The idea of civil society and the way it has been used in the last 20 years is not simply to describe the overall, large constitutional structures of the state; it is used largely to try and understand how politics operates on the ground, at the community and local levels. It is really at the localized level, if one is to use the concept of civil society meaningfully, as I've been saying in answer to your previous questions, where most of the innovations have been done. In fact, even if the overall structures of the state and the overall governing principles remain the same, the real differences are at the level of localized practices. It is fundamentally misleading to claim that the same concept of civil society can describe the everyday, localized practices of governance in Western democracies and what happens in non-Western situations today. Localized practice is where the differences lie, which is why I have tried to show numerous examples of how communities actually cope with questions of illegality, of violence, of different people not being treated equally. These are the contexts which demonstrate the inapplicability of the large structures of modern forms of governance. The reason these large structures fail is because they are made effective precisely by not following the same idea of civil society.

Civil society is typically about a kind of free associative, modern bourgeois life. It is quintessentially bourgeois politics. The challenge that the modern state faces in most of the non-Western world is that most people are not bourgeois. What sense does it make to use the forms of modern law and modern administrative procedures on populations that cannot survive if you simply insist on protection of private property, equality of law, freedom of contract and these kinds of things? Most of these people would simply die or they would rise in revolt and break down the whole structure.

The reason why many of the forms of modern government actually manage to work is because they make adjustments and negotiate with many of these contrary forms. They do so at the localized level, very often by recognizing themselves as merely exceptional cases. But, of course, exceptions pile up on exceptions and very often there are localized norms which are often quite contrary to what the larger principles would dictate. Very often, at the local level, people have an understanding that the norm is actually quite different. It is only by recognizing that norm at the local level that in fact the larger structure will survive.

I have deliberately called this political society to suggest that the civil does not necessarily translate easily into the political; there is in fact a rift there. Yes, there is a zone of civil society in many of these countries. Yes, there is a zone where people rely on a modern contractual system, where there is free association, and I think many of those ideas - of free association, of modern, bourgeois life - actually have very powerful, often pedagogical, uses. Certainly many people lay great store by these ideas, which still continue to be effective as a way of thinking about what society ought to be like. It is recognized, however, that all of society is not like this and will not become like this overnight.

On the one hand, there is the modernizing project, which insists that at its completion, everybody will be properly respectful of the law and so on. But, in the meantime, how does society operate? There is a clear recognition that you have to make exceptions and that you have to negotiate very different claims. And these negotiations, I think, are fundamentally political.