This thesis examines the relationship between civil society and democracy through a case study of the revival of the Catholic Church in the post-communist Czech Republic. I use an ideal typical conception of civic organisations that emphasises three characteristics: civility, independence, and autonomy. I ask how each of these characteristics is related to democracy and how the degree to which the Czech Catholic Church approximates each characteristic can be explained. Civility - my research challenges the contemporary consensus around the work of Robert Putnam that there is an inverse relationship between civility and associational hierarchy. I show how the organisations and networks in which the Bishops were involved during Communism functioned as schools of democracy, producing the strong civil values of Czech Bishops still in evidence today. The argument indicates that Putnam and other social capital theorists should move beyond the formal level of associations in their search for the causes of civic virtue. Independence - The failure of the church to restitute its property and its continued dependence on the Czech state is conventionally explained by reference to either an historic anti-Catholicism or the contemporary exigencies of justice. I reject these arguments, and show how Church restitution is artificially created as an issue by politicians seeking to build distinct party identities in the difficult circumstances of a society still awaiting the consolidation of new social cleavages. Autonomy - the Church's weak links to the public sphere are generally explained by reference to a communist legacy of anti-political attitudes, or to poor political skills on the part of civic associations. Instead, I argue that the strongest explanatory factor lies with the political programme of the Klaus administration and its post-communist inspired concerns to limit power to the Parliament, and more particularly to the executive, where Klaus' party was dominant. 1 show how Klaus' success was greatly facilitated by the speed of the 'transition', which allowed the easy implementation of a radical ideology by a political entrepreneur who faced little opposition from parliamentary colleagues unable to find 'partners' in a post-Communist atomised society.

Through close textual analysis of 20^th century Czech anthropological texts from the Revivalist and Socialist periods and contemporary social research conducted after the Velvet Revolution, I demonstrate certain prominent discourses of identity developed in early Bohemian anthropology and their continuities in present day popular discourses. In each period, identity is deeply intertwined with teleological theories of history with Czech populations at the apex of cultural evolutionary development. In the Revivalist period this apex was believed to be the democratic nation state, transitioning to a Marxist nation state in the Socialist period, and in the contemporary period is conceived of as a neoliberal nation state. A major function of anthropology in the Revivalist and Socialist periods was to legitimate either period’s respective teleological theory and Czech possession of relevant values as 'objective' and 'natural' fact, a general mode of discourse which continued in the contemporary period in numerous editorials in the 1990s on the advantages of capitalism. The contemporary manifestation has particularly noteworthy consequences for the Roma minority, which I argue has provided Czech discourses with an ethnic category 'anti-thetical' to their own identity, providing a 'repository' for negative Czech self-stereotypes emerging from collaboration in the Socialist period.