5 CIVIL SoCIETY IN PARTNERSHIP wITH THE STATE: MORE GOVERNANCE, LEss GOVERNMENT The sovereignty of the nation state is being challenged from many different directions not least of which is from the perspective of civil society. The idea of supplanting the functions and functionaries of the state with th citoyen of civil society harkens back to the classics of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emancipatory sociology. In some ways, the new group of theorists and social scientists who envision a decentering of public adminis tration away from a distant, uncaring, and inefficient centralized state ad- ministration into a more proximate, empowering, if less tidy system of multilevel governance, subsidiarity, and new public management draw their inspiration from these classics. The contemporary theorists of civil society, however, claim that growing complexity posses new challenges to governance, democracy, and autonomy that the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social theorists did not anticipate. The nation state is seen as inadequate on