The necessity of politics

"Beem traces the concept of civil society back to its theoretical wellsprings in Tocqueville and Hegel, who grappled with the same problems more than a century ago. Both thinkers rejected the sufficiency of civil society alone to achieve the degree of moral and civic unity necessary for a well-ordered polity. Beem brings their thought alive by relating it to the contemporary civil society debate.

He then turns to the history of the American Civil Rights movement, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to illustrate how civil society both instructs and is instructed by the moral parameters developed through politics."--BOOK JACKET.