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565 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 7 (1999)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0565 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Civil society and the voluntary and nongovernmental associations that support it by building social capital are receiving increased attention as part of the democratization process: Fareed Zakaria (1995) comments, In the world of ideas, civil society is hot. It is almost impossible to read an article on foreign or domestic politics without coming across some mention of the concept... . At the heart of the concept of civil society lie intermediate institutions, private groups that thrive between the realm of the state and family. (1) Fueling the discussion has been Francis Fukuyama's book Trust (1995), confirming his ability to sense what is going to be the issue of the hour-wit- ness his End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama is an enthusi- ast for how democracy is sustained by what he calls intermediate institu- tions (Fukuyama 1995). Many others have also come forward to reemphasize the role of private associations in sustaining democracy, a point made by Alexis de Tocqueville (1988) more than a century and a half ago. A central theme of those who feel that associationalism nurtures democ- racy is along the lines that political man cannot live by economics alone. This theme is perhaps partly a reaction to the prevalence of rational choice theory in the academy over the last few decades. After acknowledging the contribu- tions of Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and other partisans of rational choice, Fukuyama (1995) denies that the rational choice approach can be the whole story: As Adam Smith well understood, economic life is deeply embed- ded in social life, and it cannot be understood apart from the customs, morals, and habits of the society in which it occurs. In short, it cannot be divorced from culture (13). This is echoed by the interesting dialogue readers will dis- cover between the articles, in the present volume, by Isidro Morales and Finn Laursen, which refer to deep integration arising out of economic integration and indicate that the economic debate is indeed sliding over into a more gen- eral cultural debate. The same idea is also emphasized in the article by Jose L. Garcfa-Aguilar. Fukuyama (1995) further warns, Not being content to rest on their lau- rels, many neoclassical economists have come to believe that the economic method they have discovered provides them with the tools for constructing something approaching a universal science of man (17). He adds critically that the political science departments of many major universities are now filled with followers of so-called rational choice theory, which attempts to explain politics using an essentially economic methodology (17). Scholarly interest in civil society and its nongovernmental organizations seems likely to increase; the attention is partly a consequence of the end ofthe Cold War: 7

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