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.
Introduction
The study of civility is branching out. For example, in just the last two decades, civility has been studied in the following different contexts: the role of rudeness (Caldwell, 2000); civility in Japan (Ikegami, 2005); the continuing value of civility (Boyd, 2006); civility and citizenship (Turner, 2008); civility as an object of cultural history (Davetian, 2009);1 the prevalence of incivility in modern life (Smith, Phillips, & King, 2010); cosmopolitanism and civility in everyday life (Anderson, 2011); the threat posed to civility by the tendency to easily take offence (King, 2013); the importance of civility for the behaviour of modern states (Hall, 2013); and civility in Islam (Salvatore, 2016).
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.2 Our main argument in this paper 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.3 We pursue this argument by exploring two sets of writings.
The first set is composed of work by some early-modern writers, especially Thomas Hobbes, writing in England (and France when he was forced to flee England for eleven years) in the 1640s and 1650s (see esp. Hobbes, 1642/1845, 1651/1845), with some attention also paid to four other writers: Justus Lipsius, writing in the Netherlands in the second half of the sixteenth century (see esp. Lipsius, 1584/2006); Jean Bodin, writing in France at around the same time (see esp. Bodin, 1576/1962); Samuel Pufendorf, a follower of Hobbes, writing in Germany in the second half of the seventeenth century (see esp. Pufendorf, 1673/2003); and Christian Thomasius, writing in Germany towards the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth (see esp. Thomasius, 2007). All these writers were concerned to demonstrate the necessity of the strong rule of the state for dealing with the darkest aspects of human interaction in that era – more than 150 years of civil war, fought over differences of belief, among other causes. In doing this, some of these writers, especially Hobbes, understood the fact that the strong rule of the state entailed a particular type of politics, a politics which contains both the raw power that comes with the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the more restrained power required to undertake the routine tasks of government through administration and discussion, a power Loughlin (2003, pp. 158–159) usefully refers to as a ‘power to’ as opposed to a ‘power over’ (see also Loughlin, 2010).
The second set of writings is composed of work by some twentieth-century writers, especially Norbert Elias’s detailed historical account of the growth of civility through what he called the civilising process, a process by which the state helped to deliver and maintain civility such that civility in turn could help the state to maintain itself (see esp. Elias, 1983, 1939/2000), though not without immense setbacks, especially in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s (see esp. Elias, 1996). Some attention is also paid to work by two other writers: Max Weber (see esp. Weber, 1994) and Edward Shils (see esp. Shils, 1997).
What follows is divided into two main sections. The first section is based on the early-modern set of writings, with the stress of our examination of the state–civility nexus slightly heavier on the state component. The second section is based on the twentieth-century set of writings, with the stress of our examination slightly heavier on the civility component.
Across both sections, we deal, in varying degrees of detail, with what we regard as the six main characteristics of the modern state as it engages with civility. Before we provide a brief discussion of these six characteristics, we stress that the discussion is useful only for initial exposition. These characteristics do not operate as discrete factors but as parts of a whole, which is how we treat them once we move, very shortly, to our two main sections.
The first characteristic is a particular understanding of the dangers human beings pose to one another in their natural condition. Secondly, the state uses a particular type of absolute rule known as sovereignty, a type of rule formulated using the just-mentioned understanding of the dangers of human nature. Thirdly, the state is only effective when it is operating within a clearly defined territory, whereby each territory ruled by the state as a ruling apparatus functions as a separate state as a political and geographic entity (an entity often referred to as a nation-state). Fourthly, the state adopts an explicit commitment to create and maintain a domain in which people can live out their lives in relative peace and security, possibly even in happiness. Fifthly, the state depends upon the distinction between offices and the natural persons holding those offices. Finally, the state relies on a distinctive type of politics.
The state–civility nexus from the early-modern perspective of Hobbes and other early-modern writers (with the stress slightly heavier on the state component)
Hobbes and the other early-modern writers on whom we draw in this section all confronted a dramatic increase in civil violence in their home counties, civil violence born of human passions, especially, but not only, religious passions.4 Bodin for instance, in struggling to make sense of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, when in a single day French Catholics slaughtered thousands of French Protestants (known as Huguenots), concluded that passion-driven civil war is the ‘summum malum’ for any country, ‘the uttermost evil to be avoided at all costs’ (Holmes, 1988, p. 7). In his influential Six Books of the Commonwealth (Bodin, 1576/1962), originally published in 1576, Bodin explored the idea that only the sovereign state – that is, a state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force across the territory it rules – can successfully contain the passions of warring confessions and thereby create the conditions for lasting peace.
