The state and civility: a crucial nexus

ABSTRACT

The study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this body of work in no position to fully appreciate the crucial role of the state. Our main argument here is that civility emerged alongside the modern state in early-modern Europe to form an ongoing state–civility nexus, a nexus by which the state produces and maintains conditions that allow civility to flourish, in turn allowing civility to help the state maintain itself, particularly by restraining the state’s raw power. We pursue this argument by exploring two sets of writings. One set is composed of work by early-modern writers, especially Thomas Hobbes, with some attention paid to four others: Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius. The second set is composed of work by twentieth-century writers, especially Norbert Elias, with some attention paid to two others: Max Weber and Edward Shils.

KEYWORDS:

• The state
• civility
• politics
• restraint
• Hobbes
• Elias

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the journal’s editor and to two anonymous referees for many excellent suggestions, though of course they are not responsible for any of the article’s shortcomings. For discussions over a number of years about matters contained in what follows we thank: Peter Baehr, Pru Black, Dick Bryan, David Campbell, Paul du Gay, Farida Fozdar, Joop Goudsblom, Kirsten Harley, Liam Heitson, Barry Hindess, the late Paul Q. Hirst, Ian Hunter, Lars Bo Kaspersen, Gavin Kendall, Noel King, Martin Krygier, Hannah Lewi, Martin Loughlin, David McCallum, Stephen Muecke, Nick Osbaldiston, Pat O’Malley, George Pavlich, David Saunders, Alan Scott, David Silverman, Grahame Thompson, Bryan Turner, Stephen Turner, Robert van Krieken, William Walters, the late Peter Williams, Tony Woodiwiss, Ian Woodward, and Anna Yeatman.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a detailed criticism of Davetian’s book, see Goudsblom (2010).

2. To be more specific, only five of the ten items on the above list of recent additions to the literature explore the state (and/or state-related objects such as citizenship) as an important component of the operation of civility: Ikegami (2005), Boyd (2006), Turner (2008), Hall (2013), and Salvatore (2016).

3. There is something of an irony here: the state must not use its immense raw power against the civility component lest the raw power threaten civility’s capacity to restrain the state. We thank one of our anonymous reviewers for highlighting the ironic character of the state–civility nexus. We shall say a little more about this matter in our conclusion.

4. In Europe, most of the religious passions of this era were triggered by the challenge issued to the dominance of the Catholic Church by Lutheran Protestantism and by the challenge to Lutheran Protestantism issued by various forms of Calvinist Protestantism, which held that Lutheranism had not gone nearly far enough and was still too similar to Catholicism (for an overview, see esp. Davies, 1998, pp. 383–576; for more on the political importance of passions, see esp. Hirschman, 1977).

5. For a twenty-first century Hobbesian argument about the ways in which strong government has been, since at least the beginnings of the Roman Empire, the best way of moderating humans’ persistent tendency to go to war, see Morris (2014).

6. Boyd makes a similar point when he says, ‘Civility is not just a formality to which people must subscribe in order to be taken seriously or to cultivate the appearance of manners or refinement  …  We have an obligation to be civil to others out of a deference to the respect in which we are no better than they. To fail to do so is to be guilty of what Hobbes characterised as the unconscionable political sins of “pride”, “arrogance”, “vain-glory” and “contumely” that renders one not only a threat to the civil order but also in violation of the laws of nature’ (Boyd, 2006, p. 873, quoting Hobbes).

7. As Hall (2013, esp. pp. 105–125) suggests, these remarks might also apply to much of Raymond Aron’s twentieth-century work (see esp. Aron, 1966, 1988, 2001).