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Recently, the phrase “civil society” has attracted the attention of political thinkers from remarkably divergent perspectives. Some use the concept to defend free market societies, which distribute many citizen services according to consumer demand and purchase. Others use the concept to promote democracy through the politicization of so-called politically neutral aspects of life, such as family, work and leisure. Without limiting the phrase too substantially to any particular project, Democratic Civility explores the histories and uses of the idea of “civil society.” Tying the concept of “civil society” securely to its sociological, cultural and material worlds, the authors collected in Democratic Civility attempt to use the idea of “civil society” to enrich our understandings of the social conditions that feed the possibility of democracy. The authors pursue careful examinations of the various genealogies of “civil society” as well as the diverse cultural experiences it entails. The pluralistic and comparative focus of the project provides much of its considerable strength.

The authors—brought together by the Civil Society and Civic Values program at the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture—approach “civil society” from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, particularly from sociology, anthropology and politics. They take questions regarding the role of theory in life very seriously and pursue these questions, often comparatively articulated, through a wide range of institutions including family, religion, and state. Brigitte Berger’s “The Social Roots of Prosperity and Liberty” claims that “civil society” with its economic and social benefits was created by a particular familiar organization. Rasat Kasaba and Robert Hefner examine religious institutions, particularly elements within contemporary Islam that contribute to contemporary notions of civil society. Kasaba examines the political consequences of the increasing power of the pro-Islamic Refah Party on Turkish life, and concludes that [End Page 173] the growth of this power has relied on conceptions of civil society and produced elements of social tolerance (276). Hefner examines the Islamic state of Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, for evidence of pluralism within Islam and the social mechanisms by which elements of Islam might work to embody the practices of civil society. Hefner offers possibilities without offering inevitabilities. There are elements articulated by Muslim leaders within the Islamic society of Indonesia that could contribute to a more vigorous civil society (289). Of all the institutions that inculcate the values of “civil society,” the state receives the most attention in Democratic Civility.

“Democracy always depends upon something larger than itself,” claims Hefner in his introduction (18). Generally, the something larger in the essays collected here is the state. Not just any state, the authors agree, but a state with several particular elements. The state must be strong enough to control society, yet weak enough to be limited in that control, a claim made very explicitly in the essays by Dan Chirot and John Hall. A state guarantees rights, liberties, “the pleasures of settled existence” (55), and the peaceful transience of a consumer society (63).

Chirot wants to reserve the term “civil society” for those societies that self-organize in cooperation with a responsive and self-limited state. In this context Chirot suggests one of the paradoxes of the modern nation-state and one of the reoccurring problems in the different accounts of civil society: the way in which liberal democracies, by surrendering some control to citizens actually generate greater strength than more authoritarian governments. “At the most abstract level, what the history of the late twentieth century forces us to notice about the states of liberal democracy is that they have greater strength than those of more authoritarian social systems” (55). This abstract point deserves and requires greater explanation. If liberal states have, in some ways, power that authoritarian states lack, then liberals and other friends of “civil society” face serious dilemmas concerning the powers of the state.

By comparing the idea of civil society in many different societies and states, the authors suggest various genealogies possible for the phrase, critique the idea that...