The Virtues and Misfortunes of Civil Society in Cuba

Bibliographic Data

ID4499753
AuthorsHaroldo Dilla, Philip Oxhorn
Year2002
Volume29
Issue4
Pages11-30
Publication date2002-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLatin American Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-582X • E-ISSN: 1552-678X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0094582x0202900402
OpenAlexW2010236217
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited19

Civil society is one of historical realities most subject to conceptual ambiguities, probably because concept is often subject of heated polemical debates over whether to define it in purely normative terms. A commonality among these definitions has been delineation of a simple linear relationship between civil society and other concurrent historical facts such as market, liberal values, political democracy, and state. In an attempt to avoid these issues, we prefer to define civil society as the social fabric formed by a multiplicity of self-constituted territorially-and functionally-based units which peacefully coexist and collectively resist subordination to state, at same time that they demand inclusion into national political structures (Oxhor, 1997: 167). Civil society is thus seen as communicative interaction of group actions that generate new power relations and either consolidate or erode existing ones. As such, it reflects a process that does not begin or end with creation of market and is not uniquely associated with any particular normative system. Civil society involves a continuous process through which different social segments organize themselves and interact with each other and with state. This allows

Civil society · Democracy · Law and economics · Normative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subject (documents) · Subordination (linguistics) · Cuban History and Society · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Politics and Society in Latin America

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