John Keane

Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions

(1998)

 

Poltical Studies' Review

"John Keane was the original civil society theorist – not in the sense that he invented the concept but that it was his books of the 1980s – Democracy and Civil Society and the edited collection Civil Society and the State – that educated most of us in the West in the rediscovered concept of civil society, at that time flourishing mainly among Central and Eastern European dissident intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel, Gyorgy Konrad and Adam Michnik. It was Keane who made us aware of this revival, and who produced the material for further reflection on a concept that, apart from in a few Gramscian strongholds, had more or less disappeared from the political vocabulary. Now he reflects on his own enterprise, and on the fate of the concept over the past decade. He remains as firmly convinced as he ever was of its worthwhileness, and notes with some satisfaction its astonishing worldwide diffusion in recent years. But that very popularity brings its own problems of confusion and misuse. As in all his writings Keane is properly alert to the limitations and dangers of the civil society idea, its too easy use as a talismanic device by political rhetoricians and theoreticians of all kinds, Keane chides Earnest Gellner for his Panglossian view of civil society, as an all-embracing all-resolving alternative to authoritarianism; he criticizes those who too readily assume that democracy or nationalism and civil society make natural bed-fellows and he acknowledges that ‘incivility' – which includes violence and the extremes of poverty and inequality – is a ‘chronic feature' of civil society. He aims to develop a ‘post-foundationalist' understanding of civil society that both recognizes these problems and at the same time meets the criticism that the concept is unduly ethnocentric as well as anachronistic. Against all the enemies, practical and theoretical, that assail civil society, this is a valiant effort, though at times there is a splenetic quality that suggests an overproprietorial attitude. But a father might be forgiven a degree of excessive solicitude towards his own offspring. Certainly there is plenty of rich material here to advance reflection on a concept that seems in no danger of disappearing."

 

From this Book see also:

Description: Here

Preface to the Farsi edition click here (PDF)

Reviews: Foreign Affairs; Political Studies

Contents: Here

Covers: Front