The aim of our book is to further develop and systematically justify the idea of civil society reconceied in part around a nation of self limiting democratizing movement seeking to expand and protect spaces for both negative liberty and positive freedom and to recreate egalitaridm forms of solidarity without impairing economic self regulation before turning to this task we would lik to conclude this introduction by illustrating the importent and perhaps decisive continution of our theory of civil society of the three theoretical antinomies mentioned above
Civil society and temporary political theory
It might seem that our position is alredy anticipated by one of the six theoretical traditions involved in the debates depicted above namely the pluralist version of the elite democratic tradition of theory indeed the pluralists addition to the elite model of democracy is precisely a conception of a third realm differentiated from the economy and the state on the pluralist analysis a highly articulated civil society with cross cutting cleavages coverlapping memberships of groups and social mobility is the presupposition for a stable democratic polity a guarantee against permanent demination by any one group and against the emergence of fundamentalist mass movements and antidemocratic ideaologies moreover a civil society so constituted is considered to be capable of acquiring influence over the political system throuh the articulation of interests that are aggregated by political parties and legislatures and brought to bear on political decision making it self understeed along the lines of the elite model of democracy