Having as parameter the concept of civil society elaborated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, this article intends to critically dialogue with other ideas of civil society currently found in the political and cultural panorama. Its main argument is that in the last few decades there has been a change from the idea of civil society as field predominantly political-statist, placement of democratic fights and new hegemonies, to an image that turns the civil society either in some managerial resource a societal arrangement to make possible specific types of public policies or in a factor of social life ethical and dialogical reconstruction. On the one hand, the incorporation of the idea of participation to the planning language has moved the civil society from its main field (that one of organizing new hegemonies) converting it in a space of cooperation crisis management. On the other hand, the expansion of the State and representative democracy social activism, in a political crisis picture, has impelled the search for a new "place" from where it would be possible to establish and disseminate both new ethical postulations and new collective procedures. From a phase where Marxism both preponderated in discussions and left its hallmark we have ingressed into a time where the liberal perspective, stated with orthodoxy and nuance, prevails and operates as main reference.
Civil Society; Hegemony; Consensus; State; Globalization