ABSTRACT
Experts from "advanced" democratic countries are increasingly being called upon to offer advice to emerging democracies, but one wonders whether they are really in a position to supply it. Mature democratic systems seem, after all, to be in the throes of their own crisis of democratic citizenship. The conviction that motivates this chapter is that people should think about liberal democracy as the pursuit of a broad social ideal. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is rightly seen as a progenitor of modern liberal democracy because of his conviction that legitimate political authority is created by a social contract among the people themselves. Civic republican critics focus more specifically on the relative neglect of political community in liberal democratic theory and statecraft. The die-hard skeptic might still reply that all this talk about the health of civil society is nothing more than Western analysts projecting their own anomie and disconnection onto the emerging democracies.
