ABSTRACT
THE CHIEF TASK facing the post-communist regimes of Eastern and East-Central Europe today is how to create a civil society ‘from above’. No major European thinker has been more discerning about the complex interplay between the state and civil society than Hegel; no society has better demonstrated how such an interplay can be made to succeed than post-war Japan. Eastern Europeans have torn down the old Stalinist edifice, but must now attempt to create the institutions and values essential to the successful working of a civil society: this is the point where the argument must begin. The American or British free market model has been proposed as the solution to Eastern European ills. This essay asks: Might the post-war Japanese model suggest a ‘third way’?
