Introduction: Whose civility?

The value of civility

This section examines the ways in which theorists have understood the value of civility – as we draw a contrast between Edwards Shils (1997) and others who saw civility as “thick” substantive virtue in and of itself; and those who see civility in largely procedural terms (Boyd, 2006; Calhoun, 2000; Sennett, 1975). We then turn to Adam Smith as a way out of the somewhat artificial distinction between the formal and substantive aspects of civility – albeit with limitations in terms of accounting for the political.

For many advocates of civility, it is a morally thick virtue that gives collective life value. Robert Boyd, for example, argues “civility is the disposition that makes political life possible because it allows those with different and conflicting views of the good to live peacefully side-by-side” (2006: 865). Civility here is more than simply passive respect or politeness, but an active and positive form of sociality. For Boyd, civility is about the communication of a deep mutual respect (Boyd: 2006). Similarly, for David Hume, the virtue of civility lies precisely in the “charity” and “generosity” seen through “politeness” and “manners'”(1985: 274–280). Civility in this sense contains a sense of the public citizen, willing and able to contribute to the wider good.

For Edward Shils, writing in 20th-century America, the civil public citizen is intrinsically connected to the maintenance of order (1997). More specifically, Shils coins two different but interdependent kinds of civility, “civility understood as good manners or courtesy” and “civility as the virtue of civil society”: civility as good manners involves treating others with respect; civility as a civil virtue involves an attitude that is a concern for the common good of society and the willingness to restrain oneself and work against antagonisms for the good of minimizing conflict and maintaining order (Shils, 1997: 339). Shils suggests that civility “restrains the exercise of power by the powerful and restrains obstruction and violence by those who do not have power but who wish to have it” (1997: 4), it affirms the very possibility of “a common good.” Shils' approach though has its blind spots. As we examine in subsequent sections, the violence involved in civility as the maintenance of social order is largely evacuated from his account. And Shils' analysis fails to capture the ways in which civility is often not experienced as a straightforward virtue, but one marked by inauthentic deceit and hypocrisy. All too often civility can appear as a mask, hiding what we really think and feel. Indeed, the incivility of populist politics is often aimed directly at this sense of insincerity.

In contrast to Shils, who sees a substantive content to processes of civility, Cheshire Calhoun argues that civility is a procedural rather than a substantive virtue, more like law-abidingness than justice (2000: 252). From this perspective, civility does not involve adopting a political and moral position – but rather agreeing on how to deal with such issues. Civility is not an end it itself – but a means to other ends. Similarly, Richard Sennett celebrates the “mask” of civility, as it allows us to live with others in the face of difference (1975). You are not civil for the sake of it, but because it enables us live alongside other people without being too much of a burden. As John Cuddihy argues in “a regime of civility, everybody doesn't love everybody. Everybody doesn't even respect everybody. Everybody shows respect for everybody” (1978). You communicate a sense of respect for others, irrespective of whether you feel it. It is this instrumental sense of civility that can lead to it to being associated with deceit. But, at the same time, in treating civility as simply about process and instrumental action, there is a danger of ignoring the ways in which, for some people, civility can also contain important values of its own – such as respect.

The work of Adam Smith offers one way for us to begin to move beyond the division between “thick” and “thin,” virtuous and instrumental, understandings of civility. In particular, instead of construing “mutual sympathy” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and “self interest” in the Wealth of Nations (1779) as ethically dichotomous and irreconcilable, it is possible to see Smith's account of sympathy and self-interest as mutually reinforcing forms of civility. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith provides a discussion of everyday civility that recognized that people can be equally predisposed to act selfishly and sympathetically:

How selfish soever man may be supposed there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others … Nature when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please and an original aversion to offend his brethren. (Smith, 1982, 47–48).

