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Notes Introduction 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: 50th Anniversary Edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), sec. 67. 2. Simone Chamber and Will Kymlicka, eds., Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3. William Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 145. 4. For an insightful analysis of this transformation of politics, see Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). George Soros elucidates the sharp distinction between “market values” and “social values” in his advocacy of separating roles: “As market participants, people ought to pursue their individual self interests; as participants in the political process, they ought to be guided by the public interest.” Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 152. Michael Sandel’s 2009 Reith Lectures highlight the same theme; he calls for “a politics of the common good [that] invites us to think of ourselves less as consumers, and more as citizens.” Michael Sandel, “A New Politics of the Common Good,” The Reith Lectures, BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b00kt7rg. 5. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), xx. Chapter 1: The Concept of Civil Society 1. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). I explore the interconnectedness of these meanings of “civil society” later in this chapter. Part of the appeal of the term is its generality of meaning—what Michael Walzer describes as the broad resonance of a “thin” concept, the wide attractiveness of which is due to its abstractness and corresponding lack of “thick” reference to concrete circumstances. Despite the variability of the interpretation of its “thick” meanings , however, “civil society” is used with increasing consistency worldwide. A 146 Notes to Pages 2–5 prominent example of this is its use for designating the broad field encompassing nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations by CIVICUS, the international body representing this sector. 2. Roger Lohmann, The Commons: New Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992). Lohmann advances the notion of subsuming the entire sphere of what is referred to here as civil society, including the nonprofit sector and philanthropy, under the rubric of “the commons.” While such an application of the term has interesting theoretical implications (as well as roots in Aristotelian political writings) and relates to my emphasis on the common good as a defining element of civil society, it tends to blur the important distinction I make here between the composite character of civil society, as defined in the following text, and the standard notion of the commons as shared social resources. My argument is that, while civil society is essential to solving the problems of the commons, it is important to distinguish between the two concepts. 3. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, “Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons,” in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, ed. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 3. 4. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1244; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (New York: Schocken, 1965). There is now an international research association devoted to the study of the commons: http://www.iascp.org. 5. Robert Payton, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good (New York: Macmillan, 1988); Kathleen McCarthy, American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700–1865 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Robert Payton and Michael Moody, Understanding Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and Peter Halfpenny, “Trust, Charity, and Civil Society,” in Trust and Civil Society, ed. Fran Tonkiss, Andrew Passey, Natalie Fenton, and Leslie Hems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 132–50. 6. CIVICUS is an international alliance of organizations “dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world.” (www.civicus. org). Helmut Anheier, “The CIVICUS Civil Society Index: Proposals for Future Directions,” in CIVICUS Global Survey of the State of Civil Society, Volume 2, Comparative Perspectives, ed. V. Finn Heinrich and Lorenzo Fioramonti (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian, 2008); Michael Walzer, “The Idea of Civil Society: A Path to Social Reconstruction,” Dissent 38 (Spring 1991): 293–304; Charles Taylor, “Modes of...

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