ABSTRACT
In the past two decades “civil society” has become an especially hot political topic. Ever since the fall of what passed for Communism in the Soviet Union and its client states, scholars and journalists alike have insisted that the democratization of that and other regions of the world depends decisively on the creation of (a hitherto absent) dense and diverse network of voluntary associations in those societies, even as other commentators, such as Robert Putnam, have bemoaned what they take to be a decline in the number and vitality of these associations in the very nation-the United States-that is typically taken to be the model that the so-called “newly emerging democracies” are supposed to emulate. is near-consensus on the crucial importance of civil society to democracy owes a great deal to the arguments of Alexis de Tocqueville in his two-volume classic, Democracy in America, the rst volume of which was rst translated into English in 1835, shortly following Tocqueville’s extended visit to the United States in the early 1830s. So I will begin the analysis of the concept of “civil society” with a summary and critique of the arguments of that aristocratic Frenchman.