Hobbes shared Bodin’s concern about the dangers posed by humans’ capacity for civil violence. In his most famous work, Leviathan (Hobbes, 1845), originally published in 1651, Hobbes argued that humans have ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power’ (1651/1845, pp. 85–86), such that they are never able to forge ‘a constant civil amity’ (1651/1845, p. 701), and ‘live, as it were, in the precincts of battle continually’ (1651/1845, p. 165), always ready to either ‘hold the sword’ or ‘hire others to fight for them’ (1651/1845, p. 333).
Pufendorf, whose main works appeared about 30 years after Hobbes’s Leviathan, combined political writing with service in the Swedish Court of Charles XI, where he was variously Privy Councillor, Secretary of State, and Royal Historian. He later held similar posts in the Brandenberg-Prussian Court (Hunter, 2001, p. 199). Pufendorf’s main contribution to the issues we are dealing with was his development of an ‘ethics and politics’ of state suitable for the reconfiguration of ‘civil and religious authority’ (Hunter, 2001, p. 148). Like Hobbes, Pufendorf believed that the nature and capacities of any given human make ‘dealing with him risky and make great caution necessary to avoid receiving evil from him instead of good’, though, unlike Hobbes, Pufendorf did not think that this fractious nature totally precluded the operation of ‘reason and will informed by natural law’ (Hunter, 2001, pp. 171–172). We hasten to add that despite this difference, Pufendorf was a fundamentally Hobbesian thinker, one who completely rejected the then-dominant metaphysical neo-scholastic tradition of natural law and worked instead towards establishing a new form of natural law. This Pufendorfian natural law consigned ‘the desire for salvation and transcendent truth to the separate sphere of private piety’, which in turn allowed it to ‘desacralise’ politics and ethics, confining them to just one key task: the maintenance of ‘social peace and civil governance’ (Hunter, 2001, pp. 150–151). In the terms of our paper, then, Pufendorf sought to ‘civilize’ political culture. As Hunter puts it, Pufendorf was keen to ensure that ‘political duties are not grounded in transcendent moral norms, but in norms of political discipline’ (Hunter, 2001, p. 160).
All of the thinkers discussed so far in this section, this is to say, were concerned to stop passion-fuelled violence escalating into civil war. On this matter, too, many of their main arguments, especially those of Hobbes and Pufendorf, were posed in terms of their understanding of human nature. The most important of these arguments was that because humans are driven by fear, especially the fear of death, only a sovereign state with the authority to take the life of any subject will have the authority to impose restraint upon all subjects and in turn to train the subjects to impose this restraint upon themselves.5
It may seem to some readers that making people’s primal fears the main focus of a ruling apparatus committed to civility is somewhat odd, even offensive. Hobbes, in his own way, agreed, but he thought that the reward – widespread peace – outweighed the drawbacks. He admitted that the reliance on fear might be ‘dishonourable’ (1651/1845, p. 79), possibly excessive (1651/1845, p. 95), and even occasionally ineffective (1651/1845, pp. 285–286), but without fear, Hobbes insisted, the state would achieve very little and would soon wither: ‘Fear of oppression, disposeth a man to anticipate, or to seek aid … for there is no other way by which a man can secure his life and liberty’ (1651/1845, p. 88). In other words, for human beings, their fear and their desire for peace are constant companions: ‘Fear and liberty are consistent’ (1651/1845, p. 197).
In describing the dual approach contained within the above formulations – ‘on the one hand rule by fear, on the other hand encourage restraint’ – Hobbes argued that the state (which he also sometimes called the Leviathan, the Commonwealth, or, using the Latin, civitas) should ‘teach and instruct the people’ (1651/1845, p. 228), as well as keeping ‘them all in awe’ (1651/1845, p. 113). We need to ask of Hobbes at this point what the ‘teaching and instructing’ actually entailed. In other words, what was actually involved in forging the civility component of the state–civility nexus?
