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Civil society has been on the lips of many theoreticians of the 1989 revolutions, in the West as well as in East Central Europe. The hope is that civil society, as a concept and a programme, will help post-communist societies out of their current political predicament. How reasonable a hope is this? How useful is the concept of civil society at the present time; either in the East or the West? This paper first considers the historical career of the concept. It then goes on to examine its fruitfulness in the current conditions of western and East European society.
Krishan Kumar (Wed,) studied this question.