Civil Society and Democracy: The Gap between Theory and Possibility

Abstract

In this essay, I first provide reasons for the reemergence of the idea of civil society and for its subsequent importance in contemporary democratic theory, particularly on the left. I then show how this new approach to civil society is premised upon the separation of spheres between state and society. Thus the place of civil society in such accounts of democracy and democratisation, although normative and therefore putatively universal, is actually based on western liberalism. This feature of civil society theory obscures democratisation as a contextualised process and therefore distorts descriptions of a normative core to democracy that it truly universal in scope.