associations as the gene carriers of the good society, within which citizens
develop democratic skills and norms. Edwards argues that this perspective is
not empirically valid—democratic skills and norms are also shaped in
families, schools, and other institutions. And many voluntary associations do
not foster democratic attitudes and values. Moreover, voluntary associations
can rarely if ever enforce or develop a broad societal consensus.- Normatively, with ‘‘civil society’’ constituting the ideal society citizens strive to
create, a`la Aristotle to Hobbes. This deWnition largely disappeared after the
Enlightenment, but has the advantage that it mitigates against the tendency to
privilege one sector over another. - Most recently, ‘‘civil society’’ as the public sphere in which citizens argue and
debate with one another. When politics are polarized, polities cannot resolve
problems. Thus there is a need to create new publics across the usual lines of
division.
Edwards argued that the three meanings of ‘‘civil society’’ are all relevant and need
to be integrated into a coherent whole. The second is the ultimate goal that all
citizens should strive for—the good society—with theWrst and third providing
important mechanisms to achieve that goal. Some works have developed detailed
scenarios of how this could happen at the global level in practice (Florini 2003 ;
Hammond 1998 ).
As Edwards noted, however, theWrst deWnition makes clear that those mechan-
isms do not necessarily lead humanity toward anything that most people would
accept as an ideal society. Other authors similarly have stressed the importance of
recognizing the ‘‘dark side’’ of these largely self-constituted, often unregulated, and
in some ways unaccountable political institutions. Precisely because of their
amorphous nature, they can serve a wide variety of purposes. Although the people
who come together in civil society organizations are ostensibly motivated by some
notion of collective good, that ‘‘collective’’ may be a self-serving group interest or a
very warped notion of what is good for humanity as a whole. Al Qaeda can serve as
an example of a civil society organization from the dark side: It is a collectivity that
is not primarily motivated by proWts, is not a government, and seems to think it is
working to achieve a version of the public good. The literature on NGOs in
particular has developed a lexicon of terms, often unXattering, for various types
of NGOs. There is the ever-popular term QUANGOs—quasi-NGOs—which is
used to refer broadly to NGOs whose independence is questionable, including
NGOs that are service providers rather than advocacy organizations and that
sometimes are little more than government subcontractors. Another term is
DONGOs, or donor-organized NGOs, referring to groups that arise in response
to the availability of funding and that may serve the goals of funders over those
of the communities where the NGOs operate. Similarly, GONGOs are
government-organized NGOs, that serve as fronts for governments to carry out
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