Agreeing to Differ
For about a quarter century “civil society” has had about it an air of excitement. This is not surprising, for the concept has been taken as a banner by those wishing to be free in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and, most recently, in North Africa, and it has been further invoked by Marxist thinkers in the West who seek a nonstatist theory of the Left.1 Still, there has always been vagueness as to exactly what the notion implied. This chapter provides the clarity that is needed. The argument is simple: “civil society” only “makes sense” when it contains a heavy dose of civility. It may be helpful to offer a complete definition of civil society immediately: it is a form of societal self-organization that allows for cooperation with the state while permitting individuation. A great deal hangs on “individuation.”
The most obvious alternative to my definition conceptualizes civil society simply as societal self-organization. A moment’s thought makes it quite obvious that this will not do. To begin with, militancy guarantees nothing nice. Weimar Germany was torn apart by the fanatical enthusiasm of Nazi and communist groups who were keen to fight it out on the streets.2 Equally, the exceedingly solidaristic self-organization of mafiosi, whether in Sicily or in contemporary Moscow, quite obviously has the capacity for destroying basic societal decencies. Sheer intellectual provincialism makes many forget that settled existence depends on the rule of law being guaranteed by effective state power. The intellectual roots of this blindness derive from nineteenth-century England. A thinker such as Herbert Spencer could imagine a moral world based wholly on contracts between individuals, and this bias worked its way into modern thought as a whole via neoclassical economics. Interestingly, if curiously, this view was taken over wholesale by Karl Marx. The “withering away of the state” that Marx expected under socialism characterizes the general point most evocatively. The fact that the twentieth century has seen viciously effective states that ignored the rule of law provided experience that seemed to underwrite this antistatist ethic. But if despotism is a danger, so too is anarchy. Those who talk of the desirability of curtailing the powers of the state, whether in nineteenth-century England or in twentieth-century United States, overgeneralize on the basis of the pacific consensus that marks their social worlds. This is provincial because it takes no account of bastard feudalism or of Beirut in its worst days, and thereby fails to provide safeguards against further savageries of the type that they represent. Social forces that destroy a liberal state or prevent it from operating efficiently do not contribute to a civil society; that term should be reserved for social self-organization that cooperates with a responsible and responsive state.
It is just as important to stress that the manner in which members of the organizations mentioned are controlled is far removed from any connotation of the word “civil.” The classic instance to bear in mind is that of tribal self-organization,3 which not only destroys organized states but also controls human beings to such a degree as to rule out any possibility of individual self-determination and moral growth. The all-powerful tyranny that closed groups can exert over every aspect of daily life, from clothing to the choice of marriage partner to the details of belief, is antithetical to any concept of civil society. Positively put, a civil society is one in which individuals have the chance of at least trying to create their own selves. This means that the membership of social groups must be voluntary and overlapping, for it is in the complex interstices of social life that individualism often resides. Furthermore, there is likely to be an elective affinity between civil society and fashion: for all the silly pretensions to which the latter can be prone, it remains the area in which many can experiment with and try on new conceptions of their selves.
These considerations have by now entered into general understanding. But there is something behind antipathy to such “caging” that has not been understood to anything like the same extent.4 It can be stated very straightforwardly before turning to its theoretical exemplar and an account of its genealogy. Civility is based on recognition of difference and diversity. Caging is dreadful in large part because it presumes that there is one road to truth in all matters. Varied attitudes can be involved here. Some welcome diversity enthusiastically, while others put up with it with resignation. A still more sophisticated attitude is that of those who think that a good deal of truth can be discovered but who are reluctant to force-feed human beings into accepting every detail of a morality. This was the position, for example, of the narrator of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: seeing a young boy about to waste years, as he had wasted them himself, along the false trails of “society” and art, Marcel refuses to intervene—on the grounds that moral learning can only take place through making one’s own mistakes. A key analytic point derives from this. That type of holistic liberalism represented by Durkheim, in which socialization is all-encompassing and all-effective, is not at all civil. A civil society will allow the individual room to experiment, doing so most of the time from a position of mild relativism—that is, one that doubts the presence of a single set of universal rules about every aspect of behavior. Relativism of this sort needs to be distinguished from total or blanket relativism. To say that the recognition of difference is shared and the decision to live together with diversity is mutual is to note a background consensus, an agreement to differ, that enables civil society to flourish. The consensus in question should, of course, be minimal, including, most obviously, respect for the rule of law, attention to empirical evidence, and abhorrence of violence, while its characteristic attitude will be that of ironic and affectionate amusement at the foibles of humanity within the resulting settled world. All this can be expressed more bluntly: the diversity that is acceptable to civil society is that within a particular world with its own boundaries.
