1st Edition

Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds

Edited By Liv Egholm, Lars Bo Kaspersen Copyright 2021
    218 Pages
    by Routledge

    218 Pages
    by Routledge

    Examining the historical and social trajectories involved in the continuous development of civil society, this volume reveals the contextual nature of the process. Through empirical studies focusing primarily on Denmark and covering the period from 1849 to the present day, it analyses the manner in which civil society has been practised and transformed over time. Presenting a new theoretical framework informed by a relational and processual perspective, the book sheds new light on familiar questions pertaining to civil society, the production of its boundaries and spaces of action, and the means by which these spaces can become causal factors. A fresh intervention in the study of a concept that has been central in defining ideas of solidarity and the common good, and to which researchers and politicians look for solutions to the great challenges of our time, Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics, history and philosophy with interests in civil society.

    Part 1: Setting the Scene

    1. A Processual-relational Approach to Civil Society

    Liv Egholm and Lars Bo Kaspersen

    2. The Modern Conceptual History of Civil Society

    Christiane Mossin

    3. The "Long History" of Civil Society in Denmark and Western Europe: Civil Society – in the Shadow of the State (Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century)

    Lars Bo Kaspersen and Anders Sevelsted

    4. Different States, Different Shadows: The Particular Exceptionalism of Civil Society in the United States

    Elisabeth S. Clemens

    Part 2: The Emergence of the Danish Civil Society

    5. Civil Society and the Civilizing Mission

    Maj Grasten

    6. Christianity, State, and Voluntarism: Protestant Processes of Privatization and Deprivatization

    Anders Sevelsted

    7. Philanthropy as the Co-creator of the Welfare State

    Liv Egholm

    8. Past and Present Futures of Democracy. The Danish Peasants’ Movement as Democracy Instigator and Cultural Mythologizer

    Christiane Mossin

    9. Eclipsed by the Welfare State: Understanding the Rise and Decline of the Danish Workers’ Cooperation, 1871-2000

    Andreas Möller Mulvad and Bue Rübner Hansen

    10. Civil Society in the Shadow of the Danish Welfare State

    Mathias Hein Jessen

    11. Civic Action as Temporal Process-in-relations: Towards an Events-based Approach

    Dimitra Makri Andersen

    Epilogue

    12. Civil Society as Process and Valuation

    Frank Adloff

    Biography

    Liv Egholm is Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

    Lars Bo Kaspersen is Professor in the Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is the co-editor of Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology and the author of Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist.