The privatization of citizenship. Civil society and the problem of the "third sphere"

In the wake of Eastern European revolutions of the 1980s, and after years o f scholarly neglect, citizenship has been rediscovered and reinvented. Cent ral to this project has been the rejuvenation of the concept of civil socie ty - an old concept newly recalled to service in the task of representing t he desiderata of a "third" sphere of civic solidarity and political partici pation independent of and in between political theory's great dichotomie (B obbio) of market and state. In the late 1990s we now know that the civil so ciety concept has not been able to sustain this theoretical promise. Parado xically, the concept intended to invoke a non-market "third sphere" has ins tead been appropriated to serve the neo-liberal project of the privatizatio n of citizenship and the fear and loathing of the state. This paradox can b e explained by locating the civil society concept within a metanarrative of anglo-american citizenship theory - the conceptual foundations of neoliber alism. Using narrative analysis to reconstruct the historicity of this meta narrative, and the epistemology of social naturalism to explain its foundat ional tenacity, this article explains how and why neo-liberalism has been a ble increasingly to privatize the public sphere of citizenship, demonize th e state, and undermine the promise of a "third sphere".