Civil society discourse flourishes because state theory itself has declined.

Evidence

The intellectual fascination with civil society and the attendant virtue of civility of late is not just the desire for the condition (the “state”) of relative lack. It is tied also to the relative demise of state theory, of theories of the state over the past nearly thirty years. Globalization supposedly has eroded the hold of states on the lived condition of late modernity (a large supposition, of course, one dramatically undercut by the altogether (re)new(ed) expansionist statist response to September 11). But on this assumption, the generative gap apparently left by the attendant demise of state theory is filled by that social condition of the “not-state” identified since the Enlightenment as civil society and promoted in the name of the individualized disposition conceptualized as civility. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 202