For Smith then, focusing specifically on trade, civility takes place on the meeting point of self-interest and sympathy for others – combining both thick and thin commitments. In this special issue, Marsden also highlights the role that traders have had in the development of theories of civility through their ability to make civility both a moral virtue and an instrumental good. He draws on the particular example of Afghan merchants who move across complex transnational spaces, showing just enough of themselves, and holding back at the right moments. Marsden describes how, for this diaspora, civility – or more precisely diplomacy – allows them to traverse a variety of political and cultural contexts, being both culturally sensitive and commercially astute. The traders emphasize savvy, wit, and cleverness, as well as cultural sensitivity, but also reflect on the implications such skills have on their moral worth. Diplomatic civility therefore traces a fine line between honorable conduct on the one hand and flexibility on the other. As such, Marsden helps us to move beyond the question of whether civility is a form of artifice to examine the role of civility in producing new forms of self-cultivation and social connection.

Adam Smith's particular take on civility can be seen in the context of a much longer conversation about the ways in which instrumental action and principle can be merged (Agamben, 1998; Arendt, 1998; Dewey, 1939; Lambek, 2010; Venkatesan, 2015). However, the combination of the means and ends is an accomplishment easier to make in theory than in practice. Although the instrumental and the principled are always deeply entangled, they can still exist in tension, and capturing these tensions is crucial to any theoretical account of civility. As Tobias Kelly shows in his contributions to this collection, the social energy of civility can come precisely in the spaces where the pragmatic and the virtuous come together and stand apart. Kelly, focusing on British pacifists in the Second World War, argues that it is the very tension between means and ends that gives claims of civility their potency. He describes how these pacifists tried to show that living peacefully in the midst of war was not simply a statement of principle (an end), but could also serve as a practical model for a life without violence (a means). Many of these pacifists turned to community farms in particular as an alternative to a society mobilized for war. Yet, at the same time, they often lacked the skills necessary for agricultural work, and, above all, could behave toward one another in a deeply uncivil manner – constantly quarreling and falling out over seemingly trivial issues. The merger of pacifist means and ends was a constant struggle. However, for many British pacifists living at peace was important because of, not despite, the space between their aspiration for respect and love, and the disappointments of experience. More generally then, we can see gaps between practicality and principle that seem to mark claims of civility as a challenge rather than a failing.

In the above discussion of the value of civility, politics has largely been left out of the picture. There is little sense in Shils' or Smith's accounts, for example, of the ways in which claims of civility are caught up in a political economy of violence and histories of privilege (Keane, 2003). In the liberal vision, civility is a space where free individuals come together in a space of equality. In this historiography, the civil sphere is a post-feudal space, where citizens can interact with each other in equal terms, without the marks of status differentiation (Boyd, 2006). Yet, civility is never neutral, and is instead always rooted in political struggles. Above all, civility has acted, like concepts of “the public,” as a restricted, and exclusionary way of differentiating who was a citizen and who a subject (to use Mamdani's (1996) words). Lisa Mitchell's essay in this special issue devotes special attention to redirecting our gaze away from civility as individual speech and comportment, and toward the ways in which civility can be understood in relation to collective actions in public. Drawing upon collective actions in India, Mitchell suggests that we pay attention to the many collective repertoires by which people attempt to make themselves listened to, frequently by the state, and the ways in which particular actors and communities are rendered as noise, as those whose particular voices cannot be heard. What is significant is not specific elite and subaltern forms of distinction but how those are incorporated into the state's responsiveness to forms of claim-making. Political recognition, Mitchell suggests, is central to civility. Rather than violence being the product of the incivility of the “masses,” violence when it emerges in collective gatherings can be the direct result of an unresponsive state that does not afford recognition to some of its citizens and often aggressively silences them. It is to these broader questions of violence and exclusion – and their relations with (in)civility that this introduction will now turn, first through a close reading of the work of Norbert Elias, and then through an examination of the colonial history of civility.

