Whichever party wins control of the Commons at the election, we must expect that it will attempt to reinvigorate civil society, a concept that "for a century or more...has been pushed to the margins by commerce and the state", according to a report out this week [3.30MB PDF].
It is fairly common ground at Westminster that power-hungry government has invaded civic space and weakened the community bonds which are required for society to function well.
As the philosopher Francis Fukuyama put it more than a decade ago: "There was a period when social scientists assumed that modernization necessarily entailed the progressive replacement of informal coordination mechanisms with formal ones."
The notion that officialdom should, instead, step back and encourage people to shape their own lives and neighbourhoods has now become the consensus.
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