entailed (Durkheim 1938 , lvi–viii; Wallas 1914 , 3 – 29 , 305 – 40 ). Those few theorists
who continued to talk of ‘‘civil society’’ in the early twentieth century (mainly
academic ‘‘pluralists,’’ rooted in classical and legalistic ways of thought, such as
Figgis, Maitland, Laski, and Duguit) did so in a low-key, limited, and largely
negative way. They emphasized that ‘‘civil society’’ was merely one societas
among many, and that its special but circumscribed function of maintaining law
and order should not be allowed to obtrude upon the equally important functions
of other autonomous ‘‘societies,’’ such as churches, trade unions, universities,
professional associations, and similar corporate entities. Unsurprisingly, this subtle
but arcane style of argument was to have a diminishing impact in the era of mass
politics, revolutionary violence, and global war.
Whatissurprising, however, is that the tradition of debate about civil society
played such a minimal, almost non-existent, role in European democratic and
liberal responses to the rise of totalitarianism. In political writings of the interwar
era occasional reference was made to the idea of asocietas civilisas a possible
antidote to fascism. The French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, for
example, drew upon the model of late medieval corporatist theorists, including
Thomas Aquinas, who had portrayed civil society as a mutually-civilizing
partnership between the Church and the secular state (Maritain 1938 , 157 – 76 ).
But such references were marginal to mainstream political debate of the period,
where ‘‘civil society’’ more typically appeared (if invoked at all) not as an impartial
public sphere, but as the institutional epitome of competitive bourgeois selWshness.
Indeed for several decades the economic model of civil society appears to have
largely obliterated all trace of the older ‘‘civic’’ model from collective political
memory. From the 1920 s through to the 1960 s, English language textbooks on
social and political science either ignored ‘‘civil society’’ completely, or simply
assumed that its deWnitive meaning was that which had been employed by Hegel
and Marx (Laski 1938 ; MacIver and Page 1950 ).
How and why did the notion of ‘‘civil society‘‘ recover from its mid-twentieth
century eclipse? The 1960 s explosion of non-Soviet versions of Marxism helped to
revive familiarity with the concept, and in particular with the ‘‘cultural’’ portrayal
of civil society as a buttress of capitalist ‘‘hegemony’’ advanced by Antonio Gramsci
( 1957 ). A more complex thesis was suggested by Ju ̈rgen Habermas, who welded
together the classical and Marxian models of civil society by portraying each as the
corollary of the other, in a world in which premodern demarcations between
‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private,’’ ‘‘political’’ and ‘‘economic,’’ ‘‘objectivity’’ and ‘‘subjecti-
vity’’ no longer applied. Habermas’s interpretation was to be of considerable
importance in the long-term reworking of ideas about civil society (and about
political thought more generally) but it was of limited immediate inXuence, not
least because it was not to be translated into English until 1980 (Habermas 1962 ).
More accessible was the work of Ralf Dahrendorf, who took over the Marxian
and Gramscian accounts of civil society and used themagainst the goals of
development of civil society 137