State and Civil Society

The concept of civil society, expressing what Marx referred to as `the struggles and the aspirations of the age', has become the foundation of the reconstruction of both left-oriented radical political theory and liberal theory. Most of these works see civil society as a residual category composed of everything that is not the state.

Neera Chandhoke argues that this position is flawed and proposes that the state can be understood only by referring to the politics of civil society and vice versa. She states that it is necessary to sift through many historical layers of meaning that inform the concept and unearth the system of meaning which can stimulate the democratic imagination.