ABSTRACT
Baron de Montesquieu has developed a viable modern concept of civil society as an equilibrium between political power and entrenched group rights. However, this needed to be revised in order to deal with civil society in the postrevolutionary forms of democracy unanticipated by Montesquieu. Charles Taylor argues that Montesquieu's theory was completed by Tocqueville, the central strand of whose concept of civil society was the practice of self-rule through voluntary associations at many levels of the polity. Montesquieu's concept of civil society formed one part of his political and legal theory, to which it must be related, and put within that overall framework. The conceptual history of civil society in economic terms has been supplemented by recent alternative accounts calling attention to more political versions of the concept in France, especially by Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Montesquieu believed that political freedom always entails constitutional complexity rather than organizational simplicity.
