Includes bibliographical references (p. [457]-483) and indexes.

Civil society and democracy : a comparative review essay / Carolyn M. Elliott -- Modes of civil society / Charles Taylor -- The idea of civil society : a path to social reconstruction / Michael Walzer -- Rethinking the public sphere : a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy / Nancy Fraser -- Civil societies : liberalism and the moral uses of pluralism / Nancy L. Rosenblum -- Bowling in the bronx : the uncivil interstices between civil and political society / Laurence Whitehead -- Beyond the nation? or within? / Partha Chatterjee -- Civil society : cultural possibility of a modern ideal / Robert Hefner -- Civil society and its avatars : what happend to freedom and democracy? / Gulpreet Mahajan -- Civil society and its institutions / André Béteille -- Civil society or the state : what happened to citizenship? / Dipankar Gupta -- The 'civil' and the 'political' in civil society / Neera Chandhoke --

Market reforms and the emergent constellation of civil society in China / Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan -- Civil society and other political possibilities in southeast Asia / Garry Rodan -- Civil society and democratization in comparative perspective : Latin America and the Middle East / Mehran Kamrava and Frank O. Mora -- Civil society and ideological contestation in India / Mark Robinson -- The coffee house and the ashram : Gandhi, civil society, and public spheres / Susanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph -- Social capital, civil society, and degrees of democracy in India / Hans Blomkvist -- Ethnic conflict and civil society : India and beyond / Ashutosh Varshney.

Includes selected papers from a conference convened by the IACIS in Hyderabad in Dec. 1998.