Civility

“civility in one sense is among the most valuable virtues in society. The skill to discuss topics that really matter to you with someone who disagrees and somehow get along. In another of its senses, when civility describes the limits of acceptable behaviour, it can reflect society at its worst when only those deemed civil enough are allowed their rights, their equality, even their humanity.

And as we'll hear, civility is a slippery idea that's fascinated philosophers especially since the Reformation when competing ideas on how to gain salvation seem to make civil disagreement impossible”

. “unlike other conversational virtues with which it's often linked, so we might think civility is akin to politeness or akin to courtesy, civility I think is distinguished by what we might think of as its minimal character, as the minimum degree of courtesy that's required in a social situation, or even sometimes in its negative character, as sort of the absence of insult, as opposed to anything more demanding. And so we might think of civility as mere civility in this sense, it's the virtue that's appropriate to our disagreements with our bad neighbors, our ex-spouses, or indeed sort of members of the other party, or the other religious sect, the people that were sort of constrained to interact with, but maybe if given our own choice would prefer not to.”

“Erasmus of Rotterdam is an extraordinarily important biblical and classical scholar of the early 16th century, and kind of a major figure in debates around the reformation. That's kind of kicked off in 1517.

And the reason he comes into our discussion is because in 1530, he publishes a little book called De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, On the Civility of Children. And this is a gorgeous little Latin guide that aims to teach children how to be civil, because the thing is, anyone with small children will know, is that they are fundamentally uncivil and brutish and animalistic, and they must be civilized. So this is a book which takes the child and attempts to teach the rudiments of good behavior from, you know, not putting dirty fingers in the shared dish at dinner, not blowing one's nose publicly around other people so that this snot lands on them.

So all of these kind of basic things, but also tries to tie them to learning to behave in a very strictly hierarchized and regimented society. They're attempting to teach the child what to do with their body and their speech, so that they don't offend their betters, so that they[…]” “they aren't over familiar with those beneath them as well. So it's a guide to behavior and a guide to how to live in society.”

“Luther really is someone who increasingly comes to reject the kind of decorum that people like Erasmus are calling for. This idea that you should keep your words within the bounds of appropriateness and acceptability. And Luther, including in his attacks on Erasmus, is very interested in insult.

And he is in a major debate with Erasmus around free will and salvation. And he is willing to use insult to suggest that Erasmus is not fully Christian, to suggest that these are fine words, but stupid ideas like dung being served on gold and silver plates. And that's classic Luther, that bringing in of excrement and the bodily and of filth.”

“Because at the same time as you've got codes of civility emerging in the 16th century, that are about having more control over the body and our animal functions, you've got someone like Luther who's kind of throwing that out and invoking bodily functions to attack the devil, the pope, and all of his enemies.

Is there a sense in which he sees civility as the enemy of salvation?

I think so, and in that he's really setting up a dynamic that we'll see with a number of religious reformers across the 16th and 17th centuries. So whether that's with John Calvin and the insistence on admonition of sinners, and right up to the Quakers, George Fox, the insistence on only ever referring to people as thou and thee, the refusal to use titles of authority or nobility, not even doffing one's cap or taking one's cap off in a place of worship or a place of respect. So we see kind of throughout the Reformation this refusal of civil behaviour as a way of insisting that salvation matters more.”

“what you have as well is the foundation of a really important genre in early modern culture of the conduct book literature, which people go to to learn how to be civil, learn the kinds of rules and so on, and skills in particular, it's not just rules, it's skills of conversation and behavior that John's talking about in terms of Erasmus and education. And that becomes a key aspect of Renaissance autodidactism, which is a really important feature of the Renaissance, people wanting to improve and better themselves.”

“before I maybe get into the specifics of Hobbes' arguments about civility and actually more particularly incivility, it might be helpful just to connect it to the Erasmus and Luther discussion that John was bringing up. I mean, so Erasmus' diagnosis of kind of the problems of the Protestant Reformation is not that it's simply a problem of Protestant theology, the fact that Luther is criticizing Catholic orthodoxy for Erasmus, it's specifically that Luther is doing it in this deliberately uncivil way, hurling insults not only at those who disagree with him, you know, his fellow monks and friars, but even the Pope himself, calling the Pope the anti-Christ, and anyone who follows him an anti-Christian.

