I propose to talk to you today about the promise and the perils of the new end of ideology, marked by the collapse of communism and anti-communism. I will consider how the ideological left and the right have lost their coherence, and I will attempt to show how this presents both an opening for political creativity and a threat to sustained public deliberations and concerted political actions. The emergence of the ideal of civil society, I will argue, is an instance of such creativity and represents a resource, developed by democratic intellectuals, to address the toss of the capacity for deliberation and action, but I will also show how the intellectual misunderstanding of the notion of civil society as a new ideology, both in the previously existing socialist bloc and the previously existing free world, diminishes the notion as the basis for concerted actions and deliberations. By examining the remarkable accomplishments of critical intellectuals in the former Socialist Bloc, I will seek to identify the possibility for principled pragmatic politics at a time that the power of modern ideologies really has come to an end. 

        The simple clarity of "left" and "right" ideologies have never matched the complexities of political, economic and cultural life. It has long been the case, for example, that liberalism on social issues -- from race relations to gun control to abortion rights -- has not necessarily been correlated with economic liberalism. Indeed, the fact that the term "economic liberalism" has had opposing meanings in Europe and the United States indicates that the categories of left and right have long been uncertain. And in recent years, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have moved from uncertainty to confusion. 

        In the former Yugoslavia, not only have Marxist opportunists become nationalist opportunists, but what is more telling, Mihajlo Markovic, a former Marxist humanist of the famous Praxis group, has become a rabid nationalist and chief ideologist of ethnic cleansing. In Poland and Hungary, those in the left wing of the old democratic opposition have become the most articulate supporters of the market transition, while in the Czech Republic, the right has been at the forefront of such support. Closer to home, in the United States, the left/right political common sense is no less contusing. At a time when the Republican Party is in disarray, with a breakdown in the "right consensus," and with the Moral Majoritarians opposing the supply-siders opposing the neo-conservatives, the Democrats struggle over exactly what it means to be a "New Democrat," what the Party can stand for beyond prosperity and balancing the budget. 

        Despite all this, the breakdown in the old left/right dichotomy is refreshing. It provides us with opportunities to think about "politics without cliche's," as Jean Bethke Elshtain puts it. [1] We can address problems anew, without stale preconceptions and without ideological distortions. It becomes possible to address basic principles and concrete ends without partisan rigidity. 

        When the right was clearly capitalist and the left was socialist, each presented a complete account of how certain fundamental economic arrangements could lead to the common good. For the right, from Hayek to Friedman, the free market was the cornerstone of free politics, free culture and a free society constituted by individual liberty. Take away the freedom of economic exchange, whether through state redistribution schemes or even trade union activity, and the road to serfdom was in view. For the left, from Marx to Sweezy, the abolition of private property was the cornerstone of free politics, free culture and a free classless society. Abolish, or at least control, the irrationality of the market, and the good society would be within reach. 

        Both the left and the right, at least at their extremes, had a propensity for disregarding the messy details of societal life. As voices on the right saw tyranny in union activity which constrained trade, some on the left denied that such activity fundamentally changed the lot of the industrial working class; only a socialist transformation could truly accomplish that. Of course, there were many on the left and the right who avoided such gymnastics, who recognized that under certain conditions economic efficiency and productivity could be enhanced by union activity and "state intervention" (most strikingly in the postwar German Federal Republic), and that private property and entrepreneurship expand productivity more readily than do state or social ownership, and this may serve the interests of the unpropertied as well as the propertied (strikingly in Sweden). As left/right thinking wanes, such recognition presents real opportunities to reconceptualize our understanding of the relationship between economics and politics, and chart public policies that view economic arrangements not as the grounds for metaphysical convictions, but as the pragmatic means to achieve specific social goals. Thus, at a time of perceived budget surpluses, proposals for public investment in infrastructure, from public transportation to highways to public education, and proposals for tax credits for certain forms of private investments, can be appraised for their promised results, and not in the teleological terms of left and right. 

        It should be recognized that more is involved here than an instrumentalist technocratic politics. An "economics without cliche's" can be supported by a reinvigorated politics. At the height of the cold war, the central political value of Western culture -- freedom -- often seemed to be little more than an empty ideological weapon, as in "the free versus the communist world." A complex civilizational accomplishment [2] was reduced to a Manichean geopolitical contest. In the hands of our most ardent anti-communists, freedom became a crude weapon. Without the superpower contest, we can and must pay attention once again to the central value. 

