revolutionary socialism. In Dahrendorf ’s account it was precisely the growth and
Xourishing of non-state bourgeois economic and cultural institutions in many
parts of Europe (most notably in Britain) that over the previous two centuries had
made liberty, equality, prosperity, and social peace widely attainable; and it was
precisely theabsenceorunder-developmentof such institutions (most notably in
Germany) that had led to factional violence, state tyranny, and fascist oppression
(Dahrendorf 1968 , 128 – 9 , 200 – 20 ).
References to civil society gathered momentum in academic writing during the
1970 s and early 1980 s, most notably in the German Sonderwegcontroversy among
historians, and in increasing criticism by political and social scientists of the ‘‘big
government’’ solutions to policy problems that had been pursued throughout
Europe after 1945. Not until the late 1980 s, however, did ‘‘civil society’’ burst into
the arena of international and mass media debate, as dissidents in eastern Europe,
particularly Poland and Czechoslovakia, began to press for the development of
autonomous public, legal, and social institutions that could act as counterweights
to the overweening powers of totalitarian states (Keane 1988 , 261 – 398 ). The collapse
of Communism opened the way in eastern European countries to attempts to
revive ‘‘civil society’’ in several of the senses identiWed above: in the establishment
of ‘‘impartial’’ legal and governing institutions (including oppositional ones), in
the removal of prohibitions and limitations on private voluntary associations
(including churches and other religious bodies), and in the re-emergence of private
capitalism (the latter attended by many of the evils deplored by Marx, no less than
the blessings urged by economic liberals).
Although it began as a reaction against Communism, however, this explosion of
interest in civil society soon began unexpectedly to manifest itself in many other
contexts and channels. Indeed, just as many east European politicians were trying
to address the problems of post-Communism by emulating the ‘‘civil society’’
institutions of Western countries, so in Britain, western Europe, the USA, and
elsewhere, political theorists and civic activists began to draw on the discourse of
‘‘civil society’’ to explain and redress certain perceived deWciencies in their
own ‘‘liberal’’ and ‘‘democratic’’ regimes. The decay of urban and inner-city
communities; over-extended and ineYcient welfare states; problems of social,
racial, religious, and sexual exclusion; rising levels of violent crime and delin-
quency; and low levels of electoral turnout and involvement in public life—all
came to be diagnosed in terms of a decline or shortfall in civil society, and of the
need for its urgent restoration and extension. Thus in Britain over the past decade,
civil society has been invoked by politicians of all major political parties, as a
remedy for such diverse ills as family breakdown, welfare fraud, environmental
pollution, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and tribal conXict in Iraq and
Afghanistan (Willetts 1994 ; Hague 1998 ; Patten 2000 ; Blunkett 2001 ;Brown 2001 ).
In Europe, and particularly in Germany, civil society discourse has more closely
followed the route suggested by Habermas, of pressing for closer democratic
138 jose harris