Time to take civil society to the next level

as networks for collective action. However he sees it as largely a distant possibility: global civil society is imagined as mechanically emerging, as an addition of new layers of non-state actors and their networks. Global civil society for Edwards, however desirable, remains an embryonic social movement and is too often merely issue-driven. Already when discussion critical theory, Edwards misses the political practice inspired by the theory: the revolutionary momentum of 1968 to which critical theory contributed is not recognised, the immanent threat to the survival of bourgeois civil society is not acknowledged. Edwards equates Habermas with critical theory, seemingly unaware that as a second-generation critical theorist, Habermas diverted considerably from the revolutionary political philosophy of Adorno and Marcuse. Critical theory challenged the straightjacket of alienating political representation; it did not settle for communicating about the forms, manners and degrees of exclusion from democracy. Almost in the last sentence of the book Edwards comes to acknowledge that 21st century manifestations of global civil society action (such as the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2002, followed-up on in 2005), are expressions of alternative forms of politics, "a new kind of society" (p.111). The realization of this new society in the making can no longer be imagined merely as a form of civil society. They are much more than mere forms existing alongside or in conjunction with capitalist political and economic systems. As genuine, but still ill-defined alternatives on a global scale, they stand in direct opposition to the imposed restraints and the demand for 'civility' which has traditionally obliged civil society to adhere to system conformity even when attempting to address global issues.

Only when conceptualised and practised as an anti-thesis to the globally unsustainable and in essence, undemocratic system of predatory and imperial globalization, will civil society be able to live up to its global potentials. At that stage and moment in time civil society may well transcend beyond the many contemporary checks and balances that serve to maintain the current order of armed globalization. Society lived as a multitude of interests committed to global commons, local needs and future opportunities for unconditional democracy, is all-inclusive. Thus, Edwards' 'civil society' provides an insightful elaboration of a concept that is already mutating. The theory of this transformation is already being laid out, nowhere more brilliantly than in "Multitude" by M.Hardt and A. Negro. Required reading, also for Edwards and fellow civil society theorists.

Literature ===========

Edwards, Michael (2004)

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