        The temptation is to identify freedom with the free market and private enterprise. With the collapse of state socialism, many would have us believe that a new age of freedom and liberty has automatically arrived. Just let the market do its magic and all problems will be solved, normative as well as instrumental. Liberals along with conservatives, when appraising post-communist reconstruction, have tended to overemphasize the importance of free market reforms, and downplayed the significance of political and cultural freedom. They seem to believe that with a free market base, all political and cultural difficulties will be readily resolved. Overlooked are such requirements as a legal political order, sound political parties, and a well-functioning educational system. The freedom of the market cannot directly address the problems of political independence, that is, of sovereignty and nationalism, and even its relationship with the freedom of speech is quite ambiguous. The political confusion in much of Central Europe, the real instability in the republics of the former Soviet Union, and the barbarism in the former Yugoslavia clearly push us away from this naive position. 

        As with issues of the political economy, the politics of identity have no straightforward left/right logic. At times, self-determination and defense of a group seems to be a progressive position of the left, as for example with Afrocentrism and Feminism, while at other times it seems to be regressive, or at least conservative, as with Serbian or Croatian nationalism. But it is a daunting task to determine the grounds for such judgment for the general public in an understandable way. Certainly, there is now an opportunity for a politics without cliche', but it may also be a politics without meaning. 

        In order to avoid political meaninglessness, it is necessary, in my judgment, to take into serious account the genuine political creativity discernible in our most recent past, summarized by the reemergence of the notion of civil society as a central political ideal in contemporary discourse and action. The creative act centered in East and Central Europe, and it has often been misunderstood. As is often the case when something new is presented into public life, it has been too quickly equated with the already familar. Observing the power of civil society to constitute democratic alternatives to totalitarianism, all too many observers saw only the collapse of an empire and predicted chaos and dictatorship. Those who saw and see something more promising were denounced for their naive optimism. That we meet today to seriously discuss the project of reintergrating European culture, on democratic grounds, as European totalitarianism recedes, suggests that we are in the midst of a more significant political turn, requiring a careflil examination of our recent past and its possible relationship with the project of this conference. 
 
 

        These are remarkable times for intellectuals. We have had the good fortune to have observed how a small group of our peers have contributed to the fundamental transformation of the geopolitical world. They did so not by winning the favorable ear of those who were in power, nor by representing directly the dispossessed, nor by engaging in brave acts of military valor, nor through exercising political leadership. Rather, they accomplished the apparently impossible by pursuing a free public life as an end in itself, within their own limited social circles. They "acted as if they lived in a free society" and in the process they created one. [3] 

        The democratic intellectuals of East and Central Europe, "the dissidents," faced incredible repressive powers, and they often paid dearly for their humble acts of self expression and self determination. They formed informal seminars and published modest journals of cultural and political opinion, and for this they faced long jail terms and charges of treason. At a time when they were at most shadowy names for their compatriots, the political authorities treated them as a significant political threat. Their movements were carefully monitored. Their friends and family paid for their associations with those who dared to act outside officially prescribed patterns of behavior. From a conventional point of view, all this seemed to be rather excessive. Even in Poland, where oppositional activity was most advanced, only a few thousand people were involved until the Solidarity period. Yet, both the opposition and the authorities seemed, at least instinctively, to understand the seriousness of the apparently marginal intellectual activities. The oppositionists realized that if they acted as if they were free, and they could sustain and extend this pretense, real freedom would be constituted. The authorities, on the other hand, knew that continued totalitarian control, based on and justified by an official ideology, depended on the appearance of the absolute authority of the Party-State apparatus, which was significantly undermined by the continued existence of a politically principled intellectual opposition. Alternatives were then open to a population which might be acted on, and, as we know now, they were. Oppositional intellectual activity constituted a limited free public domain in a otherwise totalitarian context, and first in Poland with the Solidarity labor movement and then in the whole region with the various citizen movements, this public opening was used to overthrow the Communist powers. 