There are several thinkers who both theorize and exemplify civility. To my mind, the greatest is Montesquieu, whose worldview is brilliantly laid before us in his early philosophical novel, Les lettres persanes. The skepticism of the book is at times open and bluntly stated. The story of the troglodytes prefigures the distaste that Montesquieu had for the political theory of the ancient world. The disciplined and unitary world of civic virtue demanded too much of us, and it was—as he would show in the book he wrote next, The Considerations on the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans—far too militaristic. In contrast, Montesquieu has sympathy for wealth rather than virtue, and famously asserted later in The Spirit of the Laws that the interests might limit the passions, that moneymaking (to make use of Samuel Johnson’s expression) might be less dangerous than the pursuit of political power.5 But the witty iconoclasm resulting from Persians observing our customs, and from our observing their own, is much more subtle. Montesquieu can be seen time and again almost throwing his hands up, with varied mixtures of delight and despair, when considering how we should live. Virtually everything that we take for granted—food, religion, love and sex, much of politics, art—is the result of custom, and is thereby wholly bereft of philosophical grounding. He goes to an extreme in one instance: the only wholly happy relationship in the book is, it is not always realized, an incestuous one between a brother and sister, Apheridon and Astarte. More typical, however, is his wry amusement. Women and men deceive each other, for sure, but the fact that women have a measure of negative resisting power is far from bad, as Rica, the more sympathetic and open-minded of the two Persians, stresses:
If [the Asians] in their turn argue that Europeans cannot be happy with women who are unfaithful to them, the answer is that this faithfulness, which they make so much of, does not prevent them feeling the indifference which always ensues when passion is satisfied; that our wives are too exclusively ours; that being so firmly in possession leaves us nothing to desire, or to fear; that a certain amount of fickleness is like salt, which adds flavour and prevents decay.6
Uzbek, the dominant Persian character, makes the same point.7 He admits, without any sense of what this means, that the very possession of the women in his harem has destroyed his desire for them—and the story of the novel shows his inability to relinquish control, even though it makes him miserable. Montesquieu had attended salons run by aristocratic women, and it is surely from this background that he gained his occasionally bemused admiration for the independence of women. Fashion might be a little ridiculous, but it allows for moral experiment, for the trying on of different personalities.
The extensive relativism stressed by Montesquieu, the insistence that we really do not have any basis for much of what we believe, has decided and absolute limits. It is again Rica who makes the point most strikingly, in a letter to Uzbek.
I can tell you that I knew nothing about women until I came here. I have learnt more about them in a month than I should have done in thirty years inside a seraglio. With us everyone’s character is uniformly the same, because they are forced. People do not seem what they are, but what they are obliged to be. Because of this enslavement of heart and mind, nothing is heard but the voice of fear, which has only one language, instead of nature, which expresses itself so diversely and appears in so many different forms. Dissimulation, which among us is so widely practiced and essential an art, is unknown here. Everything is said, everything can be seen, and everything heard. The heart is exhibited as openly as the face. In conduct, in virtue, and even in vice, there is always something spontaneous to be perceived.8
So there is a voice of nature, a true grounding for some universal values. The Persian Letters makes it clear that slavery is wrong, as is despotism, whether political or religious: both speak the language of fear—and fear is something universal. We can go a little further. The famous letter on suicide notes the cruelty of being punished twice: first for the misery that some people find in existence and then with the social opprobrium of having the suicide’s body dragged through the street. This says something about civility. Montesquieu is its best representative because he is aware of horror and had indeed witnessed torture in his early career in Bordeaux. Some eighteenth-century proponents of civility speak of polish and refinement, and so sound a little prissy. Montesquieu is harder: civility is a necessary virtue to help us negotiate a world of pain. That is why he places so much emphasis on knowledge and, above all, on toleration, itself almost a synonym for civility.
