October 7, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Civil Society: The Underpinnings of American Democracy
By Brian O’Connell
Bowing to the difficulty of defining a broad concept such as “civil society,” this book’s author offers a visual diagram.
Mr. O’Connell, professor of public service at Tufts University and founding president of Independent Sector, sketches a small circle that represents the citizen, or self. Overlapping the circle at different angles, with the circle in the center, are four rectangles that represent business, government, community, and volunteerism.
The resulting image is that of a throwing star, a tool of the Ninja warrior.
Intended or not, Mr. O’Connell’s visual representation of civil society as a weapon sets the tone for this short, urgent narrative, as he advocates the increased vigilance of citizens as the only hope for the United States’ survival.
“Though it seems eminently logical that rational people would never let such a democracy unravel,” he writes, “I’ve been around long enough and read enough to know that people and history can be terribly irrational.”
Mr. O’Connell writes that civil society gives privileges to its citizens yet expects people to work to insure that those privileges are shared by all. Too much complacency and pessimism, he writes, could eventually lead to despotism.
Like many of Mr. O’Connell’s books, Civil Society contains quotations from historical figures and first-person anecdotes to make its points.
For example, in a chapter covering “Limitations of and Threats to Civil Society,” Mr. O’Connell relates his struggles with the Internal Revenue Service over that agency’s badgering of non-profit groups that exercised their advocacy rights in the 1970s. “It has been my sad experience to face several very real threats of retaliation for being part of entirely legitimate efforts to convince or, if necessary, force government to obey its own laws.”
He concludes by urging readers never to neglect such protections, lest they lose them.
Publisher: University Press of New England, 23 South Main Street, Hanover, N.H. 03755-2048; (603) 643-7100; fax (603) 643-1540; http://www.dartmouth.edu/acad-inst/upne; 148 pages; $35 cloth, $14.95 paper; I.S.B.N. 0-87451-924-1 cloth, 0-87451-925-x paper.
