Civil Society,Locality and Globalization in Rural Tanzania: A Forty–Year Perspective

In the last decade, much discussion of civil society in LDCs, especially those in Africa, has been based on two sets of normative assumptions, one deriving from the Tocquevillian tradition, the other concerning the nature and implications of globalization. This article criticizes both these approaches, on the basis of a restatement of the Hegel–Young Marx position on civil society. This is then used to compare and contrast the character of rural civil society in northern Tanzania in the 1950s and 1990s, allowing a critical consideration of the emergent properties of LDC civil societies, of the changing significance of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ within them, and of the underlying sources of their transformation.