And so Hobbes a century later, when he's thinking about the problem of peace and how we coexist in a civitas or state, he's thinking about this in the context of an English Civil War, which Hobbes viewed as a religious war. So Hobbes was very much persuaded by this kind of Erasmian analysis. The problem isn't the fact that, you know, Puritans disagree with Anglicans about how the Church of England should be governed, it's that they do so in this[…]”deliberately insulting and contemptuous way  

“They hurl insults at each other, not just at each other, at their lawful sovereign. And in doing so, they corrode the sort of tenuous or fragile social bonds that make peace possible. So in his various works of political philosophy, Hobbes actually sort of diagnoses incivility, in the specific sense of insult, or what he calls contumely as a major obstacle to peace.

So much so that he actually posits as a fundamental law of nature, that no man shall revile or deride another, or speak in a hateful or contemptuous way. But Hobbes doesn't think that in order to live peacefully or un-murderously, it'll be enough for us just not to insult each other. He thinks that we actually need to go further.”

“in his work of Latin political philosophy, called Decive or Of the Citizen, he describes what he calls the animus quillis or civil spirit. This he defines as the willingness of individuals, not only to observe a civil silence on controversial questions, so simply not disagreeing with one another about religion, but also their willingness to conform themselves to whatever the sovereign says should be the orthodoxy, specifically in religion. So, it's agreeing to agree, and this is what Hobbes understands by sort of being civil or being civil in spirit, agreeing for the sake of peace.”

“in order to live together peacefully, we not only must not insult each other, Hobbes thinks that disagreement itself is the problem.

As he says in De Quivé, the mere act of disagreement is offensive. So in order to live peacefully, we better get religious disagreements off the table.”

From In Our Time: Civility, Jul 31, 2025

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-our-time/id73330895?i=1000715148087&r=840

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“from really the earliest stages of civility discourse in the 16th century and all the way through the 17th, there's this niggling fear that civility is just plain hypocrisy. There are accusations against those who practice civility and courtesy.

There are accusations that they are simply flatterers, and this happens when we're talking about political structure as well. There is also this idea that civility is dissimulation, that this is a kind of lying, that it is to hide what you really think and to hide what you really are. There's also a set of concerns about civility as this art that creates this impossible tension between the inward and the outward.”

“a lot of writers defending civility say, well, actually, you know, civility only works as an outward performance because it reflects what's on the inside. But its critics will say, well, actually, civility is just putting this on because you're kind of rotten all the way down. So dissimulation, dishonesty, and falsehood are kind of being accusations that are lobbed at civility constantly.

And the other thing that does happen, though, is that civility in England is seen as something that's worryingly foreign. So we've seen how Castiglione is used. Castiglione's book comes over from Italy.

Over the course of the 17th century, the models of civil behavior that are increasingly popular among the English are French. And you see from the late 16th century, where civil gentlemen are attacked for being Italianate, and they'd sooner kind of draw a rapier on you and enter into a duel. By the later 17th century, they're Fops, they're Frenchified, they're pseudo-Catholic, and they're absolutists in disguise.”

“Hobbes basically thinks that, look, we can't control what people think. Thought, after all, is free. Within the confines of our individual skull, our thoughts can roam over anything, filthy, profane, sublime, whatever.

But what we can control is how we manifest those thoughts outwardly. So for Hobbes, the virtue of civility is precisely is that it governs the outward performance of our, especially in the performance of worship in religion. He thinks, believe whatever you want in your mind.

But when it comes to worshiping God or worshiping or respecting the sovereign, you must conform your private to the public conscience. And it's not incidental in this case, or not a coincidence that Hobbes, when he, so he spent the Civil War basically safely with the royal court in exile in Paris. When he returns to London, people think him a suspiciously Frankified, Frenchified character.”

“Tolerance can become intolerance of those who don't go along with tolerance.

Yeah, I mean, civility and tolerance are similar in that respect. How do you make people who don't want to be civil, civil? And how do you make people who don't want to be tolerant, tolerant?”

“what you have, even in, say, 1648, you have comprehensive Presbyterians, if you want to call them like that, someone like Edward Bowles, who is aware of these huge tensions and these huge differences that have caused these massive conflicts, not just in Britain and Ireland, but also in Europe. And he applies the concept of circumspection, which is a kind of religious adaptation, if you like, of the self-control of civility and pleads with his fellow Presbyterians to be circumspecting all their dealings and so on, and think about their words in relation to other people and other people's faiths and accommodate other people as much as possible.