        The exact sequence of this history, its causes and its interpretations will be debated for many years. [4] I will consider today one meaningful proposition drawn from the East and Central European experience of recent years: intellectuals who act as if they live in a free society, who engage in free and open discussion, and in the process open up space for public deliberation, significantly contribute to the capacity of a society to deliberate and act democratically. They help constitute a civil society and the ideal of civil society. It is in the creation of this ideal which has been a key to the transformation of previously existing socialism, and it is can contribute to the vibrancy of democracy in the former "free world." With this in mind, I would like to examine with you how the ideal of civil society reemerged as a set of creative public actions of free intellectuals in decidedly unfree societies, and how the future of this ideal in the newly constituting democracies of East and Central Europe and the established democracies of Western Europe and North America may contribute to the reintegration European political cultures. 
 
 

        The history of civil society as a reemergent public ideal and the experience of East and Central European intellectuals of the old bloc begs to be consider from every political and theoretical angle. This was a high point of intellectual intervention in public affairs. The initial strength and subsequent weakness of the Central and Eastern European intellectuals and their role in constituting embattled civil societies must be understood if we are to understand contemporary political cultures. All prevailing political positions have been challenged by the consequences of the intellectuals' actions in that part of the world. Conservative distrust of intellectuals for their impracticality and their immorality, the position, for example, of Paul Johnson, [5] is significantly undermined by the high moral principles of the East European secular left and by its respectful relationship with religious sensibilities and religious institutions, and by the practicality of its oppositional stance. Elitist realism, such as that of Walter Lippmann and contemporary Lippmannians, from Ronald Steele to Henry Kissinger, is challenged by the acuity of the oppositions' understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist State. Intellectuals with broader understandings of history and political, economic and social theory did not lead the workers of Solidarity. They advised and learned from their compatriots. The idealists, such as Vaclav Havel, proved to be the genuine realists in their oppositional stance. Old leftists are confronted by the fact that the vanguard of the workers state, not the privileged intellectuals, became the object of the workers wrath. Indeed, the intellectuals proved to be allies of the toiling masses in their opposition to actually existing socialism. New Leftists are challenged by the commitment of the intellectuals and workers to "bourgeois" freedom, their respectful relationship with their elders and cultural traditions, and their conviction that capitalism is not the root of all evil, but a desirable inevitability. The conservative, the liberal and the radical are forced to reconsider their positions in light of the developments in East and Central Europe: with the fall of communism and the intellectuals' contribution to the fall. 

        This reconsideration is indeed observable. It is summarized by the reintroduction of an old fashioned concept in contemporary political discourse. Intellectuals provide democracies with their political vocabularies. They have done this in the past and they are still doing it today. They are not the only people who do this, particularly in contemporary democracies, but the way they do it provides opportunities to be true to democratic principles. The alternative word smiths include political handlers, propagandists and advertisers of various sorts, and political and social scientists. They move from one extreme, that of mass manipulation, to the other, that of scholarly objectivity, distanced from public life. Intellectuals exist between these extremes; they conceive of the words which name alternative ways of thinking and acting in concert, ways that are understandable for the general public. Thus, when we think about economic life, for example, whether we are of the left or of the right, we ponder the nature of capitalism, a word coined by Marx. When we consider competing judgments concerning the viability and desirability of this named system, we think of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism, as they have been given meaning by such historical figures as Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx himself. The inherited political alternatives of our world, the alternatives that have been weakened in the recent past, have been made sensible largely through the work of such intellectuals. 

        And this is not only something of the past. As the opposition to Communism took a radical reformist turn in the late 70's and 80's in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as the limits of the welfare state became evident to those on the left and right in Western Europe and in North America, as the notion of a systemic alternative to capitalism, called socialism, has been cast into doubt for many of critical disposition, a new way of considering the relationships among the state, the economy and cultural life has been presented by intellectuals, and it spread like wild fire. In recent years, the idea of civil society was reborn in the opposition to Soviet power, and the revived concept has been used throughout the world by a diverse set of political actors. 

