violence, or rule by a local maWa. But each of the four models mentioned above has
very often incorporated at least one of these supposedly antithetical social arrange-
ments. As one participant in a recent forum put it: ‘‘Where I come from, the Ku
Klux Klan is part of civil society. It’s non-governmental, non-proWt, membership-
based, internally democratic... and members work passionately on a voluntary
basis to advance the mission of the organization.’’ It is equally diYcult to locate it
with precision on any of the conceptual axes that stretch from a command
economy through to laissez-faire capitalism, from cultural universalism to cultural
pluralism, from ‘‘human rights’’ to basic resources through to the claims of private
property, or from an ‘‘interventionist’’ through to a ‘‘nightwatchman’’ model of the
state. Because of the gradual build-up of diverse meanings over many centuries, it is
also impossible to treat civil society simply as a Weberian ‘‘ideal type,’’ designed to
advance knowledge through sharply-deWned theoretical insights, rather than with
reference to exact historical facts. Current fashionable uses of the term should
perhaps therefore be seen as a cluster of loosely overlapping ‘‘elective aYnities,’’ of
use in conveying a wide range of moral, cultural, and social aspirations, rather than
as a set of precise analytical concepts in political and social science.
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