Guest Editorial: Understanding the Complexity of Democratic Civil Society

摘要

The democracy of the states has always been a profoundly unfinished thing, as movements have utilized democratic legitimations and institutions to push further democratization. The democratization of the world beyond the states has yet to begin. (Markoff 1999, p. 301).There is a renewed, emergent interest in the idea of democratic civil society. At the forefront of this interest is a fundamental sociopolitical, systemic question: How to mediate the tensions between the private and the public, between the individual and the social, between public ethics and private interests? This question is followed by another, What does this idea of democratic civil society mean? And finally, the question: In what kind of social and institutional infrastructure democratic civil society should be embedded that would enable it to realize its full potential and at the same time be protected from coop-tation by external political forces.