ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the most relevant features of the theoretical tradition, which accompanies the development of the notion of civil society in Western Europe, and its employment in conditions of political transformation in Eastern Europe. It explores some of the prevalent trends in the anthropological critique of civil society as an empirical field of investigation. The chapter evolves an approach that looks at the operational use of the notion and to its practical fields of application in the contexts of EU eastward enlargement. The idea of civil society is one of the oldest and most contested in Western political and sociological thought. In spite of the several ambiguities related to the historical development of the notion of civil society and even more to its methodological testing in the study of contemporary social phenomena, there are some opportunities that its use encloses.
