The totality of family, national, moral, religious, economic, social relations and institutions is civil society, and the features that characterize the listed social institutions help to reveal the meaning of this definition. Civil society has certain features, which is why it is a kind of separate state institution. Signs of civil society determine the necessary and most rational form of people's existence, which is based on a rational approach and democracy.
If we consider civil society from the position of structural analysis, then it is presented as a complex and specifically structured entity, which is part of a system of characteristic unification. Such an education can be called complex because it consists of various elements, with the exception of the state opposed to society. Such education is considered specific because of the connection between the parts that make up this association of people. They are built completely differently than in society and its subsystem - the state. The latter reveals the predominance of subordinate, hierarchical, vertical ties, and the signs of civil society, on the contrary, characterize it, first of all, by horizontal, equal and coordinating ties.
In order to form an idea of what features of civil society are inherent in modernity as easily and correctly as possible, we can try to list the structural units that form these features.
In the economic sphere, such structural units are most often private enterprises, joint-stock companies and other production unions that are created by citizens, taking their own initiative. In the social sphere, the structural units can be considered the family, local governments, bosses at work, political parties and other organizations created by society, private institutions for conducting public opinion research. In the spiritual sphere, structural units are institutions outside state influence, for example, the church, as well as the media, which help to promote freedom of speech, free thinking, freedom of conscience, voluntary associations in the field of science, creativity, etc.
Central attributes of civil society:
- the presence in society of private owners of a particular production;
- active development and ramification of democracy;
- the security of citizens through the established law;
- a certain level of culture of citizens.
This small listing makes one think that the main features of civil society predetermine the fact that an individual is faced with the state not alone, but as part of a particular public institution.
Civil society, the features inherent in it, carry the value of a civilized order. It is important to always keep this in mind. Sometimes the opposition of the concepts of “state” and “signs of civil society”, carried out along the path of “streamlining - decentralization and personal freedom”, is strongly shifted to the line of “unity - disintegration”. This greatly changes the general idea of him. In reality, the signs of civil society create a double burden: it unites individuals in accordance with the difference in their foundations and:
1) socializes them additionally;
2) contributes to the emergence of a solid unity of society as a whole.
The main structural elements of civil society are:
1) self-formed community of people based on self-government. These include family, business corporations, associations and other associations in society;
2) the totality of relations in society not belonging to state activity;
3) the personal and working life of people, their morals and traditions formed;
4) the sphere of own management of organizations by free people is protected from outside interference by the state authorities.
These elements in science are considered from the point of view of socio-political categories or as independent state-legal institutions that form the signs of civil society.