The notion of ‘civil society’ took on new significance and popularity in the eighteenth century, particularly in the works of social and political theorists who began to imagine and understand social interactions as distinct from those of the state. Civil society was imagined as the space for trade relations and ties of reciprocity that bound naturally sociable humans together without the constraints of political obligations. Civil society was the place where Montesquieu’s doux commerce could flourish and Joseph Addison’s Mr. Spectator could mingle safely and pleasantly with his fellow wits as well as the more numerous crowd of fools. This redefinition of civil society bears witness to the growing importance of economic relationships in eighteenth-century social thought. David Hume notably insisted upon the role of commerce as a key civilizing impulse in modern societies. During the eighteenth century, the concept of civil society was increasingly assimilated into a model of commercial society in which economic relations formed the basis for production, exchange, and consumption. A ‘polite and commercial’ society, to use Blackstone’s phrasing, was one in which the government served the needs of society rather than the other way around. This notion of the primacy of the social – along with cognate conceptions of sociability, civility, urbanity, and citizenship – made a great impact on the work of the grand masters of modern sociology such as Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas. For Simmel, the concept of Geselligkeit, or sociability, was the building block for his social theory. Simmel’s sociability was a form of uncoerced socialization that emerged spontaneously between individuals who could regard one another as relative equals. This approach encouraged scholars to take seriously and examine closely the rules of social engagement and the unspoken assumptions that lay behind the presentation of the self in the company of others, as demonstrated by the work of sociologists such as Erving Goffman and Herbert Blumer, amongst others. The historical sociology of Norbert Elias had a great influence on the work of social and cultural historians in the 1980s, especially in the wake of the belated translation of his work into English and French. Elias’s development of a figurational sociology has helped us see the practices of sociability as the means by which seemingly static social structures are actually always in the process of construction and reconstruction. This dynamic of socio-genesis creates the chains of inter-dependence and reciprocal obligations that structure human relationships throughout the social order and forms the motor of what Elias called ‘the civilizing process.’ Elias’s sociology made the modern state dependent upon this civilizing process. This is an insight upon which more recent histories of ‘state formation’ have elaborated. Finally, the study of sociability has been closely linked with the history of public opinion. Here the work of Habermas and his influential thesis on the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in the long eighteenth century have held sway in recent decades. If the original Marxist framework for Habermas’s model has been put aside by more recent work on the public sphere, his proposal that the idea of a ‘public’ took hold as an alternative form of political legitimation through increasingly rational and critical debate in Enlightenment Europe has gained new advocates in the work of scholars such as Dena Goodman and Tim Blanning. The questions posed by these grand narratives of eighteenth-century sociability were at the heart of the works presented in Montreal at the fortieth meeting of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS). All of the papers managed to variously nuance, criticize and appropriate different aspects of these key theories of sociability. …