Violence and civility

Whilst civility might be about respect and restraint, it is important not to ignore its relationship to structures of violence and coercion. Norbert Elias provides perhaps the most sustained analysis of the relationship between civility, the state, and violence, and any attempt to understand these questions must play close attention to his arguments. In summarizing Elias' interpretation, we are not claiming it is persuasive as a socio-historical account, but rather that it opens up questions about the ways in which the monopolization of violence by the state and the growth of particular forms of self-restraint were mutually reinforcing. Crucially, Elias' concern with civility was rooted in his own experience of the 20th century. Elias described himself as a member of the German-Jewish generation whose scholarly writings were rooted in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and spread of anti-Semitism and the triumph of Nazism and the systematic extermination of millions of Jews (among them Elias' mother) and non-Jews across Europe. Elias' two most important books on the subject, The Civilizing Process (1994) and The Germans (1997), explores what he sees as the “civilizational” and “decivilizational” tendencies that surfaced in France and in the German princely states from the 16th century onward, respectively. ²

In The Civilizing Process, Elias traces the decline of violence and the emergence of “civility” across France to the “courtisation” of medieval life. Sixteenth-century France, according to Elias, had one of the most developed states in Western Europe; the king had his own standing army and was no longer dependent on knights and other warrior groups to defend the kingdom from external and internal enemies. The monarch and aristocracy disarmed and pacified these fighters by inviting them to become members of court society. As they interacted in court society, these warriors realized that the only way of acquiring social prestige, political power, and economic wealth was to exchange their swords and body armor for modern weaponry: powdered wigs, embroidered tunics, sumptuous banquets, court balls, and intrigue. French court society provided a place to mingle and resolve differences peacefully. These everyday interactions spilled over and became embedded across urban and rural life, contributing to the spread of social order and political stability throughout the kingdom and to the development of a state that monopolized violence. The pacification of daily life encouraged artisans, merchants, peasants, churchmen, and other groups to interact, and as they did so they became increasingly “interdependent,” generating a vast and complex series of networks throughout France. Each person in each network became attuned to and was compelled to adjust their behavior in relation to those around them, predisposing all of them to exercise self-restraint.

In contrast, for Elias, Prussian court society, like the kingdom itself, remained fragmented and exclusionary: local aristocrats forbade commoners from joining it. Unlike the members of French court society, Prussia's nobility and commoners were deeply divided, making it impossible for them to mingle and acquire the social and political skills to organize, like their French counterparts, a centralized state and curb interpersonal violence in daily life. For Elias, there was a direct link between these processes and the shape that Nazism took. According to Elias, Germans, in contrast to the French, had failed to develop a centralized state and to exercise “self-restraint,” leading the Germans to forge a “culture of violence.”

It is possible to argue with some of Elias' historical claims about France and Germany. However, the first great theoretical benefit of his account is the way he pays close attention to the state and coercion as the grounds upon which civility is made. For Elias, civility is reproduced in a context where violence has been radically reorganized, monopolized by the state and placed quite literarily out of sight. But at the same time, it is important to remember that the military can be sent back onto the street at any moment. Civility does not see the eradication of violence, but its reorganization, with the state playing a crucially important role.

It is not just that the state sets the conditions of civility, but the absence of the state – or at least supporting political structures – can, under some conditions, make civility hard to achieve. Paul Anderson argues in this issue, for example, that for the middle classes of pre-war Syria, the absence of suitable political structures meant they were unable to live the civil lives to which they aspired. Civility is not an issue simply of face-to-face encounters, but also of the wider political and economic structures that make (in)civility possible. For the Syrians described by Anderson in this collection, talking just before the outbreak of the civil war, the “disorder” of the Syrian state prevented them from enacting their own sense of dignity. Litter and the constant use of car horns, for example, are linked by his informants to a generalized and chronic state of political corruption. As Anderson shows therefore, the manners, forms of courtesy, and etiquette of civility are seen as being closely tied to forms of governance. Civility is not just about the mutual recognition of worth, but also the conditions of action. The two senses of “civil” (as public participation, and as polite and courteous) are therefore brought directly together – but importantly this is felt most keenly in their relative absence, rather than their presence. Such an analysis is a useful reminder that for all the potential conservatism of civility, it can be sorely missed when it is not there.

