Social Self-Organisation, Civility and Sociology: A Comment on Kumar's 'Civil Society'

Abstract

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of interest in civil society in Eastern and Western Europe. In many writing, the precise lineaments of civil society remain unclear. Kumar objects to attempts to remedy this by formulating some neutral, historically decontextualised concept - though he errs in so far as he implies that this is particularly a sociological pratice. Instead he does social science, and potentially the public sphere, a great service by distinguishing different past and present conceptions of civil society