ABSTRACT
For perhaps a full decade, "civil society" has had about it an air of excitement. This is not surprising. For the concept was taken as a banner by those wishing to be free, in Latin America and in Eastern Europe, and it was further invoked by Marxisant thinkers in the West seeking a nonstatist social theory of the Left. Fashion can mean that a topic is dropped as quickly as it is taken up, and this may be about to happen to the notion of civil society. Gore Vidal once suggested that the deepest meaning of Creation, his magnificent novel about the origins of the world religions and ethics, was that agrarian civilizations before the advent of the great monotheistic creeds were the most tolerant in the history of mankind. Depoliticization has resulted from absolute disenchantment with the past, leaving a good deal of steering room for elites to push through economic reforms.
