Empirically grounded, methodologically plural, gender aware, theoretically rich, and sufficiently provocative, the editors of this volume have assembled interpretations of Polish civil society that ought not only draw in those dedicated to Polish scholarship. This volume needs to be engaged by everyone who wants to appreciate how social science matters in figuring social change.

Civil society is a remarkable concept. In past work, I considered it to represent a space, form of action, and normative intervention into the transformational praxis ending communist rule. I thought its ambiguity productive in realizing change on relatively peaceful terms. The dozen contributors to this volume move well beyond my crude account into a critique of scholarship's implication in social action. Nonetheless, it brings me back to where I started at the end of the last century. There are four acts in this play.

First, the normative rule defining civil society toward the end of communist rule came with money, and imposing western credentials and biases. Katarzyna Jezierska documents how those leading edges defined out of theoretical, and transformational relevance forms of social action that ought to have been recognized. This is not a new observation, but the volume makes clear that we misread civil society's space. Theories, even putatively emancipatory ones, can erase actors from our vision. I know that's shocking for any region with a reflexive bone in its body, but how well can civil society resist intellectual arthritis, especially when a society is drained of its supply of irony?

Irony may be regenerated by appreciating how much the development of civil society has depended on a broader range of repertoires and collective identities at work in pluralizing the social than civil society's theoretical owners acknowledge. With this second act, Elżbieta Korolczuk's parents, Renata Ewa Hryciuk's mothers, Dominika V. Polanska's tenants, Ilona Matysiak's rural women, and Gabriella Elgenius's Polish London all have contributed to an identification of public needs and civil resources in pursuit of a common good without political reduction. Anna Giza-Poleszczuk's reconceptualization of social action and its words is especially powerful in this practice-oriented volume. Adding to the civil society array does not, however, always change which practices are valued most.

Civil society's lie depends on its apparently neutral presentation of plurality, publicity, and legality. The law always favors some over others; some views are more political than others; and street violence and campaign contributions are both social actions, but one is typically viewed as uncivil by civil society theorists. That lie is even more clear when civil society is an explicit part of transition culture itself.

This collection clarifies how civil society can work against transition culture's mobilizing, and therefore partial, sensibility. After all, tenants are hardly privileged in a culture that celebrates private ownership, and yet, Polanska shows us how they found their space. We could normalize her intervention: with democracies consolidated, civil society can lose some of its antagonism toward communist legacies and value parts of that socialist, and even pre-communist, past. But here we begin to find the challenge in our third act.

This volume was mostly completed before civil society's rebellion against the Law and Justice Party (PiS) attack on conventional democracy, but one contribution was especially prescient. Daniel Płatek and Piotr Płucienniczak develop a rigorous account of how the extreme right functions, with political opportunities leading in explaining variance. When right wing politics is institutionally dominant, as PiS now is, those who celebrate true Poles as Catholic, homophobic, antifeminist, and nationalist are likely to be less politically disruptive even when their own extremism paves the way for others to use democratic practices to undermine democratic norms.

Of course we can argue that PiS has unintentionally revived civil society; the editors’ introduction and conclusion gesture toward those exemplary expressions in the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, #czarnyprotest, as well as other developments of 2015–17. This new struggle could restore that secure articulation of civil society as a space, means, and set of norms resting at democracy's foundation. But if these developments lead us away from the knots, this collection helps us to see in civil society's post-socialist articulation that new vernacular mobilization could, once again, blind. That's why theoretical implications define our fourth act.

Anna Kiersztyn documents Poland's peculiar articulation of precariousness and protest. Ekiert and Kubik invite us to contrast contentious and accommodating civil society. Korolczuk and Elgenius invite us to distinguish practical and strategic interests, and collective and individual goods. Kerstin Jacobsson's civic privatism ought readily be admitted into the civil sphere, given that it offers yet another modality for extending public good beyond political instrumentalities. But what allows us to so readily eschew mobilizations of identity that restrict the community's membership to those who are narrowly Catholic, homophobic, and anti-feminist? Those are, also, definitions of the public good even if they are noxious to most cosmopolitan and inclusively democratic sensibilities. This only makes the normative more explicitly important to theorize, and to do more than decry the blinders neoliberalism imposed.

I can appreciate why the volume shies away from the normative, especially when that normative is neoliberally loaded. It also makes sense to shy away when folks claim to solve thorny problems with adjectival fixes; civil versus uncivil come to mind. The best fix is to escape the term altogether, and just focus on studying the dynamics of social movements or voluntary organizations. But I am glad these authors resist such temptation because democracy matters.

Were the volume to have explicitly embedded civil society into a sociologically-oriented theory of democracy, like Charles Tilly's now old notion of equal, broad, protected, and mutually-binding consultations between society and state (Democracy, Cambridge, 2007), then we would have a clear normative frame that could find new knots to pick at, like who in the community deserves consultation and how markets can undermine democracy's norms. If we had the kind of empirical richness and theoretical awareness of this volume to inform those asocial democratic accounts focusing only on governmental forms, we might have the start of a theory not only accounting for authoritarianism's return, but maybe even an appropriately-emancipatory theory of civil society to mobilize.