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This article contains information related to civil services. Between 1750 and 1850 the term civil services emerged as the key concept in Western political thought. Till then, civil society was used synonymously with that of the state. A member of the civil society was also expected to be a citizen of the state and under obligation to act in accordance with its laws and without harming other citizens. This perception remained dominant till the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain, France and Germany. The concern at this time is with the nature of civil services and the limits of state action. About Civil Services, a concept originated within liberalism with an attempt to undermine absolutism. The concept was introduced into modern European political philosophy through the Latin translations of the Aristotelian Greek term, which for Aristotle, is the ethical-political community of free and equal citizens in ruling and being ruled under a legally defined system of public procedures and shared values. According to Riedel, the term has since come to refer to very different organizations of the sphere regulated by public law- city republics, estate polities, dualistic structures of prince and country, the society of orders within the absolutist state. However, the Aristotelian identification of the political and the civil was maintained until the eighteenth century. Civil society, as a concept, is part of the democratic revolution of the eighteenth century as a bulwark against the absolutism of the state. It reflects the new spirit of the Enlightenment espousing the cause of liberal individualism. The Greek view, as exemplified in Aristotle’s writings, used the term koinonia that includes the notions of association, community and society, and there was no evidence of separate terms for each of these words. Aristotle’s main concern, according to Runciman, is not ‘between society and the State but between the private or familial and the political-cum-social’. However about civil services exam, in the context of developing a philosophy of what constitutes the political, Aristotle provides a series of distinctions that indicates the difference between political society and the society of citizens. Aristotle points out that a number of natural associations are formed for some good purpose and the highest of them all, is the state that has to be distinguished from the household which arises naturally out of a union of male and female for the satisfaction of daily needs. Within the household, there is a natural hierarchy of the husband over the wife and master over the slave. A cluster of households form a village and several villages together constitute the city-state that ensures economic and political independence. The state comes into being for the sake of life but continues for the sake of good life. It is established as an ideological end of other associations. The state exists by nature since ‘man by nature is a political animal’, for human beings alone have perceptions of good and evil, just and unjust.
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