ABSTRACT
The revival of ‘civil society’ since the 1980s has been intimately linked to questions of democratic renewal. From communitarians rediscovering the ‘social capital’ provided by local associations (Putnam 1995) to radical pluralists championing associative democracy (Cohen and Rogers 1995), from critical theorists highlighting processes of deliberative reason (Cohen and Arato 1992; Habermas 1992) to advocates of cosmopolitan democracy (Held 1995), civil society has served as a bridgehead of democratic reform. Civil society has transmuted from a social theory into a political theory. The line of inquiry has been from the social to the political: what political outcomes do social norms and processes produce? In this sense, the revival of civil society as a ubiquitous category of current debate is strictly less a renaissance than a mutation, a reworking of its diverse social, cultural and political meanings in European history (Kaviraj and Khilnani 2001; Keane 1999; Trentmann 2000).