The second important thing to take from Elias' account is his focus on status differentiation. Elias notes a particular tension where forms of “correct social conduct” are instituted as universally desirable, and yet dominant groups struggle simultaneously to mark them as signs of prestige and distinction that elevate those who practice them (1994: 384–386). Elias' description echoes Bourdieu's work on “distinction” (1979) in its stress on the ways in which class habits and attitudes are lived through largely implicit ideas around taste. In this collection, Helene Risør shows how a civil form of victimhood has become a quintessential indicator for “proper” citizenship in Chile. In Chile's long democratic transition, notions of friend and enemy are migrating from the political to the social, where the urban poor are increasingly criminalized, and their struggle to get by makes them unable to adhere to notions of proper conduct. In this context, if civility is a matter of communicating respect and consideration (Boyd, 2006), such respect and consideration is not equally distributed. Risør describes how poor Chileans are stigmatized through class-based notions of decorum, and increasingly seen as potential criminals who are unworthy citizens of a new democracy. Livelihood strategies, forms of dress, and housing can all place the urban poor outside the boundaries of bourgeois civility.

Crucially, in the making of distinctions of status, judgments about bodies are central. Elias brilliantly captures the ways in which concerns about defecation, procreation, and eating have an important role in the ways in which claims of civility have played out. But at the same time, Elias' sensitivity to the bodies of civility also points to a clear blind spot in his work: colonialism. In the colonial encounter, affective judgments about racialized bodies have had a crucial significance in the making of the distinctions of civility. Elias' account is very much rooted in the narrow domestic history of Europe, largely ignoring the ways in which colonialism has shaped the meanings and implications of civility within and beyond this particular space. In Elias' analysis there is an implicit assumption that anyone – so long as they exercise sufficient self-mastery and overcome class prejudice – can master civility. But in the colonial context, bodies can already come marked by racialized forms of prejudice, and therefore be a priori excluded, marking the hard limits to civility. It is to this issue that we now turn.

Colonial civility

Colonialism is central to civility. George Orwell (1937), for example, pointed out that European civility was shaped through colonial expansion, as well as the regulation of the white working class at home. Indeed, the Indian Empire was extremely attractive for relatively less privileged members of the English middle classes as, “the people who went there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money; they went there because in India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to play at being a gentleman” (1937: 63). Equally importantly, the concepts of barbarism and savagery that underlay notions of civilization are deeply entangled with colonial imaginaries (Kiernan, 1995: 154). Said (1978) and Grosrichard (1998), among others, have shown that for many European thinkers visions of ideal political orders were informed by a constantly fantasized image of the “Oriental despot,” characterized by the lack of control over sensual pleasures of the body and excessive unchecked power. In other words, the antithesis of European civility. Claims of civility were therefore used to justify and also produced through colonialism.

As such, rather than a category transplanted onto the colonial relations, the actual cultivation of European civility was a project that unfolded itself through colonial expansion, both in Europe and the colonies simultaneously. European civility always had a colonial supplement, as Bhabha argues (1994: 95). Savagery itself was ranked and differentiated, for example, India was seen as the place of unending stagnating culture, while African slaves and African colonies were seen as the antithesis of civilization. As Catherine Hall points out “The right to colonial rule was built upon the gap between metropole and colony: civilization here, barbarism/savagery there” (2002: 10). European forms of civility cannot be understood without what they were being framed against, from the 18th and 19th century onwards through colonial missions – first a set of assumptions around “savagery” as forms of different styles of living, which then solidified into a 19th-century biological racism where differences were fixed immutably in hierarchically organized bodies (Goldberg, 2009; Hall, 2002; Hansen, 2012).

In this context, the consistent denial of representative government in the colonies, and the violent forms of the colonial state that always undergirded European rule (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001), made practices and understandings of civility explicitly white. The classic substance of 19th-century Western civility, an associational life of free men allowing dissenting voices to freely debate is, in the colonies, Bhabha argues, “confronted with an aporia out of which emerges, in a figure of repetition, the uncanny double of democracy itself ” (1994: 95). The forms of civility that appeared in the colonies were thus clearly marked through the distinction of whiteness, in which whiteness had to be made substantive through performative, domestic, and public spaces which differentiated settlers from natives. In the colonial context therefore, but also more broadly, particular bodies and people have always already been marked prior to any actual public participation as uncivil or incapable of civility.

