Evolution of the content’s knowledge and practice of civil society’s concept

Abstract

The present paper aims at providing an overview of the evolution of the cognitive content of the civil society concept, and how it has been related to the political and social context of each thinker. More particularly, it investigates how each of the thinkers contributed to enriching its analytical dimensions and related it to some given type of organization? Civil society helped to make the nature of the relationship between the state and the society more intelligible. The first contributions focused on the context that produced the separation of the cognitive content of the concept from the religious sphere, then from the political and the economic ones. The paper attempts to analyze how these ruptures in the evolution of the concept unfolded, the roles it can play and how they shaped the emergence of new organizations that have become new representations of the concept of civil society