This thoughtful book, an essay synthesising arguments developed over many years, makes the case for “civility” as a robust and useful sociological concept, and as a value worth defending. It also provides insight into John A. Hall’s distinctive approach to sociology, and raises vexing questions about the nature and fate of liberal society. I address these aspects in that order.
Hall approaches his core argument from two angles, developing his own definition of “civility” in Part One, and engaging with various “enemies” of civility in Part Two, so as to strengthen the case in its favour. He begins from the premise that civility is a “hard” concept with genuine sociological relevance and analytic utility, not just a fuzzy feel-good concept, a repository for our hopes about human nature. Civility “is important because it allows disagreement to take place without violence and regularizes conflict so that it can be productive” (4). It is a state of affairs that is sustained by some social and political conditions, and threatened by others, and Hall’s project is to help clarify this. He links the historical development of the idea of civility to that of civil society, arguing that the former defines the latter. Civil society is more than just “societal self-organization”, which can take highly uncivil and predatory forms. It is what happens when parties “agree to differ”, to tolerate disagreement and have a bias towards peace. He roots this unapologetically in occidental history, in a European move to abandon religious war and respect confessional differences. But this was a matter of a power stalemate making tolerance a practical necessity. As he puts it, only with further time did practical “civility in itself” become ideological “civility for itself” (30). Hall’s conception of civility bears some comparison to Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberty, because on the one hand it is about protecting actors (persons and groups) from interference and allowing substantial autonomy, but on the other there is a more positive implication of the release of creative energies, and making space for experimentation.
The rest of Part One develops this position, and I try only to convey the “punch-lines.” Chapter Two examines the thesis that commerce and capitalism tend to promote civility, primarily through the ideas of Adam Smith. Hall, along with many current specialists, reads Smith not as a prophet of rational self-interest, but as an astute analyst of the human need for approval and admiration from others (cf. Kalyvas and Katznelson 2008Footnote 1: 18-50). Ultimately it is this impulse that propels market activity, channeling envy and rivalry into relatively benign forms of competition. The third chapter considers the problem of political rule. Central to Hall’s sociology is that political regimes are almost always a key variable, as important for social dynamics as economics (65-66). A strategically gentle approach to governing citizens tends to depoliticize people, or at least “defang” political extremes. Good and stable governments find means to accommodate the discontent, and those that don’t risk fomenting resistance and revolution. Chapter Four shifts the focus to problems of ethnic and national diversity and conflict in states and empires. Comparing contemporary United States and Europe, Hall argues that the US has been more successful in creating a “civil nationalism,” a political community with scope for considerable cultural diversity, and more able to integrate “outsiders.” But he acknowledges the homogenizing histories of both cases, and the challenges faced by the global south in developing its own civil nationalisms. Drawing particularly on the work of Raymond Aron, Chapter Five places the question of civility in the context of international relations. Here Hall advocates Aron’s realist approach to international politics, arguing that civility in the always fragile international arena is best preserved when states are able to conduct their mutual business intelligently, with a clear sighted understanding of the possibilities and interests at play. Taken altogether Part One presents civility as an aspect of social relations operating at many levels, between persons, groups and states. It is not so much a characteristic of societies, as a systemic feature of social relations, especially conditioned by the presence of liberal political regimes.
Part Two engages various arguments that run against the case for civility that Hall has been making. First he defends Erving Goffman’s approach to social interaction as micro-performance against critics (e.g. Alvin Gouldner) who have seen this as a celebration of the inauthentic, by countering that there is a great deal of mutual regard involved in Goffmanesque “face-work.” People try to manage the normal difficulties of social life through performances that give each other the space to preserve mutual and self-respect. In a word, with civility. There are interesting parallels here with David Runciman’s (2008)Footnote 2 recent defense of “hypocrisy” as a necessary aspect of modern political life. Next, Hall challenges that strain of cultural criticism that sees modern culture and art as stripped of its capacity to provide meaning, either because it is degraded by individualism (Daniel Bell) or a vehicle of bourgeois domination (Pierre Bourdieu, Renée Balibar). For Hall these complaints over-estimate the importance of high culture (and intellectuals) for modern life, and fail to appreciate the benefits of “disenchantment,” of a variegated society relatively immune to the impassioned calls of intellectuals. Turning to the “problem of communism” Hall first discusses its inability to deliver on its idealistic and millenarian promises of social solidarity, comparing the views of Durkheim, Marx and Weber on this point. This leads to a discussion informed by Tocqueville about the difficulties of liberalization of the Soviet communist sphere in 1989/1991. Ideally such changes should take the form of a bargained transfer of powers from autocratic rulers to new powers from below, but in the absence of well-developed civil society in the first place, this option was and is limited. Tocqueville takes centre stage in the next chapter on the importance of “trust” between citizens, and between citizens and their state. Once again the political regime is the decisive factor, with Hall arguing that as Tocqueville’s attention shifted from early American democracy to the French Ancien Régime and revolution, he increasingly saw the role of states (“kings”) as central. When states seek to rule by dividing and excluding groups in society they foment distrust and incur radicalism. Civility depends on a diffuse social pattern of trust, which is fragile and easily undermined. The book’s penultimate chapter turns to the historical movement from multi-ethnic/national empires to more nationally integrated states, so often fraught with ethnic homogenization and violence. He concludes with a note of worry, suggesting that contemporary China “resembles Wilhelmine Germany,” with weakened legitimacy and potential for national extremism. The overriding message of Part Two is that civility entails the release of power by the state and moral and ideological authorities and putting trust in the people.
