Civil society', much more than 'state', 'government', 'power', or even 'democracy' is an elusive term in political theory. At issue has been the question of what aspect of social life constitutes civil society. For the ancients, Cicero for example, civil society was necessarily an outcome of a political community. Later, civil society would be taken, not as emerging out of a political community, but to be the same thing as that community. By the time…
