ABSTRACT
The rebirth of the concept of civil society dates fram the 1980s, when dissidents in Eastern Europe began to use the term. The concept has also been taken up in the West, especially by those on the Left who have seen certain paralleis between the situation in Eastern Europe and in the West during the neo-liberal revolution. Civil society theorists share with neo-liberalism the opposition to statist visions of socialism. But if neo-liberalism can be seen as a mixture of the free market and the strong state, civil society theorists see both as possible threats to a 'strang' civil society. Neo-liberalism has led an assault on a number of the associations within ci viI society that ci viI society theorists wish to defend and strengthen. The concern has been to reassert the distinction between state and civil society and to argue for the ethical priority of the latter, for the purposes of limiting state power and defending citizens' freedoms. There is a long tradition in political thought of delineating a terrain of human association, a notion of 'society' distinct from, and with moral claims independent of, and sometimes opposed to, the state (Wood, 1990, p. 61). Most commentators point to Locke's concept of the state of nature as the historical starting point. It is the value of this liberal and potentiaUy 'anti-political' conception of civil society that the paper questions, proposing instead a republican or more strongly 'political' conception of civil society. Paradoxically it may be that we can best defend civil society from the state by pointing to the necessary mediations between civil society and the state.