        Naming and exploring the meaning of political projects have given such projects viability, although it is clearly not the case that intellectuals, in a magical way reminiscent of mythology, have brought modern political life into being by providing the proper words. Political positions do not automatically arise from the intellectual's pen, but they also are not simply reflections of objective conditions. They are formulated and communicated in response to common experiences, with successes and failures. This is central to the everyday life of democracies and to their long term futures. It is a main reason why intellectuals are key actors in the democratic arena, even when they seem to be marginal. The support of the capacity to talk about societal problems includes the formulation and introduction of political vocabulary. Here, we consider how the re-introduction of an ancient concept helped millions to come to terms with the fundamental changes in their political world and has the potential to be used for reorienting politics in the future. 
 
 

        In the former communist world, the recent fate of the ideal of civil society is directly linked to the fate of the independent critical intellectuals and their role in the emerging democracies. The intellectuals were identified with the ideal of a civil society. Strategic necessity inspired theoretical innovation. Dreams of an officially sanctioned "Humanistic Marxism" and a "Socialism with a Human Face" ended in nightmares, and a group of intellectuals, initially small in number, began to develop a unique strategy, a reform from below, one which involved ignoring the politics of the Party-State. They advocated a societal secession from the Party-State in delimited spheres of cultural and social life. What can be called the constitution of a free civil society. At first, the strategy in the hands of the intellectuals was confined to symbolic acts supporting human rights activities and some independent publishing. The activities of KOR, in Poland, and the activities of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and journals such as Beszelo in Hungary and Zapis in Poland, typified this strategy of opposition. The societal strategy revealed its full potential when it developed popular support. Solidarity in Poland expressed its strength. 

        After the fall of Communism, the strategy and the theoretical inquiry led to new problems and questions in the former Soviet bloc. Opposition was not enough; the social constitution of a modern order was the primary task. Discussion about civil society moved in two contrasting directions. In the post-communist orders which had experienced a significant democratic opposition, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, talk about civil society began to look suspiciously utopian, and it looked like an ideology for the centrality of intellectuals in public life. It seemed to some that people like Adam Michnik in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia were using the civil society strategy to maintain their leading political roles. Theirs seemed to be the position of the impractical and self-serving intellectuals. Both the danger of intellectuals and their impracticality have been a concern of civil society's critics. 

        People and particularly the new political and cultural elites were tired of the intellectuals' impractical dreams. Civil society seemed to be a contemporary version of the old promises of socialist society. This was a time of hard geo-political realities. The pressing tasks were state building and the construction of a sound market economy. The ideal of civil society seemed to come from the world of dissent: at best fuzzy headed, at worse, a leftist subversion of the free market, a disguised neo-communism. Here was the Czech battle of the Vaclavs: Prime Minister Klaus vs. President Havel. The power of the market and the promise of consumerism vs. the power of the powerless and civic ideals, the businessmen versus the intellectuals. Variations on the Vaclav themes were observable elsewhere. 

        But at the same time, the theme of civil society was playing itself out in a strikingly different way. Places like Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union seemed to lead the way in adopting fundamental questions. Can a civil society be built in the newly independent nation-states? Has a civil society ever been a part of their experience? Will it be a part of their future? Even in the nation that experienced oppositional civil society activity to the greatest extent, Poland, the capacity to sustain a civil society as part of normal component of societal life, and not as part of a conspiratorial subversive structure, seemed to be far from certain. 

        Civil society in these inquiries was understood in two distinct but related senses, as Gellner has explained more generally. On the one hand, civil society was understood as being the distinct location in a social order where free associational activity, apart from the imperatives of the state, tempers the state's capacity to dominate. (Some, such as Cohen and Arato, would add the same qualification of market and corporate domination.) On the other hand, civil society is a society as a whole in which such social qualification functions as a regular and primary part of social life. The prime examples are the nation states of Western Europe and North America, according to Gellner, not as typifications of modernization, as a universal necessity, [6] but as special and difficult cases of social organization. 

        The attacks upon civil society tended to function in what might be called the magical domain. Some, such as Klaus, purported to answer all political and economic problems with the magical wound of the market. Shock therapy and privatization would solve all the problems of the so called transition. He seemed to be counselling, to paraphrase the old union slogan of Joe Hill: "don't mourn, privatize." Don't become consumed by the problems of ethics and memory, build a sound economy. Western transitionologists presented similar formulas for the making of proper constitutions and the building of adequate civil service and policy apparatuses. Concern for civil society seemed to be hopelessly out of date when compared with the pressing practical needs of state building and the construction of a sound economy.

