Description:
BRIEF CONTENTS Introduction -- The Importance of a Civil Society -- PART 1. Civil Society in the Classical and Religious Traditions. Plato: Civic Virtue and the Just Society -- Aristotle's Response to Plato: The Importance of Friendship -- Christian Conceptions of Civic Virtue -- Elements of Islamic and Jewish Medieval Political Thought -- PART 2. Early Modern Approaches to Civil Society. Niccolò Machiavelli: Civic Virtue and Civil Society -- Thomas Hobbes and Modern Civil Society -- Benedict Spinoza and Liberal Democracy -- John Locke, Civil Society, and the Constrained Majority -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Community and Civil Society -- PART 3. Late Modern and Contemporary Approaches to Civil Society. Immanuel Kant: Civil Society and International Order -- G.W.F. Hegel: Civil Society and the State -- Karl Marx and the Economic Argument about Civil Society -- John Stuart Mill: Civil Society as a Higher Calling -- John Rawls: The Just and Fair Civil Society -- The Conservative View: Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Michael Oakeshott -- PART 4. Critiques of Civil Society. The Critique of Power in Civil Society: Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault -- Feminism, Gender Equality, and Civil Society -- 21st Century Challenges for Civil Society: Culture, Religion, and Climate Change -- Civil Society, Liberal Democracy, and Racial Injustice: A Political Theory Informed by the Black Experience in America.