However, having clearly asserted the relationship between processes of colonial subordination and the promulgation of European notions of civility, in this collection we also make an argument that there are multiple genealogies of distinction and prestige that underpin regional hierarchical structures, and which often come to mingle with colonial projects but are not invented by them. Elias was criticized by Jack Goody, among others, for proposing an “entirely Eurocentric” conception of civility, and for never considering whether colonial peoples had developed a similar notion and set of practices aimed at transforming “passions into interests” (2002). As the multiple contributions to this special collection point out, elite and non-elites have generated novel and heterodox forms of civility during the colonial and postcolonial era. In this collection, essays examine forms of civility as a series of practices directed toward the consolidation of the colonial and postcolonial state and/or as a series of practices of self-making and community making in plural worlds. Essays also stress that there are multiple historical traditions of authority and rule that emphasize the capacity to restrain and train one's body and emotion as a political idiom, which actors draw from and struggle with. The attractions of civility for many might lie in its promise of mutual recognition. But at the same time, relatively egalitarian dimensions of civility can co-exist with more hierarchical traditions. It is to the implications of this tension that this introduction examines next.

Difference, mutuality, and emancipation

At one level, difference is built into civility – we are civil to those who might be different from us, or hold different views. But, civility is not exclusively about difference. As Adam Smith saw it, for example, a sense of mutuality was at the heart of civility. The stranger of civility is not necessarily absolutely strange, radically different. Civil disobedience, for one, assumes a certain level of mutual sympathy, or at least the possibility of mutual sympathy. The relationship and tensions between the potential for a shared sociality and the reproduction of difference are therefore crucial to the practice of civility. In this volume, for example, Hansen examines the struggles to create forms of civility that cross over the racialized legacy of apartheid South Africa. Hansen argues that the governance of apartheid era South Africa fostered forms of ethnically and racially marked civility, making it hard to develop forms of civility that could cross racial boundaries. Even the anti-colonial civility of large parts of the anti-apartheid movement was based around demonstrating that people of color could master the arts of civic conduct within their own communities. In the post-Apartheid period, “the practical meaning of civility … and other associated terms regulating public lives … are now being redefined and reinterpreted,” but the “rainbow nationalism of the ANC has so far not provided an adequate foundation for a sense of mutuality.” As Hansen has it, “the racial history remains too strong.” It is instead the claimed universality of religious community, the Pentecostal churches and ideas of Islamic fellowship that provides a space for sentiments of fellow feeling across internal and external racial and cultural differences. Yet as Hansen here also points out, these universalities themselves are not free from the long histories of apartheid and the construction of racialized forms of civility. But, despite all these difficulties “the promise of a universal ethos of civility that cuts across race and class continues to be profoundly attractive to many people.”

Hromadzic's essay in this volume stresses similar themes, showing how claims of civility in postwar Bosnia can stretch across ethnic and religious boundaries. However, at the same time, claims of civility can also reproduce distinctions based on class and the urban rural divide. The residents of towns make moral judgments about modes of living that can include Bosnian, Croat and Serb, Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox, but at the same time seek to exclude rural new comers. Claims of relative civility are a way of marking the difference between the rural and backward and the urban as civilized. There are, therefore, points of solidarity and convergence that can cut through ethnic divisions, whilst creating new distinctions. Importantly, the moral force of these claims comes – perhaps counter intuitively – from the sense that it is the “rural” that is politically dominant in contemporary Bosnia. In the absence of political power, Hromadzic also shows how the material and the aesthetic are crucial to such distinctions. Hierarchies of taste are not just about bodies and behavior but also the material token of modernity, such as swimming pools and central heating systems. The aspiration to civility therefore assumes a form of mutuality, but this a mutuality with limits.

