The focus of this course is on the history of the concept of civil society since the 17th century to the present (Locke,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Ferguson, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Gramsci, Habermas, Cohen and Arato,
Taylor, Keane, Perez-Diaz, anti-communist dissidents in East Central Europe). The development of this concept is presented against the background of the transformations of political and social thought in the different historical periods, as well as in the context of the social and political history of mainly European societies.