On the threshold of the twenty-first century, many scholars and citizens are grasping for some sense of societal purpose more substantial and satisfying than the aggregated narcissism that triumphed in the last. Yet, the various formulations of the object of this quest, “Social capital,” “civic engagement,” “the public sphere,” or “civil society,” strike contradictory chords of meaning. “Social capital” might ring pleasantly in the ears of social scientists, but to some humanists, it emits a discordant economistic sound. “Civic engagement” might recall the pieties of a citizenship class convened a half century ago, which alternately comfort and repel. Gold-plated philosophical terms like “civil society” and “the public sphere” come enmeshed in a thicket of theoretical writing, much of it bound to parochial Western political theory. While the range and variety of issues that this special issue of the journal calls forth is to be applauded, such heterogeneous expectations can also lead to confusion and miscommunication. Thus, at the outset, let me state my own particular interpretation of what is at stake in the contemporary discussions of social capital.

The concept of social capital is a strategic vantage point from which to mount a discussion of a number of critical and interrelated concerns that have made their way into dispersed personal libraries and private offices for at least the last decade: first, the discovery of an extensive network of women's organizations that undergirded American political history (especially the development of the welfare state); second, a theoretical search for the “public” that is invigorated by an extensive list of authors, ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Jürgen Habermas; and finally, that noisy, sometimes surly face-off between multiculturalism and its critics.