The intellectual tradition of discoursing the nature of the state and civil society is traced back to the contract theorists-Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the one hand, and to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, on the other. Social thinkers like Niccolo Machiavelli have often conceived the state as a product of reason, that is, as a rational society in which human beings can lead a life following the dictates of reason. To Hegel, ‘the process of rationalisation of state not only merges with process of statisation of reason ’, but also the two processes get interwoven; ultimately, when the rationalization of the state reaches its climax, it no longer remains as an ideal model but becomes a reality, that is, a moment in history. This article narrate the discourse between state and civil society based on secondary sources.
State and Civil Society based
