Civil society is everybody’s darling in politics and policy today. It’s hard to find a policy student who hasn’t interned at some NGO, founded her own grassroots initiative and isn’t excited about non-profits in any given policy field.

Animal vs. disability charities, via Flickr, originally uploaded my Mot

So is the third sector panacea? Uh, maybe not. A third sector? Non-governmental, non-profit? What kind of definitions are these, anyway? And what would be an uncivil society?

Whenever social sciences come up with such terms that convey little more but a vague sense of something being different, or gone (think postmodern) there is always the danger that really, we don’t know (exactly) what we’re talking about.

For all their shortcomings, we roughly know how markets and states function, and how they fail. By contrast, we appear to know relatively little about how whatever it is we call “civil society” works.

Is it then reasonable to assume that civil society is categorically devoid of dysfunctions? Hardly so, I think.

As long as we don’t know what we’re cobbling together in civil society, we’d better stick to our lasts: the market and the state.

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