This book is a primer on the varieties of ways that the concept and institutional space that we call civil society has been incorporated into political theory and practice and, as such, it is quite a good source for students who may be grappling with what Powell calls the meta-narratives of civil society in political analysis. Despite the new subtitle for this second edition, it is perhaps less interesting for those who want to understand current debates about the Big Society in the welfare field and, specifically, how the concept of civil society is shaping the current debate about the relationship between the welfare state and the third sector. As a result, I suspect it is a book that will be on the reading lists of political science undergraduates but probably hard to find on social policy reading lists, although I think it should be read by those interested in the development and politics of the welfare state.

There is a new first chapter in this second edition which identifies four narratives ‘exploring the relationship between civil society and the state’. These narratives are anchored in contemporary political projects wrestling with the realities of neoliberalism and the democratic deficit that it is creating globally. First, Powell describes Chinese attempts to design a political architecture that can accommodate a downsizing of bureaucracy and government as part of socialist reform; the model that is emerging is one where the state is either a ‘traffic cop’, a ‘soccer referee’ or a ‘fire fighter’ and everything else remains the business of civil society. It is described as neo-institutional in its Chinese form because civil society does not exist independently from the state but instead is absorbed into systems of governance. This is not unique to China; it is, in my view, the normal way that the state and civil society are related in the modern global world, East or West. The second narrative emerges from the philosophical reflections of twenty-first century conservatism. This is the Big Society of Jesse Norman, Philip Blond and Roger Scruton. In this incarnation of civil society, the welfare state is replaced by charitable institutions and the voluntary sector becomes the ‘first sector’ rather than the third sector. The third narrative is provided by theorists of the third way of which Anthony Giddens is the most prominent representative. It is a model in which government and civil society are conceived of as being in partnership; where ‘the reconstruction of welfare provision has to be integrated with programmes for the active development of civil society’ (p. 17): civil renewal initiatives, community-based crime prevention and involvement of the third sector in welfare service provision are ingredients of the third way mixture. The fourth narrative is that of ‘radical democracy’ which seeks to transcend the neo-institutional models that have been favoured by governments and party ideologues. This is the narrative emerging from the Arab Spring, street level resistance to austerity in Greece and the anti-capitalist movement that continues to challenge political authority throughout the world in an attempt to ‘democratise democracy’. Powell captures the political tension that is embedded in these competing narratives by referring to the words of Cornelius Castoriades (Reference Castoriades1987) who points to the conflict between ‘the radical democratic project of autonomy (personal freedom to determine one's own future without structural manipulation) and the institutional project of mastery by a disciplinary state’ (p. 54). The efforts to resolve this opposition marks the political battle ground where the future of civil society will be determined.

The book provides a useful historical and political overview of the emergence of civil society as an institutional reality and charts the fight over its occupation by social movements seeking to consolidate democratic gains in struggles to define the political process. However, the absence of any reference to Habermas’ pivotal work (Habermas, Reference Habermas1989) on the structural transformation of the public sphere in the book is an omission worth noting. Chapter 3 describes the renaissance of civil society in relation to the secularisation of society. Chapter 4 discusses the early social movements and political struggles that have contributed to the creation of civil society as an institutional space in modern democracy. Chapter 5 focuses on the theoretical legacy of Nietzsche's contribution to the notion of the ‘totalitarian big society’: a tradition in thinking which led to the fusion of state and civil society in state socialist societies and Nazism. Chapter 6 turns attention to the issue of human rights and the occupation of civil society by new social movements attempting to change the democratic narrative through civic insurrection (p. 144). In places, the inattentive student reader may find the analysis drifts slightly away from the book's main theme with a confusing mixture of political philosophy, political history and arcane detail, but good concluding sections at the end of each chapter serve to make the relevance of such analysis clear and the connections between the different elements of the discussion explicit.

In the end, a key question that could be asked is how do we know civil society when we see it? I am not sure that this book answers the question other than to suggest implicitly that it is complicated! The idea of civil society is complex because, on the one hand, it points to the ensemble of social institutions and practices that are often defined by the fact that they are not part of the state but, on the other hand, it attempts to conceptualise the social space in which people, organised into publics, form to criticise the state and act independently of it. The reality is that civil society has gone global, as Powell recognises in his final chapter, and we live in a socio-political world where the difference between governance and empowerment has been eroded. The politics of civil society is about how to reinstate this difference.