As Austin Sarat’s introduction to this edited volume notes, bemoaning the demise of civility is an episodic American pastime. The tragedy of some lost era of civility serves as the premise for all sorts of calls for better behavior, both in formal politics and in citizen engagement more broadly. Civility, Legality, and Justice in America serves as a corrective to that impulse. Indeed, I wish it had been available the last time I taught my “Politics & Virtue” class, because it does an excellent job of showing the important difference between talking about what virtuous citizens are like (or should be like) and talking about how virtues get constructed and deployed—put to use—in discourse in order to discipline, divide, and distract. It is an important project to determine when, how, and under what conditions civility fosters versus impedes robust, contentious, and inclusive public debate on issues of justice. This volume makes great strides in that direction.

Compared to other virtues that have been the subject of recent renewed scholarly interest after years of abandonment (take humility as one example), attention to civility has never really waned only to resurge. As the footnotes to this volume show, there are many excellent political theory texts on this virtue to date—examining whether it is a virtue and if so what kind, if it is a character trait or a behavior, if the bigger risk is its deficit or its excess, if it enables solidarity or remedies its absence, if it functions to quash or to manage disagreement, and so on. Civility, Legality, and Justice in America, which emerged from a 2013 symposium at the University of Alabama Law School, builds admirably on this literature. Over the course of an introduction, four body chapters, and an Afterword, this volume makes a distinct contribution by analyzing civility as a concept, practice and disposition, and considering its effect at different levels of the political. This could have been done more effectively had the essays engaged one another more directly, though the authors generally work to converse across chapters in a way that reflects the volume’s dialogic origins.

Sarat’s introduction is entitled “The Meaning and Uses of Civility,” and if the first two chapters primarily address meaning, the last three are focused more on uses. The first two chapters analyze civility in greater abstraction, and do not take up questions of identity and power in detail. The last three build on this conceptual ground laying, responding to their claims through contextualized analyses that make questions of identity and power central. This makes for a very interesting dialogue, but often the reader has to do the work of reconstructing the dialogue because the authors leave certain points implicit, or are too civil, as it were, in their disagreements with each other.

In Chapter 1, Teresa M. Bejan and Bryan Garsten use Hobbes and Constant to explore liberal civility. Specifically, they examine the “different affective, psychological aspects of political disagreement that are often overlooked in theoretical discussions of pluralism today” (p. 23). Hobbes’s fear-driven, security-loving response to the disagreeableness of disagreement was to “impose a civil silence on controversial questions” (p. 31). Constant rejected such restrictions on expression, decried the “sensitivity” that censorship presumed on the part of the citizen, and saw a certain degree of “callousness” as the solution to offense in political engagement (p. 38). Importantly, while Hobbes and Constant shared a sense of the risks inherent in pluralistic disagreement, Constant’s approach was to impose a demand on the listener as well as the speaker (p. 45). Contra Hobbes, Constant shows that we need not hear disagreement with our positions as diminishment of our persons. Bejan and Garsten thus illustrate how the challenge for liberal civility is to balance commitments to equality and disagreement. Anticipating the next chapter, the authors conclude by suggesting that Waldron’s “mutual respect” approach leans too much toward Hobbes, setting the bar too high and thus risking civil silence and failing to consider what everyday political interactions are like and what they should appropriately demand of us.

In contrast to Bejan and Garsten, who emphasize habit and affect, Waldron argues for structured rules and formalities as the route to civil discourse on contentious issues. More formality, not less, is the key, as civility is “a cold virtue, not a warm one” (p. 50). Instead of everyday political interactions, Waldron takes the courtroom and legislative chamber as his context, arguing that civility requires that “one shows up when it is one’s turn to speak and one remains to hear—to listen attentively—to what is said from the other side” (p. 59). This approach focuses less on a Constantian disposition toward useful insensitivity and more on duties of reciprocity and recognition of other positions as deserving airtime. There is much to this formulation, and Waldron’s resistance to relying on people’s feelings and affects to protect civil discourse is persuasive. As the subsequent chapters show, however, absent any analysis of who the “one” and the “other” in a disagreement are, chilly formality is too easily read as a luxury of certain kinds of subjects or a disciplining tactic. Waldron claims that civility “need not evacuate the passion from politics” (p. 60), but he also argues that we must “distance ourselves personally from the object of our contempt without distancing ourselves decisively from him or it in our politics” (p. 61). Where “politics” means the courtroom and legislative chamber, and “we” includes lawyers, judges, and elected officials, this may be the case. Beyond these contexts, the structured formality that he argues for seems a potentially problematic, exclusionary version of civility.

