ABSTRACT
The term ‘civil society’ belongs to a category which has a wide variety of competing definitions. There are two schools of thought, dating back to Hobbes and Locke on one side and Hegel and Tocqueville on the other. The former understood civil society in broad terms as a polity based on the rule of law and personal freedoms, with freedom of association leading to the emergence of a vast network of civic organisations promoting the common good. Hegel and Tocqueville launched the tradition of a more narrow concept by limiting the notion of civil society to the nonstate part of the polity. Regardless of different approaches and the definitions they spawned, the two characteristics which are most commonly present are extra-kin associations, those not based on blood or family relationships, and the association of citizens into private organisations. The list of such organisations includes political parties, social movements, religious institutions, clubs, universities, and all other organisations which are not part of the state machine.