        The problem with these apprehensions is that the differentiated structures of modern societies were considered as alternative keys to the ill defined transition, purportedly the transition to democracy. Some argued that the economy is the key to the successful transition; others that it is state building, and still others that it is civil society. Here we have an empty contestation. It is the stuff of which good academic debate is made. Advocates of each position can marshal the evidence in their favor and publish in the pursuit of tenure and professional advancement. The notion that needs of the state or the market must take priority over the concerns with civil society is also material that can help fuel partisan debate. Ideologists on each side of the question can man the barricades with their axiomatic certainties. Blend the academic foolishness with the partisanship, and ideological struggle may be forthcoming. It is sometimes observed by critics that absolute commitment to civil society model is a rationalization for critical intellectuals, [7] but it is no less true that absolute commitment to the market is the ideological commitment of the businessman, and absolute commitment to the state is the commitment of the politician or the bureaucrat. Beyond such dogmas, recognition of the interconnections among the economy, state and civil society make the exclusive concern with one without the others incomplete. [8] 

        Yet, the tendency toward ideological formulation is very real. There has been a tendency for the intellectual innovation, the perception of civil society as a part of contemporary life, to get carried away with itself. The advocacy of civil society can take on an ideological appearance when the term takes on a misplaced concreteness. Another consequence of the misplaced concreteness is that the civil society position can seem to be strikingly weak relative to the institutions and political forces it is up against. 

        People acting freely in public had great effect in and against the Communist orders. People spoke and acted together as if they lived in a free society and in the process they created an alternative political power. This brought to mind the importance of civil society as it had been explored in the history of ideas and led to fuller considerations and descriptions of civil society in modernity. In East Central Europe, though, it led to the idea that civil society may be the appropriate model of transition, especially important as nationalism appeared as the alternative form of mobilization. It came to appear to some that the alternative normative grounds for transition was nationalism or civil society. Thus, Gellner chooses civil society over democracy as the way toward an open as opposed to an authoritarian society. Note the echo of Popper in the subtitle of his Conditions of Liberty, "civil society and its rivals." 

        This for obvious reasons led to considerable consternation. On the one hand, if civil society is in fact the alternative to authoritarian systems, if we think about civil society systemically and structurally, it is strikingly weak in the societies of the former Soviet bloc. Civil society is a West European and North American exception, not a part of the past or the present of East and Central Europe. On the other hand, as a systemic alternative in this unusual part of the world, it seems to be the creation of intellectuals under the guardianship of intellectuals. It is civil society by command of the intellectuals, not as the development of the natural course of events. It seems to be a rationalization of class power. 

        These negative aspects of the civil society "model" are not the necessary result of intellectual innovation, but are, rather, in large measure, a consequence of a misunderstanding of the role of the intellectual in democratic society. The innovation should help the intellectuals and their fellow citizens to consider and talk about the problems they face. They do not provide easy or complete answers to political problems. Civil society is not the answer to the transition, but a way of perceiving its complexity. It helps observers and political actors come to appreciate a significant dimension of the societal changes which have occurred with the fall of communism, and can inform deliberation and action based on this appreciation. 

        Important aspects of civil society, particularly a free press, exist to a much greater extent after the fall of communism than before. Before the great changes of 1989, the alternative systems of publication in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary helped facilitate the formation of an independent public opinion that the authorities had to confront. Foreign broadcasting, such as Radio Free Europe, amplified the impact of the alternative system. Yet in comparison to the role of the free press today, not only in these countries, but also in Russia, Bulgaria and Romania, as well, the previous system of free public communications was minuscule. In each of these countries, newspapers expressing a broad range of political opinions flourish; radio and television are not absolutely free of government influence, but in comparison to the Communist control of the past, they are remarkably independent. Russia has even managed to tolerate a free critical press in the time of war. This does not mean, of course, that all is going well in these countries, but it does mean that the state does operate in a way that is fundamentally constrained by an independent public opinion. The ideal of a fully developed independent civil society may be a long way off A civil society in the Anglo-American sense never did exist, but the societies are significantly "civilized," extending the sort of action that marked the beginning of the changes in the eighties. This is an important part of the changes these societies have experienced, every bit as important as the changes in the political and economic systems. 

