Civil Society: Challenging Western Models

Between kinship ties on the one hand and the state on the other, human beings experience a diversity of social relationships and groupings which in modern western thought have come to be gathered under the label 'civil society'. A liberal-individualist model of civil society has become fashionable in recent years, but what can such a term mean in the late twentieth century?
Civil Society argues that civil society should not be studied as a separate, 'private' realm clearly separated in oppos...