Publics in history.

This article seeks to prove wrong skeptics which held that the concepts of civil society and the public sphere morally admirable but analytically useless as some skeptics have argued. An outline of a program for empirical research that proceeds from current work on those topics is provided. The argument unfolds in several steps. First, the authors aim systematically to inject the idea of an associational civil society, distinguished theoretically from economic and political institutions, into debates in sociological analysis. Second, they explore in detail the different categories of networks of publicity that are rooted within civil society. Third, the authors lay out a series of propositions for converting a model of institutional spheres and extra-institutional networks of publicity into a systematic program for empirical research.