The book is firmly grounded in the comparative historical sociology that has characterized Hall’s work, even though it is also built around a series of quick and deft engagements with theorists and thinkers in a long sociological tradition. It is in effect a long essay weaving together strands from various areas of research over his career covering the sociologies of literature, nationalism, modernisation, and forays into international relations and the social theories of the Scottish Enlightenment. Someone who sees sociology as a fundamentally radical and critical project may be perturbed by Hall’s distinctively liberal approach to sociology. The spine of his intellectual genealogy, nicely sketched by this book, features Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, Raymond Aron, and Ernest Gellner. Each of these in his own way took a realist and reformist view of society and politics, distrusting the doctrinaire. Hall’s own approach fits well within this tradition, and he is clearly making the case for liberalism in the broadest sense, through the case for civility. On the one hand he is interested in liberal forms of society, how they come about and fall apart, what makes them tick, and sometimes explode. This has to be understood within a world history of all kinds of society, out of which liberal forms are just one option, one possibility. There is a strong sense in Hall’s work that they are conditional accomplishments, and their future is not guaranteed. Hall might also be described as having a liberal approach to sociology, in the somewhat archaic sense of “liberal arts” as being that body of knowledge necessary to be a good citizen. Of course we cannot circumscribe what would be the relevant body of knowledge in modern society, but there is a general spirit in Hall’s work, that sociology should give us a sober and rounded sense of the kind of society “we” (most of us who have the luxury of studying sociology) live in.
Hall acknowledges some of the tensions in his approach in a short conclusion. The civil state should set people free as much as possible, but this requires that the people will remain relatively quiescent and avoid too much political enthusiasm. Following Aron, he hopes that states can, as much as possible, be intelligent actors in the international realm, but without becoming too jealous about their interests and boundaries. Hall is also realistic about the close and complex relationship between liberal society and constant economic growth and, despite some of its claims, profound inequality. He recognizes the problems these pose for the case he makes. His investment in the Smithian solution, that generalized wealth and the social dynamic of competitive emulation will cultivate civility, commits him uneasily to some form of economic growth. And growing inequality seems perversely bolstered by the very depoliticization and distraction by private pursuits that his liberal argument supports. He is clearly uncomfortable with these conclusions, and hopes the gifts of science and the pressures of an ever more interdependent world society can help remedy rather than exacerbate these problems.
Hall indicates in the conclusion and elsewhere his indebtedness to Adam Smith’s basic theory of social interaction—that people are driven to seek approval and avoid disapproval, and that this impulse propels socioeconomic change, and softens people, making their rivalries more petty and symbolic, more civil. This is part of why he worries about an end to economic growth, because it creates an environment that supports this more pacific and creative channeling of social conflict. But there is a darker side to Smith’s argument. What if people compete for unwarranted or ill-founded approval? The corporate banking elite of recent years was driven not simply by material greed, but also by pride in building ever larger and apparently more profitable organisations. They sought approval within their own peculiar universe of prestige and value. Smith himself suggested in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that the most morally advanced persons would learn to judge the actions of themselves and others in terms of a more impartial and generalized view of the world. The wise person seeks the approval of those they respect and in whose judgment they have confidence. But Smith thought very few could achieve this. Democracy, popular culture, mass society, tend to pull the natural pursuit of approval in the opposite direction, toward the banal, the momentary, the undiscerning. There may still be more to be mined from Smith in terms of the diagnosis of our present situation.