For Hobbes, the state–civility nexus was built around the idea that the sovereign state, as a public common power, must recognise the role of the subjects in the ruling arrangements. The sovereign, he insisted, only becomes sovereign through the covenants of the subjects (1651/1845, p. 161), to the extent that once this is done, the sovereign is the ‘representative of all and every one of the multitude’, the ‘person’ or ‘office’ who or which always carries the force of the multitude (1651/1845, p. 171). This is something rulers had to learn before the state could work to its full potential. In this context, it is worth noting Quentin Skinner’s point that the virtues of the sovereign state were not initially apparent in early-modern Europe, that before they became widely appreciated in this domain, a new type of reasoning, ‘practical political reasoning’, had to be disseminated in royal courts and other locations where rulers were instructed in their craft. This was supported, from the fifteenth century onwards, by the use of special ‘advice-books for magistrates’ and the related ‘mirror-for-princes literature’, a literature that aimed to instruct would-be rulers in how they must comport themselves on behalf of the state as a means of delivering a better life to the people in the territory they ruled or sought to rule (Skinner, 2002, p. 374).
This still does not tell us how Hobbes and other early-modern thinkers proposed to strengthen the state by promoting civility. On this matter, the main emphasis among these thinkers was on producing greater restraint in both the rulers and the subjects of their rule, that is, on having them all control their passions by controlling their emotions. This aspect relied to a considerable extent on the development of neo-Epicureanism and neo-Stoicism in the countries we are dealing with. The two main themes of these movements were strength of mind and control of the emotions.
In twenty-first century, countries in which the state is strong and civility is firmly entrenched, people are so widely expected to adopt some or other combination of this type of strength and this type of control that most of them do so in a manner which is barely noticed, such as the recognition of the ordinary rights of others, the regularity of polite exchanges with people we hardly know or know only as fellow commuters or fellow shoppers, the capacity to enjoy or at least endure those with whom we must share cities, roads, planes, the countryside, and other spaces and facilities.6
However, civil capacities had been explored by sixteenth-century writers such as Lipsius, whose work initially aimed to foster restraint only among a limited segment of the population, the rulers themselves and their officials and elite soldiers. In his written work, Lipsius adopted and adapted the Roman Stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus, particularly in developing three techniques, ‘constantia, patientia, firmitas (steadfastness, patience, firmness)’ (Oestreich, 1982, pp. 13–14). Using these techniques, Lipsius aimed to help individuals cope under immense pressure (Oestreich, 1982, pp. 5–9, 13–15, 31). His book De Constantia, first published in 1584 (Lipsius, 1584/2006), was read by rulers and officials in different parts of Europe, many of whom wished to employ his three techniques. ‘The aim of constancy was to achieve a “right and immoueable strength of the minde”’, while patience was to be used ‘to resist the importunities of passion, and … to avoid one’s reason being overtaken by opinio, that is, by “vain imagining”’, firmness was about trying to become the type of person ‘who acts according to reason, is answerable to himself, controls his emotions, and is ready to fight’ (Saunders, 1997, p. 86, quoting Lipsius and Oestreich). In short, this ‘neo-Stoic man of constancy was a secular alternative to the contemporary enthusiasm for Christian models,’ a ‘contribution to the Dutch achievement of producing restrained personnel for military, juridical and administrative offices, men equipped to set aside their religious beliefs in order to perform official functions for the State’ (Saunders, 1997, p. 87; for more on neo-Epicureanism and neo-Stoicism, see esp. Burchell, 1999; Oestreich, 1982; Osler, 1991; Reydams-Schils, 2005).
In contrast, Hobbes’s approach to fostering restraint was heavy-handed in some ways but quite subtle in others. An example of his heavy-handedness was his keenness to see subjects directly instructed in their obligations. For example:
[T]he people are to be taught … that they ought not be in love with any form of government they see in their neighbour nations, more than with their own … that they ought to be informed how great a fault it is, to speak evil of the sovereign representative … [and] that some such times be determined, wherein they [the subjects] may assemble together, and … hear those their duties told them, and the positive laws, such as generally concern them all, read and expounded, and be put in mind of the authority that maketh them laws (1651/1845, pp. 326–330).
Hobbes speaks about manners as those qualities which promote peace and unity and he considers them to be distinct from the ‘small morals’ which concern matters such as ‘how one should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company’ … Similarly, Hobbes separates manners from mere fashion … So the importance of manners is not found in the way they protect us against petty annoyance or because they embellish an otherwise dull existence. It lies in their contribution to peace … [T]hey are serious matters and, hence, of considerable interest to individuals who are motivated primarily by self-preservation (Johnson, 1998, p. 68, quoting Hobbes; for more on the importance of manners in early-modern England, see Bryson, 1998).
