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CIVIL
SOCIETY REVISITED
Volume 68 No. 4 (Winter 2001) Arien Mack, Editor Elzbieta Matynia, Guest Co-editor |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
| Editor's
Introduction
This is the eighth issue in the Social Research series on Central and Eastern Europe. The series was launched soon after the momentous events in the fall of 1989. In its periodic returns to the region over the last decade, the journal has examined various aspects of an unprecedented experiment: the peaceful dismantling of the communist system and the subsequent efforts at a democratic transformation. But it was 25 years ago that a still-communist Central Europe, with the emergence of new kinds of social movement, first caught the attention of social science scholars in the west. Their efforts to find a name that could embrace the activities and the actors in these movements that functioned independently of both state and Party in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, led to the launching of an extraordinary new career for the concept of a "civil society". Today, not only has the term "civil society" become an ubiquitous part of our democratic vocabulary, providing a conceptual framework for democratic action throughout the world, it also provides an ongoing challenge for the social sciences: subjecting the concept and the phenomenon of civil society to further theoretical and empirical examination. In the fall of 2000, on the 20th anniversary of the emergence of Solidarity in Poland -- certainly one of the world's most remarkable and widely known civil society projects -- the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and the Sociology Department of the Graduate Faculty, New School University, jointly organized a conference called "Civil Society Revisited". All but one of the contributions to this issue of Social Research were presented at that conference. Our intention was not to celebrate the signing of the agreements in the Gdansk Shipyard, but rather to offer a critical analysis of the uses and abuses of the concept. We wanted to pay attention to the context in which the idea was first revived, but we were also interested in how it came into being, in how it functions, and in the role it plays today in a variety of contexts. The material presented here is a combination of theory, case studies, and empirical analysis. As this issue of the journal goes to press, the people of Poland remember on this 20th anniversary the imposition of martial law and the traumatic termination of Solidarity in December, 1981. No one believed then in miracles, and certainly no one dreamed then that their outlawed civil society would nevertheless survive, or survive, or go on to demonstrate the power of its accumulated experience by negotiating with the communist regime a transition to democracy. Elzbieta Matynia |
Recommended Reading Vol. 63 No. 1 (Spring 1996) Gains and Losses of the Transition to Democracy Vol. 63 No. 2 (Summer 1996) The Future of the Welfare State Vol. 64 No. 4 (Winter 1997) You may also be interested in the other issues in our transitions series |
Table of Contents
Notes on
Contributors
(at time of publication)
Jose Casanova is Associate Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) and he guest-edited the special issue of Sociology of Religion on "Religion and Global Civil Society" (60:3, Fall, 2001).
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. His publications include Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society (1998) and After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe (1992).
Irena Grudzinska Gross is a Program Officer in the Ford Foundation's Peace and Social Justice program and affiliated with New York University's Remarque institute. She is the author of The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville and the Romantic Imagination (1991).
Agnes Heller is Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (2001) and her book The Concept of the Beautiful is forthcoming in 2002.
Jacek Kurczewski, Professor at Warsaw University, Institute of Applied Social Sciences, specializes in sociology of law. He is the author of The Resurrection of Rights in Poland (1993) and co-editor (with MacLean) of Family, Politics and Law: Perspectives for East and West Europe (1994).
Joanna Kurczewska, whose field of specialty is nations and nationalism, is University Professor of Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology. She is the Editor of the Polish Sociological Review.
Maria Renata Markus is a senior lecturer at the School of Sociology, University of NSW, Sydney, Australia. Her publications include contributions to Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom (1989) and Race Critical Theories: Text and Context (2001).
Elzbieta Matynia is Director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the Graduate Faculty, New School University. Her most recent publication is "Furnishing Democracy", East European Politics and Society, Winter 2001.
Adam Michnik is the Editor-in-Chief of the biggest Polish daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza and a visiting professor at the New School University’s Graduate Faculty. His two English language books are Letters from Prison (1985) and Letters from Freedom (1998).
Vladimir Tismaneanu is Professor of Government and Politics
at
the University of Maryland (College Park) and editor of East European
Politics
and Societies. His most recent publication is Between Past and Future:
The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (co-editor Antohi, 2000).
