ABSTRACT
Among the many current disagreements about the definition and use of the concept ‘civil society’, not the least is whether a market economy properly belongs to it or not. Those who wish to include it can point to the development of the civil society concept within eighteenth-century political economy, to designate a sphere of autonomous economic activity and social coordination independent of the state, which also formed an integral part of a liberal constitutional order.1 For these theorists a market economy continues to form an essential element of the freely associative life which underpins democratic political institutions.2 Those on the other hand who wish to exclude the market from civil society argue that the economic domain, involving the pursuit of essentially private, self-regarding interests in consumption and accumulation, should be distinguished from the sphere of public deliberation and collective organization concerning matters of the common interest, which is civil society proper; it is the latter form of associative life that is important, not only for the health of democratic institutions, but as a site for the exercise of democracy in its own right. Indeed, in idealized versions of this argument, civil society becomes the authentic sphere of democratic participation and debate, in contrast to the depersonalized logic of market forces on one side, and the bureaucratized state on the other.3