Later in the seventeenth century (and into the eighteenth), Thomasius, a pupil of Pufendorf’s, became a ‘leading exponent of Pufendorfian civil philosophy’ (Hunter, 2001, p. 197). While Thomasius, too, served as a juriconsult to the Brandenberg-Prussian state, his most notable impact was as an academic and cultural reformer. As founding professor of law at Brandenberg’s new University of Halle (established in 1693 as the first non-confessional university in Germany after the Thirty Years War), Thomasius developed a curriculum for jurists and clergy that rejected the neo-scholasticism of the orthodox Lutheran universities and focused instead on ‘forming the future jurists and statesmen of [the new] deconfessionalised princely territorial state’ (Hunter, 2001, p. 199).
In line with this, Thomasius was concerned that well after the settlement of the Thirty Years War, a culture of confessional disputation was still hindering the development of what we would now call a culture of civility. Like Lipsius over a century before, Thomasius used a trio of ‘conceptual categories’, in his case, ‘honestum, decorum, and justum’ (Barnard, 1971, pp. 236–239). His ethic of decorum is of most interest to us, inasmuch as he urged its use as a form of personal accountability, a device to help individuals take responsibility for their ways of thinking and acting – ‘a certain weighing of costs and benefits, and a “reckoning” of consequences’ (Barnard, 1988, p. 591; see also Hunter, 2007; Thomasius, 2007).
The final two matters for discussion in this section are the role of office and the distinctive politics of the state.
The most important aspect of the role of office is the fact that the state depends for its survival not on the actions of any one individual natural human person or any group of such persons (no matter how important they are considered to be, or how long they survive), but on the operation of the offices which these natural human persons fill or have filled. In this way, the state–civility nexus is facilitated by the state’s remarkable durability – the state does not depend on any individual or set of individuals for its performance because those who fill the offices must follow the procedures that come with the office they hold. The offices, as it were, train the officials into the job, not the other way around.
Exploring these developments, Paul du Gay argues that as the state developed in Europe in the early-modern period:
the distinction between an office and the person holding that office became sharper and began to harden as a separate, highly structured domain of offices arose, and associated with those offices a greatly accumulated set of powers developed – resources, and instruments which were (and remain) not really under the effective personal control of those who happened to occupy the offices at any given moment (du Gay, 2012, p. 400).
As a persona ficta the state is able to incur obligations that no government and no single generation of citizens could ever hope to discharge. As Skinner … puts it there is no other way of ‘making sense of such obligations than to invoke the idea of the state as a person possessed of what Hobbes termed “an artificial eternity of life”’ (du Gay, 2012, p. 407, quoting Skinner).
The raw-power element of this distinctive politics is very much about the state component of the state–civility nexus. This is the element that delivers the force required for the state to protect its population from external and internal enemies, which is ultimately its most fundamental task. As Ian Hunter says, security is ‘the default setting’ of the modern state (Hunter, 2005). This is the case even if threats are not sourced in the violence of human enemies but in things like floods, earthquakes, fires, droughts, tsunamis, or even, as mentioned a little earlier, financial crises. Du Gay, drawing on Hunter’s work, makes this point forcefully:
Under conditions of peace the sovereign state, in its guise as security state, can almost seem to disappear, and the state becomes the addressee of a wide range of additional demands and expectations. As soon as the security envelope is threatened, however, whether internally (incitement to insurrection, domestic terrorism, economic crisis) or externally (foreign terrorism, invasion, economic crisis) then civil liberties and rights are retracted to the extent that is necessary to protect the space within which they were unfolded in the first place … It should therefore come as no surprise – in fact it should be taken as evidence of its ‘stateness’ – that contemporary liberal democratic states default to their ‘foundational’ security setting when under threat (du Gay, 2012, pp. 402–403).
In this way, the restraint element is not just a minor partner to the raw-power element, it is its equal. It is true that the state would be of little use without the raw-power element, but it is equally true that any state would quickly become a failed state without the restraint element (a failed state being any state that cannot guarantee the security of the population of the territory it rules).
