family and the ethical state, as a subordinate realm of needs and particularity. Legitimacy—once endogenous to associational life—becomes exogenous, conferred by the rational architecture of the state. The contradictions within civil society for Hegel are resolved only through the universal rationalist state,

Here the family falls asunder, and the members become independent one of another, being now held together merely by the bond of mutual need. This is the stage of the civil society, which has frequently been taken for the state. But the state does not arise until we reach the third stage, that stage of ethical life or spirit, in which both individual independence and universal substantivity are found in gigantic union.

Hegel’s subordination of civil society is inherited by Marx and the socialist tradition. Marx preserves its ethical incompleteness but reorients the end toward the abolition of bourgeois civil society in favor of proletarian unity under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This lineage is carried through the Second International, Leninist centralism, and later social-democratic statism, all of which treat associational life as structurally insufficient and normatively subordinate, to be reorganized by the state, whether through revolutionary seizure, developmental planning, or welfare-administrative incorporation.

Democratic socialism makes its operative novelty a dual engine. On the intake side stands populist consent, rooted in a moralized rhetoric of participation and equality that converts any visible or imagined grievances and promises of provision into an elastic stock of authorization via politics by the state. While its machinery operates through standardizing bureaucratic control, vertically integrated programs bundle rule-setting, finance, and provision within one administrative stack. The two subsystems feed each other. Each round of visible provisioning, schools, clinics, groceries, transit, and relations between people that were otherwise organic enlarge the stage on which consent is organized and provide the proof that centralized care “works.” Each enlargement through the politicization of consent licenses fresh institutional reach. The cycle rewards spectacular promises of outputs and punishes quiet maintenance or independent organic organization within society, thereby elevating authority over adaptability.

Beneath the substitution of organic civil society runs a juridical spiral that democratic socialism struggles to escape: it moves from legibility to discretion to opacity. Steering a heterogeneous society based on ideological ends needs a simplified plan, but simplification breaks down on real variation. To cope, the state enlarges and spreads discretion to caseworkers, inspectors, board chairs, procurement officers, and the innumerable hands of administration. Exercised behind procedural glass, that discretion breeds opacity: selective enforcement, shifting thresholds, and the quiet power of exceptions. This as well as the growing influence of politics in daily life and relations.

The regime is “democratic” by authorization yet indeterminate in concrete operation; citizens meet rules that are clear in statement and unpredictable in application, so the lived experience is arbitrariness with a public rationale. Constitutionally, property is recast from a right to experiment into a conditional revocable permission tied to use mandates and service tie-ins. Administrative law displaces common law: precedent-formation and understanding erode; adjudication migrates to tribunals built for uniform output rather than fit and reason-giving; legal authority shifts from congruence with expectation to promulgation of imposed ideological jurisdiction. Associations aren’t abolished but colonized—grant-reliant, synchronized to electoral politics, drafted into “partnerships” that act as delegated administration. Formal checks remain even as, in practice, the separation of discovering rules, adjudicating them, and providing services collapses. The polity becomes more majoritarian in its ceremonies and less free in its structure.

Democratic socialism—thereby fusing populist authorization with bureaucratic command—inverts civil society’s logic: spontaneous coordination yields to electoral control, property, and precedent to administrative discretion. The quest for legibility breeds discretion, opacity, colonizing associations, and politicizing provision. The polity grows more ceremonially majoritarian as its structure turns illiberal. Human relations become increasingly politicized. The space for autonomous and dissenting freedom steadily recedes.