Civil Society: The Complexity of a Concept

The civil society is not reduced to a state structure, but it does not constitute its antimony. It is the scenario in which private interests interact in a complex relationship with the public apparatus, in an always deliberative way, with fluid democratic expressions and solid bases of participation in collective affairs. Democracy is only possible in society and society is only viable when the interaction of the various agents that compose it. State and society, under the parameters of pluralism, are the condition of the development of civil expressions. Therefore, democracy and freedom determine the existence of a political system in which civil society is not reduced to the periodical and mechanical electoral event in which political preferences are manifested, nor to the individualistic apathy of the neoliberal world. The example of this reduction to simply procedural practices is given by countries like Colombia, Mexico, Peru, among others in Latin America. And in the developed world, the United States is a paradigm of show democracy in front of a civil society superficial and far from the real daily problems. Article result of the research project "Latin American Social Thought" executed within the framework of doctoral studies in Political Science of the Universidad del Rosario, Argentina, whose purpose is to determine the validity of the concept of civil society