        There is a wide array of citizens initiatives around the old bloc which are now a part of the political realities along with the free press: from women protection groups in the former Yugoslavia, to human rights groups in Slovakia, to the trade unions of Poland. These groups are not always appreciated by the new political elites, and the groups' battles for their continued existence are far from assured, but that they exist is testimony to the persistent viability of civil society in post-communist societies. 

        The proponents of civil society may have been the critical intellectuals in the previously existing socialist society, and among the chief proponents of civil society in the post-communist orders are again the critical intellectuals, but unless they maintain that civil society is the key to democracy, they are advocating a position that can not be construed as being a rationalization for their access to power. Like reasonable advocates of market reforms and state building, they are responsible defenders of important independent institutions of complex society. One institutional sector: the economy, the polity or civil society, cannot be substituted for any other. 

        The practical question about civil society is, though, not whether civil society exists or not, but how broadly does it function, how does it relate with other components of society and what are its effects? The free market critics of civil society are concerned that a focus upon citizen initiatives will frustrate the formation of a sound economy. The proponents of sound St ate building and statecraft are concerned that the immediate functioning of popular sovereignty and free social movements will make the constitution of the rules of the political game impossible. The advocates of civil society also have their special concerns, related to the workings of the state and the economy: the threat of a politically manipulated populism and nationalism drawing on the economic frustrations of those who are suffering from the economic changes and do not understand them. 

        Populism, of nationalist and other varieties, is a real threat in the post-communist situation. Yet, the proponents of civil society point out that the economic changes are unlikely to be successful without popular support for and understanding of them, and constitutions that do not address the concerns of organized society are merely pieces of paper. Civil society is a way of making economic change effective within a democratic political environment, of increasing understanding and support through public discussion, and of making constitutions and the rule of law legitimate. The balance between the threats and supports of the independent public action within a civil society for economic construction and state-building is a matter of political judgment and action. 

        The viability of civil society is especially important in Eastern Europe because of its apparent social alternative, authoritarianism and xenophobic nationalism. Nationalism of the worst sort has become a significant part of the post communist situation, not only in the former Yugoslavia, where the television cameras and the world press have focused our attention, but also in the former Soviet Union. Dangers of nationalist repression very much exist in Slovakia, and potential tensions exist between Hungary, and Slovakia and Romania, and between Poland and Ukraine, and Russia and the Baltic Republics. Authoritarian xenophobic nationalism is very much a part of the political landscape, and the way to avoid nationalism is not at all clear since it still has a remarkable capacity to mobilize populations. 

        If we think of civil society as a well developed type of social organization, it will appear to be too weak in the post-communist situation to address adequately the problems of manipulated xenophobia. It will seem that another way of resisting waves of collective hysteria must be formulated. Some believe the discipline of the market will do the trick, others that corporatism is the answer. They hope that the power of the market or of a rational state will stem the tide of primordial irrationalities. Others are more fatalistic. They see the realization of a more humane social order to be a matter of collective fate: limited to those who are more European, are truly a part of Central Europe, have a Hapsburg and not a Ottoman past, and so forth. Technocratic responses and resignation to civilizational fate seem to be inevitable alternatives to primordial hatreds when civil society is reified. 

        But when civil society is understood in a more concrete, and less ideological, fashion, the search for magical solutions is abandoned, as is lazy reference to civilizational fate. Instead attention is focused on the expansion of the concrete actions of free public activity as the actualization of a civil society, and the effects of these actions can be charted. The story of civil society is not a new grand narrative, replacing the narratives of the state and the economy, but a minor narrative to be considered along with others by the democratic public. 

        For the involved political actors this presents a possibility that an alternative to the failure of democracy exists. For outside observers, it suggests how to make sense of the failures in the Balkans, along with the relative successes of Central Europe. We observe, with dismay, how the state controlled media manipulated public opinion in the Balkans, inflaming a far from inevitable genocidal conflict. We observe how civil responses to the slaughter, such as the organization Women in Black in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia work to inform opinion in other ways. Beyond the Balkans, we can analyze carefully the struggle for free media in Russia and observe its effects on the ability of the state to execute an unpopular war in Chechnya. And in detail, we can observe the formation of networks of voluntary associations and independent social institutions, as they develop around the old Soviet bloc, and help redefine societal life, interacting with the development of a democratic state and a sound economy.

