AGENCY, CITIZENSHIP, AND CIVIL SOCIETY

Civil society was a vision largely forgotten during the “short twentieth century.” It sounded quaint and even irrelevant for the age of power politics, organized economy, and mass democracy, in which individual agency tended to be stifled by these gigantic institutions and processes that operated beyond one's practical comprehension and engagement. This was a time when the centralized bureaucratic state, whether the totalitarian or welfare variant, dominated public life, while the economy of scale, whether capitalist or not, was welcomed with little questioning. Democratization surely constituted an irreversible trend of the century, and yet its universal appeal was intrinsically tied to passive citizenship, in its worst case, of a mass consumerist kind. Neither society, increasingly cramped between the state and market, nor civility and civic virtues, increasingly displaced by the sovereignty of individual citizens' unreflective preferences, could claim much attention but in a romantic lament for their erosion. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the vision of civil society had no corresponding reality in the twentieth century and was merely reflective of a bygone era – that is, an “idealized nineteenth-century.” The twentieth century was not to be remembered as the age of civil society.

Against this historical background, it comes rather as a surprise that its last decade witnessed the sudden triumph of civil society all over the world.