ABSTRACT
While it never served as an effective General Election rallying cry in the way that its authors hoped, the ‘Big Society’ and other ‘social recapitalization’ projects have generally had a good press. Some have drawn parallels between the ‘Big Society’ and the concept of associative democracy explored by the late Paul Hirst. Others saw the ‘Big Society’ as an echo of communitarianism or a partial return to ‘One Nation’ Toryism. At the least, it seemed to mark an embrace of ‘society’, a repudiation of the Thatcherite legacy and a shift away from untrammelled neoliberalism.