The state–civility nexus from the twentieth-century perspective of Elias and other twentieth-century writers (with the stress slightly heavier on the civility component)
In discussing Elias’s twentieth-century contribution to the study of the state–civility nexus, a good starting point is Weber’s thinking on the politics of the state. It is a good starting point because Weber’s understanding of the two elements of the politics of the state influenced Elias’s thinking on the state–civility nexus (in fact, Weber’s work influenced Elias’s intellectual development more generally; see esp. Mennell & Goudsblom, 1998, p. 5; Van Krieken, 1998, p. 16; see also Breuer, 1994; Goudsblom, 2003; Turner, 2004).
On the raw-power element of the politics of the state, Weber understood the political sphere to be necessarily one of ‘contestation, competition, struggle, and … conflict’ (Kim, 2004, p. 186). In this way, he argued that ‘the modern state does not have any normative implication … It neither stands in the tradition of natural law based constructivism, nor does it stand in a republican tradition’ (Greven, 2004, p. 197) and he insisted that ‘in political life, the pluralistic “fight of demons” always continues – and at any moment only power describes their struggles’ (Greven, 2004, p. 199, quoting Weber). For Weber, then, the politics of the state must always involve the use of force:
Anyone seeking to save his own soul and the souls of others does not take the path of politics in order to reach his goal, for politics has quite different tasks, namely those which can only be achieved by force … Machiavelli had such situations in mind when, in a beautiful passage in his Florentine histories (if my memory does not deceive me), he has one of his heroes praise those citizens who placed the greatness of their native city above the salvation of their souls (Weber, 1994, p. 366).
This disagreement need not detain us, for we have said enough by way of providing the background to Elias’s arguments about the state–civility nexus. In short, Elias studied this nexus against, at first, a backdrop of concerns about the operation of European states in the devastating wake of the First World War and, later, against a backdrop of even greater concerns about the rise of Nazism and the conduct and outcome of the Second World War. It is little wonder that Weber’s powerful remarks about raw-power politics and his musings about the need to restrain such politics through formal parliamentary debate had an effect on the way Elias conducted his massive project on the history of civility.
A similar but by no means identical point can be made about Shils, whose main body of work was produced at roughly the same time as Elias’s. Shils, too, was heavily influenced by Weber. He argued forcefully (probably more forcefully than Weber himself) for the importance of the restraint element of the politics of the state. In this way, Shils focused on the importance of civility in the twentieth century for protecting the modern state against ideological partisanship, which he viewed in something like the way Hobbes viewed those religious beliefs that in being seen to be sourced in perfection became justifications for passion-driven civil war. Civility, Shils said (1997, p. 4), ‘is a restraint on the passions with which interests and ideals are pursued’. Moreover, ‘civility limits or diminishes the real losses which are bound to be inflicted on a society in which conflicts are both inherent … and provided for’ (Shils, 1997, p. 341). In other words, for Shils, civility’s job is to mitigate inevitable conflicts in a bid to stop them ‘from degenerating into a “war of each against all”’ (Shils, 1997, p. 14), ‘out of respect for the common good’ (Shils, 1997, p. 49; see also Turner, 1999).7
Before we go into more detail about Elias, we should acknowledge that in making him the central thinker of this section (for all the reasons discussed above), we are also indirectly taking up a challenge inadvertently issued by John A. Hall. In the same book in which Hall offers many perceptive points about civility and the state (he is definitely in the camp of those who know the importance of the state for achieving and maintaining civility, as we mentioned in our introduction), Hall argues that Elias’s work on the civilising process has little or nothing to offer the study of civility. Not mincing words, he proposes that Elias’s ‘celebrated claim that there is a civilizing process is wholly wrong’ (Hall, 2013, pp. 5–6). He bases this judgement on the fact that Elias’s best-known book – The Civilizing Process (Elias, 1939/2000) – was first published in exactly the year, 1939, that much of the world was plunged into six years of ‘war, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder’. For Hall, then, the rise of Nazism and the devastation of the Second World War leave Elias in no position to understand that civility ‘comes and goes in waves and needs care and attention if it is to be maintained’ (2013, p. 6). We suggest to the reader that what we have to say about Elias in this section be taken as a rebuttal of Hall’s claim, a claim we regard as somewhat bizarre in his otherwise well-argued and useful contribution.