It is important at this point, as we move from the character of civility toward an account of its genealogy, to warn against a misconception. Gore Vidal once suggested that the deepest meaning of Creation, his magnificent novel about the origins of the world religions and ethics, was that agrarian civilizations before the advent of the great monotheistic creeds were the most tolerant in the history of mankind. There is some justification for this view. On the one hand, the logistics of agrarian civilization meant that they had no capacity to penetrate let alone to police the thoughts of the tribes and peasant communities over which they ruled. On the other hand, monotheism brought in its train the potential for—and, with Christianity once Constantine had converted, the enthusiastic and vicious practice of—intolerance, even though the principle of universal salvation envisaged and allowed the incorporation of all human beings into society for the first time. Nonetheless, the classical agrarian civilizations were not civil societies. Civility has everything to do with the modern world, in which differences conflict with one another rather than being ignored because people live in social silos that do not interact. What matters is the agreement to tolerate, albeit within clear limits, so that it becomes possible to live in peace.
The origins of toleration of this sort lie within Europe. Perhaps its deepest roots result from the way in which the removal of the centralized authority of Rome placed power in several sets of hands.9 What is most striking in comparative perspective is the separation between ideological and political power. This separation has its origins in Jesus’s injunction to deliver to Caesar what was Caesar’s, but to give to God what was God’s—a remark that amounts to saying that Christianity’s concern was with spiritual salvation rather than political order. Christianity later refused to provide ideological justification for Rome, and it found thereafter that it could survive and prosper without the benefit of an imperial polity. Once it realized that it could not itself create a theocracy, fear of concentration of power in the hands of a secular emperor led the church to encourage kings whom they made more than primus inter pares by ritual anointing and the singing of the Laudes regiae. If those policies were conscious, very different activities by the church may have done as much to encourage state formation in Europe. The church’s greed for land seems to account for the breaking up of obligations toward one’s extended kinship network; if the way in which this resulted in a family pattern responsive to Malthusian pressures is well known, the manner in which its atomization of society made for easier state-building may be quite as important.10 Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine that royal power became unfettered as the result of these two forces. Rather, state-building took place within a field of preexisting social forces. Kings were faced with feudal nobilities whose property rights were firmly established, as were those of the church. In these circumstances kings sought to enhance their powers by granting autonomy to towns; these became islands in the feudal sea in which new ideas and social practices could develop. So here was an acephalous world in which liberties were both widespread and firmly codified in a legal system that privileged corporate rights.
This vesting of power into separate bodies might have led to a static society in which different sources of power merely blocked any sense of a common enterprise. This did not happen, with European society in consequence gaining a restless dynamism that changed the pattern of world history. A measure of cooperation was initially made possible by the sense of unity provided by Christian norms; shared membership in a civilization certainly helped to revive and deepen economic interaction even within the medieval period. But over time a patterned and interactive division took place. State-society relations within countries became increasingly intense due to the endless competition in war caused by life within a multipolar world of states. The need for monies for war led to the practice of calling assemblies of the realm, that is, of church, nobles, and townsmen, to whom were added representatives of the peasantry in parts of northern Europe.11 Such assemblies took over tags of canon law—“what touches all must be agreed by all” and “no taxation without representation”—which gave Europe a sense of the rule of law. Of course, the fact that there were several states was of enormous importance. A measure of internal decency was encouraged once it was realized that foul treatment of key social elements might encourage them to move and thereby to enrich rival states, as clearly happened when the Huguenots were expelled from France. The presence of avenues of escape supported both economic and political liberties.
This account is slightly exaggerated. Central and Eastern Europe took a turn away from such diversity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as nobles and kings allied against towns and independent peasantries. In northwestern Europe, in contrast, states remained rule-bound even during the period of absolutist rule. In general, however, multipolar pluralism was sufficiently well entrenched as to rule out the success of any attempt—whether by popes, emperors, or kings—to re-create imperial unity. Nonetheless, it is very important to stress that civil society gained in self-consciousness from the experience of fighting against politico-religious unification drives. It is this background that explains the rise of toleration. Attempts at suppression of the religious diversity created by the Reformation failed because Charles V’s imperial pretensions were destroyed by the balance of power politics. The principle of cujus regio, ejus religio, enshrined in 1555 at the Treaty of Augsburg, seemingly allowed for diversity and difference, at least between states. But the principle was not really accepted and internalized, as the brutality of the Thirty Years’ War so massively demonstrated. The Westphalian settlement of 1648 is a better marker of development in European attitudes since it went beyond the principle established at Augsburg to the attempt to take religion out of public life altogether, one mechanism toward which end was the insistence that existing religious groups within states should be allowed to worship as they saw fit.