        The actions of self-declared independent intellectuals and citizens helped revive the concept of civil society, as it contributed to the demise of Communism. The same type of action can and has contributed to a more humane post-communism. It is of crucial importance that the practices of intellectuals, as political actors and as observers, do not make such civility seem unattainable. 
 
 

        In "actually existing democracies," such as those of the United States and Western Europe, the intellectual's task concerning the ideal of civil society is in many respects, the opposite of the one in the former Soviet Bloc. In the East, there is a need to avoid overly reified terms, to realize that the narrative of civil society is not grand, but minor. The tyranny of theory is a recent memory. It is sown into the fabric of societal and political life. Intellectuals as philosopher kings are held in deep suspicion. The tyrannies of anti-Marxism threaten to smoothly replace the tyrannies of Marxism: markets for anti-markets, and nationalism for Leninism. The idea of a civil society in this context must not appear to have a misplaced concreteness. As an alternative to communism and anti-communism, it is too weak. And when it does not appear to be too weak, it appears as an ideology for the continued ascendancy of intellectuals. The societal referents of the term in their concreteness need to be appreciated, if they are not, they may be overlooked. The role of theory and ideas in the West is very different. A strong dose of theory injected into the body politic would not be a bad thing. The cry for theoretical reflection can be heard. The narrative of civil society might be minor, but at least it is a narrative that can inject sense into public deliberations. Public theoretical reflection seems to have become a monopoly of the right. Ideas that may provide an alternative to the right's over rationalized conception of men and women and over sacralized conception of the public good are much needed. [9] One can almost hear the people's cry for civil society. 

        The "civil society strategy", born of the apparent weakness of the opposition in the context of a totalitarian power, said a great deal about politics in the modern era, and the nature of social movements of the political east and the west. Thus the writings of such anti-political authors as George Konrad, Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik gained wide western readership, and not only among close observers of the old bloc. The imagery of the oppositionists of society set apart from the authorities looked a great deal like the ideal of a civil society articulated independently of the state. Civil society became an international hot topic of theoretical inquiry. But the translation of the concept into the political world of the western democracies is a difficult endeavor. 

        The term civil society, as we have observed, is heard in political discourse of everyday life in the former Soviet bloc in two different negative rhetorical contexts. Either politicians and citizens wonder whether they ever had one and whether they are capable of having one under present conditions, or those who use the concept or ideas related to it are critically appraised as propagating a new ideology to sustain the hegemony of the intellectuals. In the political West, in the United States specifically, the term appears in a more confused fashion. It is used in ways that fit a wide assortment of alternative political orientations, ranging from George Bush's "thousand points of light, " to feminist attempts to sustain an independent social movement, to conservative attempts to de-statize social welfare programs and re-interject conservative religious morality into public life. It is simultaneously under and over theorized. The modifier, civil, appears in political discourse before the word, society, as a way of expressing little more than the idea of good or peaceful society. With the conclusion of the successful negotiation of a peace agreement in Bosnia, a spokesman for the State Department hoped for the sustaining of a civil society as the alternative to continued war. There is not much specific understanding about the nature of civil society in such a declaration. The spokesman was not thinking about any particular set of social and political arrangements reminiscent of the order that began to emerge in the struggle against Communism or in the history of ideas. He was just hoping for a peaceful resolution of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In the academic world, in contrast, the topic has great specificity and is the subject of serious and sustained theoretical reflection. This apparently explains the reemergence of the term in political discourse, but does not in a serious way inform meaningful political action. 

        The usual separation of public life and academic life is exaggerated in the case of the civil society idea. It is a new term which serves both academic and public purposes, but the latter does not inform the former because the idea of civil society moves against the academic current. While it is connected to the greatest accomplishments of the political intellectuals, the definitive defeat of twentieth century totalitarianism, it moves in opposite directions from dominant academic fashions: de-constructivism, post-modernism and multi-culturalism. [10] Postcolonial concerns for the subaltern involve a turning away from the nurturing of an autonomous non-partisan public space. There are some bases of commonality: both academic fashion and the civil society thinkers are usually skeptical about grand narratives of progress and liberation, both the fashion and these thinkers are aware of the limitations of enlightenment dreams of the rule of reason, and critical of the conflation of power and truth, both the "post-modernists" and the "post-totalitarians" are aware of epochal changes in the way we think and the way we act. But there are striking differences as well, centered around the evaluation of liberal traditions of democracy and freedom; academic fashion assumes and radically questions them, while civil society thinkers are aware of their historicity and fragility, attempting to further substantiate them. 

