Coffee, association, and cultural hybridity in seventeenth-century England improvement and the discourse of society in eighteenth-century Ireland -- The authority of the defeated: catholic languages of the moral order in the eighteenth century -- The experience of empire: the black family, britons, and the emergence of society -- A habitat for hopeful monsters: David Hume and the Scottish theorists of ivil -- Society -- Society and empire in revolution: Ireland and Britain in the 1790s
Summary
Livesey traces the origins of the modern conceptions of civil society to Ireland & Scotland during the 18th century, arguing that it was invented as an idea of renewed community for provincial & defeated élites to allow them to enjoy liberty without participating in governance