| Chapter 2: | Bringing the Civil in “Civil Society” Back |
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about the quality of citizen politics and the performance of the democratic state? Can political science scholarship continue to pay lip service to this concept without resolving these fundamental dilemmas? Despite civil society’s high standing as a concept in academic scholarship, emerging global realities now demand that scholars interrogate its worth and usefulness. Confusion over its meaning and mandate as well as disillusionment with its political capabilities and its actualizations within different societies are responsible for the current theoretical predicament (see Boyd, 2004; Foley & Edwards, 1996; McIlwaine, 1998; Shils, 1992; Tempest, 1997; Whitehead, 1997). Benjamin R. Barber (1998) convincingly captured the conceptual commotion surrounding this seemingly promiscuous notion. He argued that
Attempts to arrive at a suitable theoretical synthesis of civil society have hence proved to be difficult. Indeed, as societies evolve and their politics undergo complex and dynamic changes, civil society itself undergoes paradigmatic shifts, thereby requiring a new consideration of the concept. This book recognizes a deficit in the prevailing conceptual analyses of civil society—an overemphasis on the associational constituents of civil society and a diminished consideration of the behavioral attitudes and practices which, lest one forget, comprise its name. Boyd (2004), for example, argued persuasively that