The long religious wars of Europe could not be won by either side, for the forces of pluralism were always sufficient to defeat any drive to political-religious unification. Sustained caesaropapism failed. Facing an endlessly destructive stalemate, an extraordinary shift in attitudes slowly took place: if agreement on detailed matters of belief could neither be reached nor imposed, a background consensus, to tolerate religious difference, was a viable alternative. If toleration was at first merely accepted as a sour grapes philosophy—that is, one imposed by circumstances beyond one’s control—it came to be positively valued. In the spirit of Marx, one can say that civility “in itself,” in which negative resisting power was great, became civility “for itself”—a world in which the principle of toleration was not just accepted but positively embraced. It is important to emphasize that this development was by no means inevitable, and certainly not the necessary unfolding of the logic of social evolution; rather, it was largely fortuitous, although it is worth noting that stalemate is a factor that has had important effects on other occasions. It is also important to note that the principle of toleration went well beyond religious difference. A brilliant recent history has demonstrated that liberal attitudes to sexuality were quite as much involved and formed the background of the world described by Montesquieu.12 Between 1600 and 1800 a revolution occurred that took sexual matters from the public to the private realm—within which there were all sorts of mixed sentiments, sometimes constraining but at other times emancipating.
The initial breakthrough to civilized acceptance of difference in Europe obviously predated the emergence of capitalism, with Montesquieu insisting later that the spirit of toleration then facilitated the triumph of this new economic system—a view interestingly different from Max Weber’s celebrated notion that the Protestant ethic helped push economic life forward. But capitalism did have something to do with the establishment of a culture of political civility in England, for soft political rule was not always present there; on the contrary, it was a historical achievement. Seventeenth-century England had been prey to civil war, treason trials, regicide, conspiracy, and the sundering of families. The very sudden move to political stability between 1675 and 1725 seems to be best explained by such traumatic experience.13 In a condition of continuing stalemate, in which neither side was capable of outright victory, it suddenly began to make sense, as it had to those divided by religion in early modern Europe, to try to live together—the successful accomplishment of which then fostered a culture of civility. Though this political achievement was genuinely autonomous, it was nonetheless aided by economic factors. For one thing, the stalemate itself resulted from negative resisting power in society being widely spread. For another, the acceptance of party alternation in government was eased by the presence of a growing economy that provided sources of remuneration other than that derived from the possession of power.
Civil society reached an initial apogee in eighteenth-century Britain. Historically, new levels of self-organization were made possible by the spread of periodicals, coffeehouses, and associations, all of which were underwritten by a vibrant commercial society.14 This is the world of Adam Smith and David Hume, just two of the great theorists of Edinburgh, the Paris of the North, as well as of Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke. Individualism flourished in this world. The modern novel, which allowed discussion and thought about new types of social identity, attests to this. Political innovation marked the age quite as much as these basic social forces. John Wilkes stands as the exemplar of popular politics, concerned at one and the same time with popular representation and the interests of the English nation.
No similar set of developments marked the world outside the Occident. To analyze the social portfolios of a set of different civilizations is almost impossible at all times, and certainly so here. Still, something can be said about the ideas and institutions of three other civilizations. The point of these limited remarks is that of underlining—rather than explaining—the claim made: namely, that civil society did not emerge endogenously outside the Occident.
At the ideational level, little evidence can be found of interest in a shared world within which difference is respected. Islam certainly stands opposed to this. What is most noticeable about this religion is the supreme confidence with which it provides a complete set of injunctions designed to apply to politics as much as to matters of salvation.15 The great tradition of this religion was not flexible enough to easily adapt itself to different political regimes as was Christianity, let alone keen to allow for toleration. At first sight, the Hindu-Buddhist synthesis of Indian civilization seems the exact opposite of this, essentially tolerant in the relativism of its insistence that there are many ways in which to find salvation. But this position is equally hostile to the notion of civil society. The Western notion depends on a shared world within which limited differences are accepted; Indian civilization stands in contrast to this for the brute reason that difference is absolute, with even the shadow of an untouchable able to pollute a member of the higher castes. It may well be that Confucianism, whose ethic of politeness superficially resembles the British upper-class insistence that “manners makyth man,” stands closest to the Western notion. But that ethic never faced ideological rivals, preferring rather to retreat from power at any moment when its standards were temporarily placed in question. Mannered self-restraint may well be important in Chinese civilization, but, in the last analysis, this was not occasioned by, nor necessary for, the management of ideological difference—let alone as a shell designed to allow human individuation.
