Civil Society, Patronage and Democracy

This article explores the relationship of contemporary analyses of civil society to research venues dealing with the transformational capacity of patronage, at work in democracies. It has two aims. The first is to offer an approach to civil society that is based on both the formal characteristics as well as the pragmatic dimensions of contemporary state-society relationships. The second is to show that within this theoretical approach, patronage appears as an integral part of many modern democratic regimes and must be treated as such in order to publicize the private domain and thus avoid the privatization of the public domain.