Civil Society

"Civil Society" discusses some of the meanings and preconditions of freedom, responsibility and social order. Keith Tester argues that these are problems of modernity. The imagination of civil society created a milieu which at once was the location and defence of social self-sufficiency in the world. Tester identifies the origins of civil society in the work of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and the often forgotten philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. It shows how the assumptions of civil society and its oppressive state of nature, fed into the sociological and philosophical discourses which emerged in the 19th century. Tester does not ask "what is civil society?". Instead he asks "why is civil society?". He concludes that through civil society, the protaganists and heirs of European modernity struggled to make their world meaningful and safe. Civil society involved the establishment of boundaries between the community and the social and the terrifying milieu of Nature.