ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of people who theorize about civil society, including Harvard theorists Robert Putnam and Michael Sandel, and the strengths and weaknesses of their work, including the Western bias and essentialism of their accounts. In the United States in the mid-1990s, the political spectrum from right to left is suffused with deeply conflicted concerns about American civil society. The East Asia of today is far more democratic than it has been before. But the best example of such a politics, Japan, cannot be our model of democracy. The same is true of the new democratic systems in Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines. But then the American polyarchy cannot be the model to which democrats aspire, either. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has been lauded across the American political spectrum, from the leftist Nation to the conservative Economist, for his recent book Making Democracy Work.
