The Road to a Sociological Theory of Civil Society

The major claim we advance in this chapter is that civil sphere theory (CST) constitutes the first truly sociological theory of civil society. To sustain such a bold claim, we first locate CST contextually, both historically and in relation to concurrent contemporary work on civil society. We then analyze the conceptual development of classical theories of civil society, identifying their weaknesses based on their sociological shortcomings. With this as background context, we argue that CST has to be seen as a way to rescue the significance of civil society “questions,” providing however a radically different strategy in looking for “answers.”Finally, we provide a vision of CST as an ongoing, collaborative theoretical project.