In his book, Richard Boyd offers a thoughtful reappraisal of the relation between the idea of civil society and the tradition of liberal political thought. He questions the view held by many contemporary political theorists that the development of civil society, understood as the realm of what Tocqueville called “voluntary associations” mediating between the individual and the state, is a necessary condition for the maintenance of liberal democracy. Against this position, Boyd argues that an earlier tradition of liberal thought was justifiably suspicious of the potential for subpolitical social groups—especially, but not limited to, intolerant religious sects—to undermine rather than support liberal institutions. In a series of well-argued chapters, he traces the trajectory of the connected ideas of civil society and social pluralism from initial suspicion to perhaps uncritical acceptance.

Boyd begins with a reconsideration of Hobbes's well-known view that even subordination to an absolute state is better than the threat of civil conflict and violent oppression inherent in subpolitical associations. The most original aspect of Boyd's analysis of Hobbes is his contention that Hobbes's emphasis on the solitary, rational individual—the very feature of his thought that makes him anathema to defenders of civil society—can best be understood as an attempt to counter the irrational psychology that animates religious sects and political factions insofar as they are bound together by often fanatically held common convictions and beliefs: “Intended to rescue solitary and rational individuals from the irrational passions that inflame groups, Hobbes's individualism merits attention as an alternative to the pluralism he rejects” (p. 68).

In his chapters on Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment, Boyd demonstrates the persistence of this suspicion of sectarian intolerance, even as these thinkers rejected Hobbes's authoritarianism for an incipient conception of civil society as distinct from the institutions of the state. Of particular interest is Boyd's analysis of the debate within the Scottish Enlightenment about what makes some social groups “civil” and others “uncivil.” This is an issue of particular concern today given the confused and contradictory responses of contemporary liberal regimes to the demand for toleration made by illiberal political associations and religious sects in their midst. To take a recent example, is the French law forbidding Muslim girls from wearing head scarves to school a violation of the rights of a religious minority? Or is it a legitimate response by a liberal secular state to the dangerous zealotry of an intolerant religious sect?

As the author shows in his careful analysis of the views of Hume and Smith, there is no easy answer to such questions. Hume shared Hobbes's distrust of sectarian religious “enthusiasm” as a source of political dissension, but like Madison in Federalist 10, he did not think it possible to repress factions directly without also extinguishing civil liberty. Hume and Smith suggested various indirect solutions to the problem of diminishing the influence of intolerant factions within society. Boyd notes that in addition to their defense of the ameliorating effect of commerce on religious sentiments, both Hume and Smith supported the role of an established church as a check on the fanaticism of the dissenting sects. Indifferent or hypocritical adherence to an established religion was less dangerous to civil liberty, in their view, than the sincere beliefs of religious dissenters.

In the latter half of his book, Boyd explores the reversal in attitude toward civil society that emerged at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is here that he locates the origins of our contemporary valorization of civil society. The most important figure in his account of this transformation is Edmund Burke. The crucial backdrop to Burke's defense of the “little platoons” of civil society was the centralizing tendency of the French revolutionary state and its hostility to religion and landed property, the twin pillars, in Burke's view, of the English constitutional order. Anticipating Tocqueville, Burke regarded the dispersal of power at the level of society as a necessary bulwark against centralized despotism. Speaking of both men, Boyd writes that “beginning with the French Revolution, they witnessed an age of centralized political power, the abdication of political responsibility by an aristocratic class and the concomitant democratic revolution. Perhaps for the first time in the history of political thought, the vices of individualism seemed to outweigh the perils of pluralism” (p. 170).

There can be no doubt that the positive evaluation of civil society in contemporary political discourse derives much of its power from the contrast with the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which both inherited and radicalized the ambition of the French Revolution to destroy any intermediary institutions between the individual and the state. For the dissidents in formerly communist Eastern Europe, who were probably most responsible for the contemporary revival of interest in civil society, the term civil society stood for the intermediary institutions that were lacking in the repressive regimes under which they lived. In his discussion of the political theories of Michael Oakeshott and F.A. Hayek, Boyd shows how these thinkers, in response to the experience of totalitarianism, attempted to develop models of civil association that could dispense as much as possible with any substantive role for the state.

With the collapse of communism and the rise of political Islam and other fundamentalist social movements, however, the earlier liberal concern with the danger of illiberal sectarianism is arguably of greater salience today. Boyd's historical reconstruction of this position is illuminating and provides a good starting point for thinking through these questions as they arise in contemporary social and political life. It is not a criticism of his work to say that he provides no clear formula for discriminating between civil and uncivil associations and supplies no simple answer to the even more difficult question of how to check the influence of uncivil associations without undermining the institutions of liberal democracy. His is a work of intellectual history, not public policy. But, as Boyd reminds us in the conclusion of Uncivil Society, “nothing less than the fate of liberty” (p. 320) depends on our finding workable answers to these questions.