        It is on the political left that the idea of civil society would seem to be of the greatest practical interest. After the fall of communism, the right makes sense, both its market and moral logics make sense to a large portion of the general public (even though these two logics have inherent contradictions), while it is notable world wide that the left no longer speaks a sensible language for the general public. Yet, despite the need for a new way of understanding and organizing public action, civil society is subjected to sustained theoretical critique from the left. It purportedly privileges those who are hegemonic and the system that sustains the hegemony of males, white and privileged classes. A clear disjuncture exists between the practical implications of the academic left cultural critique of the injustices implicit in the liberal political and cultural order, and a civil society critique of the order of things. The cultural left focuses on identity politics, the possibility of knowing and its cultural framing, and the subversion of hierarchies of cultural judgment; the advocates of civil society (and a related group of intellectuals often identified with communitarianism) want to transcend identity politics, establish a consensual grounding for truth, and maintain that cultural judgment must be sustained. The advocates of civility in the West do not only face the resistance of those who argue for the logic of the state and the market; they face as well the criticism of those who view them as apologists for the ongoing workings of the liberal state and the market and their injustices. The alternative to the right is fractured; intellectuals disunite. 
 
 

        The ideal reborn in the opposition to modern tyranny (Hannah Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism) used in a pragmatic fashion has the potential to address major political problems on both sides of the old iron curtain. On the East side, the term civil society, when used in a non-reified fashion, has the potential to sensitize political actors to established political accomplishment, and points toward concrete ways to avoid authoritarian solutions to the extremely difficult problems the constituting democracies face. On the West side, if the principles of civil society can come to be known and appreciated, and this is largely the responsibility of intellectuals addressing the general public, alternatives to the unidimensional character of present day political discourse may develop. Public deliberations may be made more robust when it is apparent that there are ways to consider the public good that go beyond the rigidities of market logic, but do not yield to discredited utopian temptations. European and North American political culture come closer. As they utilize a common pragmatic political ideal, they intergrate on the basis of a great civilizational accomplishment of the western tradition. This stands as an alternative to, or rather a supplement of, the integration of international governing bodies, such as the EU, and international economic agencies, such as the IMF: suggesting that reintergration has a civil, as well as a market and a state dimension. 
 
 
 
 

Notes. 
 
 

1. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Politics Without Cliche," Social Research, Fall, 1993, Vol.60, No.3, p.431-444. 
 
 

2. See Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, New York: Basic Books, 1991.

4. Of particular concern is the relative importance of the intellectuals in the political transformation. Some scholars, such as Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwin, want to downplay the importance of intellectuals, while the dominant point of view, emphasized by such observers as Timothy Garton Ash, Lawrence Weschler and many others, including myself, have recognized the special role of intellectuals and the special importance of the cooperation between intellectuals and the workers. See Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland's Working -Class Democratization, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, Lawrence Goodwyn, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, New York: Oxford University Press, Timothy Garton-Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, New York: Vintage Books, 1985, and Lawrence Weschler Solidarity: Poland in the Season of its Passion, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. 
 
 

5. See Paul Johnson, hitellectuals, London, Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1988. 
 
 

6. This was the prevailing position of modernization theory inspired by the work of Talcott Parsons. See his The System of Modern Society, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971. 
 
 

7. See, for example, G.M. Tamas, "A Disquisition on Civil Society," Social Research, v.61, n.2, Summer, 1994, p.205-222. 
 
 

8. The democratic challenge is for citizens to judge the relative weight to be given to each of these institutions and to determine how they are to be connected. Such judgment is left to democratic decision. 
 
 

9. This is something that Richard Neuhaus has been arguing forcefully. See his Naked Public Square, Grand Rapids Mich.: Mott Media, 1984. 
 
 

10. Telling critiques of academic fashions and their distance from public life can be found in Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Cultural Wars Divert Education and Distract America, New York: Doubleday, 1994 and David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.