One of the conceptual gifts the Scottish Enlightenment brought to social thought was the concept of "civil society" (Ferguson, 1980). This was not a theory of government per se in the sense of the state, but of the non-state portion of social life and action. Civil society was seen as a space for public discourse by associations of citizens, and in particular discourses with the potential for being critical of state actions among other things. A communicative space oriented toward the discussion of public concerns, and the birthplace of journalism not linked to political parties or financial interests. According to Habermas in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), civil society was "refeudalized" by the highly structured corporations that in the course of the nineteenth century came to play an increasingly dominant role in the capitalist economy. Whether Canada ever had much of a civil society is still a moot point, given the country's predominant economic orientation toward staples extraction as well as the dominant role in all aspects of social life by the state, powerfully reinforced by the extreme concentration of power of the executive under the Westminster model.
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