“Civil society” is a term with deep historical roots and surprising resilience. Well known in the drawing rooms of early modern Europe, it fell into disuse in the mid-nineteenth Century and regained currency only in the 1970s, when a transfixed world sought ways to talk about resurgent social forces that were challenging totalitarian governments across Eastern and Central Europe. The outpouring of academic works and popular writing since then on civil societies, past and present, across the world's disparate regions attests to the power of the concept and its ability to transcend national boundaries. Coupled with the related concepts of social capital and the public sphere, civil society offers a powerful analytical tool for thinking about ways in which people, individually and in groups, link to broader political, social, and economic arrangements, whatever the country.

As the term is used in this book and as most scholars today would agree, civil society consists of sustained, organized social activity that occurs in groups that are formed outside the State, the market, and the family. Cumulatively, such activity creates a public sphere outside the State, a space in which groups and individuals engage in public discourse. But given the extraordinary range of settings – from cafes and dinner parties to union halls, trade associations, and charities – in which people in any nation come together, it should come as no surprise that the term has been applied in a variety of ways, even when it comes to Western countries with liberal democratic Systems in common and similar institutional arrangements and civic traditions. Extending the term still further to illuminate developments in nondemocratic Systems presents still greater challenges.