Across his three main books, The Court Society (1983), The Civilizing Process (1939/2000) and The Germans (1996), Elias demonstrated a capacity to explain remarkably sharp contrasts between the different faces and fates of civility in Europe, ranging ‘from the medieval period’s moderated restraint of emotions and the disciplined shaping of behaviour as a whole, which under the name of civilité had been developed in the upper class as a purely secular and social phenomenon’ (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 87), through to the ‘decivilizing spurt of the Hitler epoch’ (Elias, 1996, p. 1).
While Elias did not concern himself directly with definitional statements on human nature, the idea that humans are dangerous passionate creatures who need to be restrained if they are to become participants in the intricacies of social life is in evidence throughout his work on civility. Nonetheless, it is the case that, even though he nowhere disagreed with Hobbes’s basic understanding of human nature, Elias did not pursue the issue in quite the same way as Hobbes did. For Elias, the difficulties with human nature were a starting point for historical enquiries, not a philosophical bedrock.
For example, in The Civilizing Process, Elias described the life of the peasant class in medieval Europe (the majority of population at that time) as a life filled with feuds, fighting, and robbery. Acts of violence and cruelty were part of everyday existence. Such acts were not outlawed and, indeed, were often socially permitted pleasures (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 163). For this group of people, this is to say, passions were expressed more spontaneously than is now the norm. The knightly class occasionally behaved exactly like the peasants, but only up to that point when their code of conduct kicked in. Elias demonstrated how this code included a large number of ‘drive-controls’, mechanisms by which the knights learned to check at least some of their excesses. However, these controls ‘were not of the same degree as in later periods, and they did not take the form of a constant, even, and almost automatic self-control’ (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 180). For Elias’ historical way of understanding human nature, this is to say, acts of violence and other uncivil behaviours slowly became more restrained and refined in accordance with a code, to the point that they were transformed into parts of more acceptable activities, such as sporting contests, activities in which most people were spectators rather than active players. Over a long period of time, life in Europe underwent this type of transformation, with the result that the active pleasure of participating in violent and cruel acts was replaced for most people by ‘the passive, more ordered pleasure of spectating’ (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 170).
Another place in Elias’s work where he explored the state–civility nexus, this time in a more recent setting, was in The Germans (1996). Consider, for example, his Weberian political thinking in analysing the contestation and inherent interests at work in Weimar Germany during the leadership of Friedrich Ebert (for more on Weber’s own use of this type of thinking, see Mommsen, 1959/1984; Weber, 1994). For Elias, German politics in 1919 consisted of near-constant clashes of old and new interests. Ebert and his government at first attempted to allow the family of the displaced Kaiser to save face by making one of the imperial princes into the regent. Elias argued this was a case of the new government being unable to fully recognise its own interests in the face of old interests, so used were the members of the new regime to being ruled ‘from above’ and therefore so unused to the new code of conduct required by the changed circumstances. On the other side of this coin, according to Elias, the members of the traditional establishment retained a very strong grasp of their own interests, believing it an intolerable insult to have a former member of the working class – Ebert had previously been a master saddler – as the new ruler of their country. Those in this establishment considered themselves to be the only true representatives of the nation (Elias, 1996, pp. 183, 289–290). Complicating this picture were clashes of internal interests within the broad church of the new republic, inasmuch as political opportunities suddenly appeared for Social Democrats, Liberals, Catholics, and ‘the numerically very large organised working class and the numerically very small Jewish middle-class circles’ (Elias, 1996, p. 247).
Elias went on to describe the way in which this scenario provided fertile ground for the emergence of Hitler’s regime, but we need not follow him that far; we have said enough to make clear his commitment to the idea of a strong historical nexus between the state and civility, though we still need to sum up the different ways his work contributes to our argument.
Elias used history to build a compelling account of the state’s role in producing conditions conducive to the wide spread of civility, starting with the early-modern state’s achievement in winning for itself a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a defined territory. He argued that the ‘special and unique character’ the early-modern state attained by achieving such a monopoly, along with a monopoly on tax collection (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 379), led to a situation in which ‘many of the previously freely competing regions and groups gradually grew together into a more or less unified, better and worse balanced human web of a higher order of magnitude’ (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 436). This in turn eventually produced an environment ‘in which all opportunities’ came to be ‘controlled by a single authority’, resulting in a dependence on the victors (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 269).