Along with Hansen and Hromadzic, Thiranagama argues in her contribution that civility is lived and experienced in “the tension between hierarchically ordered social and political realms, and the promise and movement of new egalitarian logics across those social and political realms.” Both Hromadzic and Thiranagama explore postwar situations; Thiranagama examines the situation in Sri Lanka in which the immense destruction and leveling effects of prolonged conflict has both built upon older hierarchical structures of caste and ethnic differentiation as well as challenged them. Thiranagama takes civility as centrally concerned with the problem of how multiple differentiated but familiar communities live with each other. Thiranagama examines both intra-ethnic (internal caste differentiation with Tamils) and inter-ethnic (ethnic Tamils and ethnic Muslim) forms of civility produced in postwar northern Jaffna. Her essay discusses the differentiated civility of manners that maintains dense relations of caste, and the civility of distance that newly marks ethnic relations. She argues that hierarchical forms of caste and class within Tamil and Muslim society have been challenged by the kinds of egalitarian leveling effects of ethnic mobilization and solidarity. Yet, at the same time, the promise of egalitarian sociality emerges from within already deeply hierarchical worlds. And, as Thiranagama reflects, the promise of ethnic solidarity and civility is also based on brutal histories of violence. Her essay therefore focuses on what she calls “hierarchically segmented forms of civility.” She suggests that civility should be seen as an evolving project that appears different when viewed from different social locations, and can therefore contain both hierarchical and egalitarian logics at the same time.

In its links to mutuality, civility is often associated with respect and dignity, and it is these aspects that, in particular, can be a major object of struggle for the marginalized. In the last two hundred years we have seen movements from the Self-Respect Movement in South India (Geetha and Rajadurai, 1993; Hodges, 2005) to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, in which the idea of dignity and equal respect have become central to marginalized groups in the face of humiliation and disregard by others. This is seen in many of essays in this volume such as Thiranagama, Hromadzic, Mitchell, Forment, and Hansen in which questions of recognition and respect for marginalized and subaltern communities are central.

The egalitarian idea of respect and dignity as something all humans are entitled to has become foundational in legal, political, philosophical, and social discourse (e.g. Rawls, 1971). Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals placed respect and dignity as a central concept within moral theory ([1785] 1996: 52–86). However, at the same time, as many theorists have discussed, respect and dignity have historically been shot through with hierarchical assumptions. Historically, to offer respect and acknowledge dignity has often been to offer deference to a social superior. In contemporary usages though, respect and dignity are also linked to egalitarian logics: it is to accord others as of worth and value. This egalitarian usage has not superseded the hierarchical one; we still feel that in particular relationships respect has to be hierarchically ordered, students offering respect to teachers, children to adults, workers to bosses, and we feel demeaned when we are not accorded the respect incumbent upon our positions. While dignity has become less ambiguously a property that one can possess without this being necessarily acknowledged by others, respect is a quality that fundamentally concerns the relationship between people and necessarily articulates a tension around hierarchical distinction within egalitarian logics.

If we return to the South Indian example of the Self-Respect movement, we can see this movement between hierarchy and egalitarianism. The caste system has been orientated around the constant production of respect and deference from lower to higher. In the Tamil language, the word “respect” (mariyathai) is understood simultaneously in terms of the new egalitarian insistence on dignity and in terms of the classical word by which caste deference was offered. At the same time as elites and upper castes in contemporary Tamil Nadu lament that no one shows them respect any longer, Dalits and the so-named Other Backward Castes assert that the showing of respect and dignity towards them is the central plank of transforming everyday humiliation. Therefore the tension between and the intermingled histories of the egalitarian and the hierarchical is central to notions of civility.

However, the struggle for an egalitarian civility is crucial for any attempt to see civility as potentially emancipatory. We therefore now turn to the work of Etienne Balibar, who has presented probably the most sustained attempt to think through civility as a progressive force. Balibar's notion of civility is idiosyncratic, difficult, but highly illuminating and significant. In particular, it enables us to take into account the ways in which civility can be exclusionary and inclusive, restraining and violent. For Balibar, civility is less about politeness and courtesy, and more about the democratic principle (2002: 30). Balibar sees two complementary political projects which civility is attached to and makes possible to integrate: projects of emancipation and projects of transformation.