And when it comes to the Restoration in 1660, Edward Bowles is one of the favorites to actually become the next senior dignitary, if you like, within the restored church because of this comprehensive position. Unfortunately, he dies, but there's a there's a group of bishops called, they get to be known as the Latitudinarians, who have a similar sense of, as long as you have an agreement over the fundamental points of doctrine, such as, I don't know, the Trinity, or there's a god, and so on, you can[…]”disagree about insignificant or indifferent things  

“the picture that we've been painting here is of those who are appealing to civility in general in this 17th century in England are those who are opposed to religious toleration, sort of broadly construed. The idea is that if we permit people to disagree publicly about religious questions, then inevitably we will descend not only into a war of words in which we hurl Lutheran style insults and scatological images at each other using this great advancement into communications technology, the printing press, but from there, it's but a hop, skip and jump to the all-out destruction of civil war.

That's the Hobbesian picture, and although few people would admit to agreeing with Hobbes on this, I think this is really almost a kind of consensus view. You cannot have a civil society that is also a tolerance society.”

“But what happens in the 17th century is that people that we might expect to be the most sympathetic with Luther, so these evangelical hot Puritan Protestants, a few of them begin to see that if they are going to be able to claim toleration for themselves, they're going to have to reclaim civility too.

And so one of the most interesting people in this regard is a hot Protestant called Roger Williams, who's sort of a very close contemporary of Hobbes, although a much more obscure figure. He is theorizing civility from the perspective of someone who is seen by almost everyone around him as paradigmatically uncivil. He's an evangelical Protestant who's constantly calling people sort of followers of the papal antichrist, accusing them of worshipping the devil, etc.,

etc. But he's doing so in the British colonies of North America on the colonial frontier.

He's Rhode Islander.”

“Roger Williams is known today, if he's known at all, as the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, which becomes the state of Rhode Island. And effectively what happens with Williams is he is so uncivil to his fellow Puritans in Massachusetts Bay that they end up banishing him in the dead of winter and he survives only through the hospitality of the local Native American tribes, so the Narragansett and the Wampanoag.

And so Williams finds himself in this sort of somewhat uncomfortable position of realizing that actually there is more civility among the un-Christian pagan inhabitants of the New England wilderness than among his fellow Christians in Massachusetts Bay. And this leads Williams to pioneer an argument which will later see again in John Locke, which is effectively to say society can tolerate not just varieties of Christianity, but it can tolerate even sort of non-Christian religions for Williams he thinks the most paganish, Jewish, or Mahometan consciences, even Catholic anti-Christians, remember he's a kind of Lutheran, he sort of believes that Catholics follow the Antichrist, can live together if they but keep the bond of civility. And ultimately when Toleration triumphs by the[…]” “triumphs by the end of the 17th century, it's with this idea that one can be civil without being a kind of good Christian.”

“So that same argument, we see it in Locke's famous Letter Concerning Toleration published in 1689. So Locke effectively says, look, it's not religious diversity that's the problem, it's not the fact that people disagree on these really fundamental questions and sort of argue and compete with each other in the domain of religion. It's that they do so in a way that violates this code of civil conduct, they do so in an uncivil way.

So he says, if men will just keep the softness of civility in their disputes, then we can peacefully coexist together in religion. And so Locke, his toleration is not quite so extensive as Williams is, but he never does that. He says, if we may speak frankly as becomes one man to another, neither pagan nor Mohammedan nor Jew should be restricted in his civil rights on matters just because of differences in religion.”

“And it's quite neat that at the same time as Locke is kind of theorizing toleration and civility in that context, he's also, much like Erasmus, writing on children and education. So he writes in his Some Thoughts on Education, which is one of the most influential educational tracts of the modern era, huge in North America and elsewhere. He is skeptical about maybe the fripperies of civil behavior.

But even Locke at the same time as he's got that skepticism, urges parents to send their children to dancing masters because he says that that is the best way to learn the carriage of the body, that you simply need to be able to perform bodily civility in the exact same way that Erasmus was arguing over a century beforehand.”

“picking up on that and making sort of explicit something that's been implicit in a lot of what we've been saying, civility is a code of civilized conduct or kind of virtue of civil conversation, combines elements of equality and hierarchy in interesting ways. So we are meant to abide by this code of civility so as to have the kind of conversation that can take place between those who are free and equal, a conversation that is absent domination. But in doing so, we're also expected to conform ourselves to the hierarchical codes of behavior on the basis of our place within the kind of status quo.

And so this is really clear in the case of considerations of gender. So that's another example of the consummately uncivil person, or maybe let's say the paragon of incivility in this period would be the female prophet who insisted not only on speaking on the basis of her direct line to God, but doing so in a way that was at odds with the feminine ideal of civility as being, exhibiting a kind of comely and feminine silence, right?”

“To appeal to civility is always to kind of raise the specter or the possibility of needing to suppress or exclude the uncivil other. I may have used, I think I used the phrase earlier, beyond the pale to describe the uncivil person as beyond the pale. It's a really suggestive phrase because it derives from the kind of Latin palace for stake or fence.

