Civil Society and the State:New European Perspectives

This companion volume to John Keane's Democracy and Civil Society features essays by leading writers from Eastern and Western Europe and provides new answers to a series of difficult questions: What precisely is meant today by the distinction between the state and the non-state realm of civil society? Why has that distinction, so crucial throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and then apparently lost without trace, again become sharply topical? For what intellectual and political purposes can the distinction be used and whose interests might it serve?

John Keane has collected a varied sample of the best and most provocative European writing produced on the subject over the past two decades.

Contributors include Norberto Bobbio, Carole Pateman, Agnes Heller, Helmut Kuzmics, Norbert Elias, Pierre Rosanvallon, Karl Hinrichs, Claus Offe, Helmut Wiesenthal, Alberto Melucci, Jacques Rupnik, Jena Szucs, Mihaly Vajda, Z.A. Pelczynski and Vaclav Havel.