To be more specific, Elias argued that, in medieval Europe, violent elimination contests associated with the quest to win a monopoly on the legitimate use of force were plentiful at first, but eventually resulted in the destruction of competitors and the emergence of the state. As the state’s rule grew stronger, ‘not every strong man’ could continue to ‘afford the pleasure of physical attack’, which was increasingly ‘reserved to those few legitimized by the central authority … and to larger numbers only in exceptional times of war or revolution, in the socially legitimated struggle against internal or external enemies’ (Elias, 1939/2000, pp. 169–170). This strengthening of the central authority of the state, Elias said, brought with it a shift in individuals’ behaviour, away from regular recourse to violence and towards the development of carefully cultivated nonviolent means of achieving one’s goals.
This process at first affected only the courtiers close to the centre of rule – ‘the transformation of warriors into courtiers’ (Elias, 1939/2000, pp. 386–397) – but then slowly spread to those further and further from the elites. To put this another way, while the option of violent hostility towards one’s opponents did not disappear, it did become a less attractive option – ‘every action taken against an opponent also threatens the social existence of its perpetrator; it disturbs the whole mechanism of chains of action of which one is a part’ (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 318). Gradually, people adjusted their conduct to that of others; ‘mutual consideration’ became the norm:
the web of actions must be organized more and more strictly and accurately, if each individual action is to fulfill its social function. Individuals are compelled to regulate their conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner (Elias, 1939/2000, p. 367).
For Elias, then, the most ‘important structural characteristics of more highly developed societies’ were those directed towards ‘moulding civilized conduct’ (1939/2000, p. 318), those characteristics, that is, by which people are ‘changed in a particular direction’ – towards a more or less automatic self-control where one’s long-term calculations about the consequences of one’s actions override one’s short-term impulses such that an overall stability of peaceable conduct is attained and maintained (1939/2000, p. 470).
Elias’s thinking on the state–civility nexus, it must be remembered, was consistent with his Weberian (and Machiavellian and Hobbesian) approach to politics. He was sure that no teleology is involved; the state–civility nexus can and does achieve a great deal by way of limiting personal violence, but it is not always marching towards an ideal outcome, one in which the strong state delivers ever more peace to the population of each territory it rules. Politics, this is to say, is never wholly in the service of one project or another; it is an activity that is always capable of disrupting any status quo. As such, Elias was certain that acts of violence and the fear of acts of violence will remain central features of political, social, and cultural life, even in countries where civility has become more and more pronounced.
Conclusion
After noting a trend in some of the recent literature on civility towards less appreciation for (and/or less awareness of) the role of the state, we have argued that civility, as the capacity to help ‘disagreement to take place without violence’ (Hall, 2013, pp. 2–3), is inextricably statist, being one arm of what we have called the state–civility nexus. Our argument has been constructed through an examination of two sets of writings on this nexus, one focused on some of the works of the famous theorist of the state Thomas Hobbes (with some attention paid to four other early-modern writers), the other on some of the works of the historian of civility Norbert Elias (with some attention paid to two other twentieth-century writers). While we have been careful throughout to make clear that civility is not by any means a guarantee of peace, either within states or between them, we have argued that the state–civility nexus has been able to mitigate the worst effects of ongoing violence in those places where it has taken hold. In building this argument, we acknowledged the irony of the state restraining its own massive power against the civility component. At this concluding stage, we wish to add that the state must restrain itself in this way because if it did not, civility’s capacity to restrain it would either disappear or be severely weakened, with the result that the state itself would either disappear or be severely weakened, for the restraint has ultimately made the state more effective and more durable.
As a final point, we wish to sharpen an aspect of our argument that perhaps we have so far put too obliquely. In describing the close relation between civility and the state through the use of the term ‘state–civility nexus’, we have never meant this term to suggest that the state takes primacy over civility, but we may not have said this with sufficient force. We conclude by pointing out that even if it is the case that civility without the state would be much feebler than it is with it (and that definitely is the case), this does not make the state the dominant partner in the nexus. A state without any civility would mean nothing other than rule by violence, which would in fact, in line with our earlier definition, make such a state a failed state. When Hobbes famously said that life without the rule of the sovereign state would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (1651/1845, p. 113), we take him to have meant that life without the sovereign state employing its capacity for civility as well as its capacity for overwhelming force would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. In other words, when civility is effectively tempering the state, the state cannot be divorced from civility, nor civility from the state.
Notes
For a detailed criticism of Davetian’s book, see Goudsblom (2010).
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).
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.
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).
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).
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).
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.