Mere Civility

Teresa M. Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Oriel College.

出版者:Harvard University Press

作者:Teresa M. Bejan

页数:288

出版时间:2017-1-2

价格:USD 45.00

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780674545496

图书标签:政治哲学politics西方思想史宗教

Today, politicians and intellectuals warn that we face a crisis of civility and a veritable war of words polluting our public sphere. In liberal democracies committed to tolerating diversity as well as active, often heated disagreement, the loss of this conversational virtue appears critical. But is civility really a virtue? Or is it, as critics claim, a covert demand for conformity that silences dissent?

Mere Civility sheds light on our predicament and the impasse between “civilitarians” and their opponents by examining early modern debates about religious toleration. As concerns about uncivil disagreement achieved new prominence after the Reformation, seventeenth-century figures as different as Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke could agree that some restraint on the war of words would be necessary. But they recognized that the prosecution of incivility was often difficult to distinguish from persecution. In their efforts to reconcile diversity with disagreement, they developed competing conceptions of civility as the social bond of tolerant societies that still resonate.

Most modern appeals to civility follow either Hobbes or Locke by proposing to suppress disagreement or exclude persons and positions deemed “uncivil” for the sake of social concord. Compared with his contemporaries’ more robust ideals, Williams’s unabashedly mere civility—a minimal, occasionally contemptuous adherence to culturally contingent rules of respectful behavior—is easily overlooked. Yet Teresa Bejan argues that Williams offers a promising path forward in confronting our own crisis of civility, one that fundamentally challenges our assumptions about what a tolerant—and civil—society should look like.

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B站小姐姐（咦？）在研究路径与事业轨迹上快成为我的楷模榜样了。这本书真是“历史-政治-理论”三结合的优秀规范性政治理论作品。——作为读者，你依然可以挑出不少不尽如人意的地方；但是当你是那个动笔写的人的时候，一定会发现能写成这样真得很了不起了。

B站小姐姐（咦？）在研究路径与事业轨迹上快成为我的楷模榜样了。这本书真是“历史-政治-理论”三结合的优秀规范性政治理论作品。——作为读者，你依然可以挑出不少不尽如人意的地方；但是当你是那个动笔写的人的时候，一定会发现能写成这样真得很了不起了。

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