Above all, Balibar's civility is about the recognition of the political status of others. The central contradiction, or even aporia, at the heart of the democratic principle is the presence, Balibar argues (following Jacque Ranciere), of those uncounted marginalized communities, whose possibility of emancipation depends on presenting their “own emancipation as the criterion of general emancipation (or as that fraction which, in continuing in slavery and alienation, inevitably entails the unfreedom of all)” (2002: 6). Projects of emancipation demand that the dignity and recognition of those radically excluded are central to any imagining of democracy (2002). Projects of transformation are concerned with (the Marxian project of) transforming the structures of the world, of exerting action to fundamentally redistribute, rearrange, and remake the world. Balibar argues that a project of transformation must – as a precondition – place emancipation, dignity, and recognition at their heart, especially the dignity of those who do not fit into majoritarian movements and their projects of emancipation. ³ Without civility, no transformation can ever become emancipation.

Balibar sees civility as arising in the context of the massive forms of violence that mark contemporary life. The problems of violence are particularly important to those on the left, Balibar remarks, who put faith in revolutionary potential, but who have to now reckon with the after-effects of immense violence that revolutionary movements and states have inflicted. How do we evolve movements and forms of praxis that are capable of reflecting upon and facing up to violence not through a naïve non-violence but through forms of anti-violence? Thus civility, in Balibar's account, is a politics that takes democracy – with its antagonisms and struggles – very seriously but seeks to confront dominating forms of violence. Balibar's work (2015) grapples with how to make a politics that takes note of the varieties of violence within political life without ceding ground to an argument that would allow extreme forms of violence to be politically legitimate.

Laurent Gayer's contribution to this issue discusses this relationship to violence in more concrete form. Gayer's essay focuses on the practices of minoritized and/or marginalized communities in Pakistina. In particular he examines the ethical practices and reflexive self-understanding of men who live within and engage with these differentiated worlds of distinction. In doing so they have to juggle with practices of violence that protect their communities and also satisfy ethical and moral imperatives that emanate from living with actually existing plural worlds. An examination of these men enables Gayer to rethink Balibar's understanding of the relationship between civility and violence. Instead of focusing on institutionalized violence, Gayer studies inter-personal relations between Yaqub and his neighbors, some of whom are ethnically, politically, and religiously similar to him and others not, and how they practice anti-violence in daily life. And, instead of focusing on “extreme cruelty” as does Balibar, Gayer studies the way Yaqub and his neighbors engage in low-intensity forms of violence. This double shift in perspective makes it possible for Gayer to make sense of how the residents of Karachi, a “city at war with itself,” curb exclusivist identifications rooted in communalism while at the same time maintaining allegiance to their own group.

Importantly, Balibar coins two forms of civility, top-down (by the action and authority of a “master”) and bottom-up civility (2002: 30). Top-down civility is the civility of the civilizing mission and conservatism, which either forces people to be civil in particular ways, or only authorizes particular people to be recognized as civil. In many ways this is the civility that populism responds to with its own incivility. As Balibar discusses in multiple writings, the Hegelian understanding of the state is precisely that which stands above people and manages conflicts, antagonisms, and forces a primary identification that takes precedence over other affiliations. The state, however, exerts enormous amounts of violence in order to manage violence: first, its modality of civility is normalization; and second, it multiplies violence in an attempt to maintain its legitimate monopoly over violence.

