Democracy without Civil Society?

Abstract

The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. By Marc Morje Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 220 pp., $60.00 cloth: (ISBN: 0-521-81223-2), $24.00 paper: (ISBN: 0-521-01152-3). To better understand the foundations of democracy has been a goal of perennial interest to political scientists. It is a question, however, that assumes even greater urgency at times when the construction of democracy is high on the international agenda—such as after the Second World War, after the collapse of the Communist regimes in Europe, and after recent interventions in the Middle East. It is also a topic that allows more introspective political observers to reflect about the quality of democracy in their own countries. Nowhere is this more the case than in the United States, a country in which democracy has become the core political value. These considerations form the background to Marc Morje Howard's highly readable book: The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe . In it, Howard investigates the foundations of democracy in post-Communist Europe, but he approaches that case with a toolkit of arguments from a wide range of other empirical and theoretical contexts. As such the book makes both a narrow and a broad contribution to the field, and even though it will be of primary interest to students of post-Communism, it also has much to offer theorists of democracy—especially those scholars with an interest in the concepts of civil society and social capital. Howard's argument consists of three main theses: (1) that among the foundations of successful democratic government, civil society is crucial; (2) that civil society is as yet weakly developed in post-Communist Europe and has, if anything, become weaker during the post-Communist period; and (3) that this weakness is explained largely by the Communist experience itself, which produced distinctive behavioral patterns and dispositions common to the …