Civil society is the tradition that puts voluntary associations, local institutions and intermediate groups at the center of political life. Clubs, congregations, unions, mutual societies and professional bodies stand between the individual and the state, and free politics depends on them.
The Scottish Enlightenment named the concept, in Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), and two very different thinkers gave it its modern shape. Hegel identified civil society as a distinct sphere between family and state, the realm of particular interest that the state must integrate. Tocqueville, observing America in the 1830s, argued that a democratic people prevented from associating would be defenseless before both centralized power and majority opinion, and that forming associations is a skill which has to be practiced to survive.
Gramsci then inverted the picture from the left. Civil society is not a bulwark against domination but the terrain on which ruling groups secure consent, the schools, churches and press through which hegemony is maintained instead of imposed. The two readings have coexisted uneasily ever since: civil society as the guarantor of pluralism, and civil society as the machinery by which existing arrangements reproduce themselves.
The term acquired new force in Central Europe before 1989, where dissidents used it to describe an autonomous social life built deliberately outside the party-state, and again in Putnam's work on social capital and the decline of associational membership. Its current critics argue that the concept has been stretched past usefulness. Professionalized NGOs are not what Tocqueville described; well-organized associational life can be sectarian or violent as easily as civic; and treating association as intrinsically democratic ignores what many associations are actually for.