ABSTRACT
Also turning to the category of civil society at around the same time as the Eastern Europeans, yet quite independently of them, were many Latin American radicals. For, again as in Eastern Europe, the Latin American discourse on civil society took place originally on the left. As well as throwing light on how and why the civil society concept emerged in this region, this chapter is therefore also about the central part played by this concept in the transformation in leftist thinking there. This transformation, from an orthodox Marxist left for whom democracy and ‘civil’ society were a bourgeois sham, to a ‘new’ left in which democracy and civil society were embraced as ends in themselves, has been much discussed by the Western leftists in relation to their own interlocutors, yet has been largely overlooked in its parallel importance elsewhere.
