ABSTRACT
Probably the only proposition about civil society that few would contest is that over the last ten to fifteen years interest in the subject has been enormous and the literature about it has grown exponentially. Here is not the place to attempt a comprehensive survey, or pretend to provide a representative summary of the discourse. Rather this brief preface serves only to identify the flavour of the collection of studies in this book, showing what it offers readers at different levels —from specialists engaged in the analysis of democratization to students of world politics and sociology who may be approaching the subject of civil society for the very first time. The book’s coverage does not extend to civil society’s place in the history of political and social thought before it was rediscovered in the 1970s and 1980s in the context of popular protest movements in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. But Whitehead’s piece includes a concise resumé; and there are complementary volumes that focus on the philosophical treatment of civil society down the ages.2
