When the communist regimes of the European East Bloc recently toppled in an inverted version of the domino theory, a feature of political thought that had largely escaped notice among western political theorists in the 1970s and 1980s abruptly moved into the foreground. That is, the dissidents of central and eastern Europe contributed greatly to the recovery of “civil society” as a descriptive and normative political concept. An idea rooted in the high age of bourgeois political self-assertion against absolutist and feudalist ideals of social order, civil society had all but fallen from use in the twentieth century. Revived by dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik as a weapon against the oppressive regimes of the Soviet Bloc, the ideal of civil society pitted society against the state, association against sovereignty, plurality against unity, civility against force, persuasion against coercion.