Bottom-up civility or emancipatory civility, in contrast, is a civility aligned around the democratic principle, the means by which individuals and collectives, mocked and decried as mobs and multitudes, have mobilized themselves using the institutions of the state and public life, through whatever means they can, to clear a “shared space” for politics where they have “their place” (Balibar, 2002: 33). The distinction between top-down and bottom-up civility has resonances with what Forment calls “vertical” and “horizontal” forms of civility. Forment describes how Argentinian street scavengers engage and contest with municipal officials, politicians, NGOs, and waste disposal companies, reconstituting themselves as particular types of citizen. At the same time street scavengers interact with residents, developing personal relations of cooperation – and thereby helping to decriminalize and incorporate scavengers into public life. For Forment, civility from below contributes to what he calls plebeian citizenship – an alternative vision of democratic life and urban governance outside marketized and managerialist conceptions – creating the conditions of possibility for everyday politics to resurface. Here, bottom-up forms of civility transform personal uncertainty into collective experience, promoting social equality and direct representation that undermine patterns of domination and made government officials accountable. In doing so, these novel and heterodox practices pushed back against forms of structural violence.

More broadly, “bottom-up” civility can be seen as the space of the civil rights movement and civil disobedience more generally. Importantly for our purposes, this is a vision of civility that runs counter to one particular vision of civility as “not being a burden” (Sennett, 1975). In his influential analysis, Richard Sennett describes civility as aimed at “shielding of others from being burdened by oneself ” through restraint, distance and respect (1975: 264). But there are also times when people surely want to be a burden on others. Civil disobedience wants to make civility a moral burden on the powerful.

Balibar's notion of “bottom-up” civility, however, is not a simplistic valorization of populism at all costs. As has been evident in the growing popularity of alt-right movements in North America and Europe, the right to incivility against others can be celebrated as leveling action against “elite civility” and identity projects. Yet, as Balibar forcefully points out, what characterizes the politics of civility is precisely an attempt to clear space for the recognition and dignity of others and fundamentally a drawing of limits, limits to violence and limits to incivility and humiliation. This runs absolutely counter to the celebration of varieties of leveling which have mobilized the idealization of hatred against others and the insistence of a singular identity for all, especially in the nostalgic celebration of lost whiteness in Europe and North America.

With this in mind, let us end this introduction by returning to some of the questions with which we started: What space can there be for a progressive civility in the face of inequality and violence? In a public lecture in 2000 entitled “The Multicultural Question,” Stuart Hall asks how we might think about “the unremitting struggle for a more socially equal, racially just society” and how common lives can be built together in heterogeneous societies that acknowledge difference (2000: 6). Hall points out that traditional liberal answers are unable to understand this demand, erasing as they do the demand for particularities, while communitarian responses fix communities as if internally homogenous or as if some do not wish to hold onto associational rather than ascriptive forms of communities. The question of how we live together in our uneven, unequal world with multiple heterogeneous communities has forced us to contemplate a “double demand for greater equality and social justice and for the recognition of difference and cultural diversity” (2000: 10). Hall suggests a new universalism which following Ernesto Laclau he calls an “incomplete horizon” where by new forms of universalism can arise, not from transcending all particularities, but from within a particular that takes account of others and its own insufficiency in suturing any identity finally. Hall suggests that identities “in acknowledging their radical insufficiency … [don't] desert what makes them particular, but … recognize that this relativizes the degree to which they can, as it were, affirm difference” without creating new exclusions that “undermine demands for equality and justice” (2000: 11). Hall sees an ongoing struggle to affirm an open and agonistic democracy that fights against racialized and ethnicized exclusion as necessarily the “multicultural” question which seeks to reconcile and recognize the claims of both the particular and the universal.

We would argue that examining civility, in all its ambiguity, allows us to confront the key questions of how we can live together. In our actually existing world, inequality, racism, and violence are challenges that concepts of civility have to face. This does not mean hanging onto civility in its pure liberal versions, or in its caricatured meaning as only a mask for reinforcing inequality, but paying attention to civilities in their multiple historical forms – with all the traces they bear of civilizational exclusivity, hierarchical rank, deference, and demeanor, but also of egalitarian demands of respect and dignity that mobilize new actors and gather new contestations, mobilizations, and forms of political demand. Civility here too appears as an incomplete horizon in which forms of relating to each other in shared publics persist, even as those publics are built on such deeply unequal forms. Civility's freighted history is part of the charge that it brings to social and political life. And it is this complex history that give concepts of civility their irresistible energy and force in the lives of so many people.