ABSTRACT
The concept of civil society has a long and distinguished history in Western political thought and practice. For the ancient Greeks, where the concept received its initial systematic treatment, civil society was conceived as a commonwealth of the politically organized citizens. The Roman Empire similarly countenanced slavery, saw society as hierarchically organized, and severely restricted citizenship. Civil society meant the possibility of participatory citizens living together in a condition of protected property rights providing for economic prosperity and political freedom guaranteed by regular, constitutional procedures and the rule of law. Although Locke was probably the most important political theorist in the Anglo-American tradition, other traditions and conceptions of civil society emerged on the European continent. The German tradition of civil society was very different from the English or the French, the latter of which after 1789 seemed to oscillate between statist models, on the one hand, and Rousseauian popular explosions, on the other.
