Georgina BlakeleyThinkers

Civil society is a sphere where social movements and associations are engaged in pushing forward the democratic project and their own ideas of what democracy should entail.

Civil society is both a zone of contestation capable of bringing down authoritarianism and a zone of protection more suited to safeguarding the stability of democracy.

Civil society is characterized by a normative ambiguity... namely, it encapsulates both democratic and liberal norms and is, on the one hand, an arena of collective agency where concepts of the common good can be realized and on the other, a framework conducive to the individual pursuit of self-interest, free from state or other individuals' interference.

Civil society is differentiated in scholars by how they position themselves with regard to the differentiation between public and private realms.

Civil society is, for the feminist, a problematic concept in that it rests on precisely the problematic public/private distinction where women's exclusion from the the public is based upon the un-democratic norms and relations in the private.

Civil society is, for the feminist, problematic insofar as it is a patriarchal sphere not accessible to women in that the abstract 'bourgeois individual', who was free to engage in commerce, exchange and commodity production in the sphere of civil society, was inevitably male.

Civil society is, for the liberal theorist, such that the public/private distinction is constitutive of civil society and integral to its very survival.

Civil society is, for the theorist outside the liberal persuasion, such that the public/private distinction is not constitutive of civil society but as tenuous and/or something to be struggled over and contested.

Civil society is problematic in that what is so often held aloft as the main virtue of liberal democracy, that is to say the separation of socio-economic inequalities from formal political equality, ignores that civil society is systematically divided along lines of class, race and sex.

Civil society 1s 2ole in established democracies is more reactive and protective, insofar as it is focused not on building and shaping but on consolidating and maintaining.

Civil society 1s 2ole is not simply one of protecting a democratic model that has already been established... it is a developmental role to build and shape the kind of democracy they wish to see established.

Civil society is synonymous with 'new social movement' in cases where new collective actors are perceived as the important beginnings of associational networks to challenge authoritarian regimes and to struggle collectively for certain forms of democratic polity.

Civil society is the intermediate sphere between the state and the private realm of the family, in which citizens associate voluntarily and organize independently to manage their own affairs.

Civil society is the site of a whole range of inequalities separate from the formal equality which characterizes the political realm.