Among the many attempts to retrieve something of value out of the supposed wreckage of Marxian social and political thought, two of the most prominent have been the advocacy of various forms of ‘communitarianism’, and the widespread revival of interest in notions of ‘civil society’. Both of these concepts are notoriously protean in character; both have captured the imagination of present-day theorists and political actors across the right, left and centre of politics; and each of them has been used in recent debate to encompass a very broad range of moral and theoretical positions, some of which appear to be not merely diverse but mutually contradictory.

Thus writers on ‘civil society’ differ sharply on whether the term includes or explicitly excludes the institutions of the state – and, if the latter, on whether it refers to all forms of associational life or only to those which have a place in the ‘public sphere’. Bodies currently advocating ‘civil society’ as a practical programme range from the Institute for the Study of Civil Society (initially linked to the Institute for Economic Affairs), whose prime concern is with the revival of small-scale voluntary action, through to the Institute for Global Civil Society (based at the London School of Economics), whose aims include the promotion and enforcement of ‘universal’ human rights. Writers on communitarian themes likewise profoundly disagree as to whether ‘community’ means merely the collective enhancement of individual goals, or the existence of a social and moral order that is ontologically and historically prior to the individual.