ABSTRACT
Although the concept of civil society has roots in ancient Roman and Greek
philosophy and the European Enlightenment, it was dissident intellectuals
in Eastern Europe and Latin American activists who revitalized the con-
cept in the 1980s to express their resistance to authoritarian rule and their
aspirations for a more democratic polity with a continued role for state
regulation. Beginning during the Enlightenment and extending until the
present, philosophers and scholars including Adam Ferguson, Georg
Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx have been concerned with understanding the structure and operation
of the modern polity, the arenas for meaningful citizenship, the social con-
tract through which freedom was exchanged for rights guaranteed under
civil law and the relationship between citizens and the state (Cohen and
Arato 1992; Foley and Hodgkinson 2003; Howell and Pearce 2002; Kaldor
2003; Keane 1998; Kumar 1993). There have been debates about the mean-
ing of civil society and its relation to democracy which I will discuss in this
chapter. My aim in this chapter is to examine the theoretical debates around the
concepts of civil society and democracy and to consider how these complex
and polysemic concepts were simplified, operationalized and turned into
projects in the context of post-Soviet democracy building.
