ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses logical incoherence of civil society, and the inability of the imagination to provide any legitimate and reproducible standards of the homogeneous and the universal, should not cause too much surprise. Civil society was not a terribly water-tight idea, perhaps the incoherence was not directly the fault of the imagination itself. Perhaps the problem can be identified as one especially telling instance of a deeper contradiction in the very meanings and practices of the modernity which civil society expressed, and indeed the modernity which was the condition of possibility of civil society. There was the interest and the enterprise of reflexivity so that the social and the societal could be defining of itself, so that individuals could operate in terms of the demands of a symmetric reciprocity. The imagination of civil society was the precondition and the product of modernity.