There are, of course, myriad, complex, and varied relations between ideologies and institutions, making the following comments about the latter alone especially arbitrary. Still, the extent to which the social patterning of the non-Western civilization stands opposed to civil society is very striking. The certainty and completeness of Islam gave no room for mundane politics; this so weakened states as to occasion an endless cycle in which corruption was always replaced by a new despotism; the fact that this was allied to perpetual, external military threat from tribes ruled out limited, civil politics. The organization of Indian civilization by means of caste made states quite as weak—with the prospects of a short tenure of power again occasioning predation upon, rather than cooperation with, the forces of society. Chinese civilization did depend on a long-lasting state, but the difficulty here was that the coincidence of political and ideological power left no room for societal organizations that were able to balance the state. Of course, in all three civilizations, there was intense social organization. But such organization was either private or directed against the state: social actors faced states that were either short-lived and predatory or long-lasting and cohesive—and tended in any case to be caged by kinship-based organizations. In every case social patterning was far removed from any notion of civil society.
We can leave this account of the character and genealogy of civility by pointing to problems to be addressed as we proceed. The first appearance of civil society was neither complete nor secure. For one thing, the imitation by backward societies within Europe did not encourage civility. If there was an initial link between commerce and liberty, as Adam Smith claimed, the planning of capitalism from above did not sustain it. For another, the behavior of European states in the rest of the world was anything but civil. Remember the slave trade. Additionally, European “liberalism” within empires overseas was characteristically dogmatic and vicious. Most important of all was the attempt to install unitary virtue during the French Revolution. What matters here is not the Terror itself but rather the reaction that it bred—that is, the determination of old regimes to stay in power at all costs. There is everything to be said for taking the French Revolution as a symbol of the moment at which the people enter onto the political stage. Thereafter states needed, at a minimum, to integrate both classes and nations if they were to be stable and successful. Civil society before the French Revolution had not faced these challenges, which is to say that its sense of propriety and refinement was the creation and property of the few. The tragedy of European civilization is that political elites that might have modernized their polities failed to do so. The lesson these diehards learned from the behavior of the Jacobins was wrong: they sought to batten down the hatches rather than to modernize by inclusion. We will see in chapter 3 the way in which exclusion affected class and nation so as to cause disaster; the analysis of recovery that follows highlights the crucial discovery of the way in which inclusion moderates political life.
A final reflection forces itself upon us. The twentieth century has seen ideocracies that are opposed to the ideal of civil society, thereby making it crystal clear that the modern world has been very far from uniform: there is no single “modernity.” Insofar as this is so, civil society is but one option among others, that is, an ideal born in the West that faces alternatives. This lends a certain measure of schizophrenia to anyone endorsing civil society. On the one hand, awareness of enemies makes explication and analysis important in an internal sense: it makes it possible to understand ourselves, so that what we value can be better defended. On the other hand, recognizing that civil society is a world among others puts on the agenda the desirability of finding rational grounds by means of which to choose one world rather than another. Most defenses of civil society of this sort ultimately tend to be negative, to stress the failure of alternatives and the fact that there is some connection between civil society and prosperity. Such defenses have cognitive power but they are unlikely to persuade everyone, not least given those flaws to its pedigree soon to be noted. While not impossible, it is only fair to say that producing transcultural argument on this point is notoriously difficult. In the final analysis, I suspect that civil society can only be defended in Kantian terms, that is, on account of its respect for the individual.
1 J. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
2 S. Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World Politics 49, no. 3 (April 1997): 401–29.
3 E. A. Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London: Allen Lane, 1994).
4 The notion of caging runs throughout the greatest philosophical history of our time: Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 1993, 2012, 2013). Volume titles are: vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760; vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914; vol. 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945; and vol. 4, Globalizations, 1945–2011.
5 A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) is acknowledged as the classic account of this tradition.
6 Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. C. J. Betts ([1721] London: Penguin, 1973), 92.
7 Ibid., 46.
8 Ibid., 129–30.
9 J. A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
10 J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
11 G. H. Myers, Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).
12 F. Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
13 J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Humanities Press, 1967).
14 N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1983). There is one difficulty with the subtitle of this book: commerce mattered quite as much to the Lowlands of Scotland, as such “North Britons,” as Smith and Hume realized.
15 M. Cook and P. Crone, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); P. Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).