The role of civil society in negotiating new relations between the market and the state

摘要

If the fall of the Berlin Wall has put an end to the socialist experiment, it has also put an end to the major political debate of this century, namely the contest between state and market as the dominant institutional form of society. One consequence of the end of this contest has been the atrophy of the political debate and the convergence of institutional arrangements that we can observe around the world. Markets are everywhere given a greater role, formal democracies mushroom, and it is widely believed that neo-liberalism is the single way to achieve prosperity.