ABSTRACT
Civil society is one of those terms where it seems especially important to distinguish Begriffsgeschichte from the concrete development of the phenomenon at issue. The concept was not in use for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though presumably the object it describes underwent certain changes in this period. I cannot pursue the long-term historical discrepancy in this brief contribution, but elsewhere I have described how the concept was rediscovered in the last years of the Cold War as a result of a curious coalition of East European ‘dissidents’ and left-leaning Westerners (Hann 2000). Here I want to suggest that in its revived career following the Cold War it is again helpful to distinguish between words and things, between the rhetoric of civil society and the actual course of social change. For reasons of space I shall restrict the discussion spatially as well as temporally, concentrating on those parts of postsocialist Eurasia where I have some personal fieldwork experience.
