Liberal Civilities

In section 1, I characterize the ideas of public virtue, personal virtue, and a close-knit community. In section 2, I distinguish two main conceptions of the concept of civility--liberal civility (roughly, a constitutive component of reasoned public discourse) and the civility of etiquette (roughly, a constitutive component of civilized society). In section 3, I further explicate liberal civility and consider its place in the practice of civic discourse. In section 4, I discuss civility within the realm of a close-knit community and consider problems with regarding civility as a personal virtue.

Civility was not invented by liberal or democratic social philoso-
phers nor did the idea of civility emerge for the first time in the
institutional practices of the more or less liberal societies of the
nineteenth century and the more or less democratic institutions
which joined them later. Civil society corresponds to liberal demo-
cratic society in its political aspects and to the pluralistic society of
voluntary associations and private corporations on the other. Civil
society entails the freedom of contract and the market economy;
in this aspect, the idea of civility is also closely dependent on a fun-
damental feature of "civil society" as Hegel conceived it: namely,
the private ownership of property in the market economy. The pri-
vate ownership of property and the freedom of contract and the
organization of the market economy around them, are necessary
conditions for civility in society. Seen in the crudest terms, civility
and the market seem to be antithetical to each other--one altruis-
tic, the other egoistic, the one inclusive, the other exclusive--but
in fact they are mutually dependent. The very anonymity of the
market, its relative disregard for the primordial and personal, is a
necessary condition of the extension of the collective self-
consciousness to the inclusion of unknown and unseen persons.
(The hierarchical system of self-alleged "planned economies" has
turned out to be inimical to civility, as well as economically
ruinous.)