Leti Volpp takes up this particular concern in “Civility and the Undocumented Alien.” This chapter stands out as the volume’s most systematic, in my opinion. After elaborating on five dimensions of civility and four discourses of citizenship, Volpp has laid a complex foundation for exploring the question of whether the citizenship activity of noncitizens is more likely to be perceived as uncivil, “because there is an implicit contradiction between the activity and the identity of the actor” (p. 87). Analyzing activism by DREAMers protesting the criminalization of immigrants, the chapter examines the performative dimension of citizenship—those who lack it can nonetheless express it through paradigmatic acts of citizenship. But Volpp also captures the Catch-22 attendant to this positionality: “[A]s formal status noncitizens, they can be perceived to stand outside the demos, so that any political claim they make on the state will be perceived as uncivil” (p. 104). My only wish for this chapter, positioned as a follow-up to Waldron’s, was that Volpp would have directly addressed how the context she analyzes exposes the limits of his virtue of formal, officious civility for citizens more broadly.

Linda Zerilli’s chapter, “Against Civility: A Feminist Perspective,” also reads as an obvious but unstated rejoinder to Waldron. For example, Zerilli cites Susan Bickford’s point that “norms of ‘good’ (i.e. rational) political communication are not neutral, but tend to reflect the communicative styles of already powerful groups” (p. 108). And in a question that directly engages with Volpp (but again, without naming her), Zerilli asks, “At what point, then, can we draw a line in the sand between incivility, on the one side, and civil disobedience, speaking back, or new citizenship claims on the other?” (p. 109). Writing from an Arendtian perspective, Zerilli argues that the problem of incivility is not failed intersubjective relations or a deficit of deliberation. Rather, what so-called incivility reveals is the “sense of frustration with the limited possibilities for political action in the modern world” (p. 121). What we need is not necessarily incivility but less concern about self-restraint. We can never know in advance how our words will affect and be taken up by others, and sometimes what the dominant group perceives as uncivil is precisely what is necessary to incite others to collective care for worldly things. A crucial part of acts of citizenship, to echo Volpp, is what Zerilli describes as enlarging citizens’ “sense of both what counts as a common matter and who counts as a political speaker” (p. 131).

The Afterword, “Civility and the Politics of Sexuality,” proposes to tie together the previous chapters through the lens of the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics, which, Heather Elliott and Gerald Lunn argue, “highlights the very debate our authors here are engaged in” (p. 157). Broadly, they frame this as a debate about “the dual nature of civility: it can both permit and prohibit communication on our most divisive issues” (p. 132). In raising this question, the Afterword revisits the prompt framing the original symposium: “Is civility a political virtue in and of itself? Or is it, as Michael Sandel observed, ‘an overrated virtue’?”

Both parts of the Afterword are promising, though the cohesion of the volume hinges on the tying together of the chapters. That endeavor is a small and somewhat disconnected part of the chapter, and unfortunately it mostly reads like discussant comments on a conference panel. This effect is exacerbated by the fact that the chapter often refers to the “speakers,” and when it does reference the “authors,” it cites entire chapters and not a specific page or point. The aim of synthesizing the essays across themes and questions, in terms of what they agreed or disagreed about, is important. But this chapter does not really function as a conclusion because it ultimately does not weave the chapters into any bigger insights. The major section of the Afterword, entitled “Civility’s Duality and the Politics of Sexuality,” reads like its own chapter. Here, Elliott and Lunn detail the history of LGBT activism as a progression from civil (the homophile movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s) to uncivil (the “in your face, here and queer” movements of the 1980s and 1990s, including ACT-UP and Queer Nation) and back to civil (particularly the fight for the right to marry) responses to injustice and exclusion. The goal here, of showing how “civility is therefore intricately bound up with identity, (p. 139)” builds nicely on the points made by Volpp and Zerilli. It does not work as well as a conclusion to the volume.

Overall, this is a thought-provoking collection of essays. Individually, the chapters are quite interesting, and as a whole the edited volume aims at concision and cohesion, which can be a challenge. Examining the meaning, but also the uses and abuses, of civility remains an important project. As it is undertaken here, Civility, Legality, and Justice in America makes a contribution by thinking through both the potentials and the limits of this political virtue for combating injustice.