So the person who's beyond the pale is the barbarian living beyond the fence. And of course, in the case of Catholic Ireland, it was the idea that the sort of savage Irish barbaric Catholic lived beyond the pale of sort of anglicized, civilized Protestant Dublin.”

“so we've been talking in a loose way about this developing sense of a link between civility and toleration. We see it in Roger Williams.

We see it in John Locke. And we see it in sort of even in 20th century liberal political philosophy. So John Rawls is the most famous philosopher of liberalism.

He too sort of picks up on civility as being the key to coexistence between people who disagree deeply, especially disagree deeply in religion. In his book, Political Liberalism, he talks about what he calls the duty of civility. And he imagines it specifically as the willingness of the members of a secular liberal society to conduct their disagreements only on the basis of a shared commitment to secular liberal principles of justice and their willingness not to bring in their kind of partial religious commitments or authorities in the course of conducting their political debates.”

“another guy who another philosopher who is working in the same ballpark is is Habermas and his idea of the kind of the bourgeois public sphere and so on, which is criticized at the time for being elitist and gendered and so on. But in terms of the underlying principles, which have probably taken from ideas of civility, going back to the ancients and then thinking about the crisis of our public discourse at the moment in the Western world, at least both in terms of our demagogic leaders and areas of discussion like social media and so on. You can see that you need some kind of recourse to civility to reform or improve the way in which we talk to each other about so many different issues, I think.

So there's a kind of paradox that comes up again and again of civility being essential for the possibility of tolerance on the one hand, but also the way in which civility talk, and especially accusing people of incivility, becomes a tool of intolerance. We could coexist very well together in the midst of all our differences, so long as you sort of shut up.”

“I think that one of the aspects of civility that's worth reviving in the midst of this contemporary crisis of civility, especially in very polarised democracies like this one, is recovering the kind of mearness of mere civility, the sense of the kind of minimal nature, civil behaviour, civil disagreement as meeting a low bar grudgingly. And I think that that's what Roger Williams really saw in appealing to civility, was that we've got to be able to live together peacefully, even with those people that we regard as damned, right? And we've got to be able to maintain the sort of possibility of coexistence, while also remaining convinced that our neighbours are going to hell.

There's this wonderful example of this from Williams' own life, which is that he remained convinced throughout his life, even though he was impressed by the civility of the American Indians, that they were participating in devil worship. But nonetheless, upon one of his returns to London in 1651, he brought with him a petition on behalf of the Narragansett people for toleration, so that they may not be forced from their religion. Again, Williams thought this religion was devil worship, but nevertheless, he[…]”

“nevertheless, he thought it must be tolerated that they could live together civilly with that which he could not approve.”

 Reading list:

Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017)

Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1998)

(from Claude)

This one's notable — it turns out to be Melvyn Bragg's final episode as host before retiring. Let me check for a deeper breakdown of the actual discussion.I couldn't find a detailed transcript-level breakdown for this one (no podpulse notes page exists for it yet) — so this is built from the episode description, the panel's own published work, and a few details guests posted before/after airing. Lower confidence than the Merleau-Ponty or Vienna Secession summaries; flagging that upfront.

In Our Time: "Civility: talking with those who disagree with you" (BBC Radio 4, July 31, 2025) — notably Melvyn Bragg's final episode as host before his retirement. With Teresa Bejan (Oxford), Phil Withington (Sheffield), and John Gallagher (Leeds).

1. Civility cuts two opposite ways. The episode frames the word as double-edged: at its best, it's the skill of engaging people you deeply disagree with while still getting along; at its worst, it's a gatekeeping standard — deciding who's "civil enough" to be granted rights, equality, or even basic humanity.

2. The Reformation is the origin story. The panel locates civility's rise as a live philosophical problem in the Reformation era, when rival, mutually exclusive claims about how to achieve salvation made ordinary disagreement look dangerous — arguably impossible to have without one side accusing the other of heresy.

3. Teresa Bejan's "mere civility" is likely the organizing concept. Her book distinguishes civility as basic, minimal toleration of someone's right to speak — not agreement, warmth, or approval, just refraining from violence or silencing — from thicker, more demanding versions of "civil" behavior that smuggle in conformity.

4. Hobbes gets invoked, and not just for "life is nasty, brutish, and short." Bejan's own preview of the episode name-checks Hobbes specifically in this context, which tracks with her broader argument that Hobbes wanted a fairly minimal, enforced civility — good manners and non-violence — precisely because he thought demanding real agreement on deep questions was a recipe for civil war.

5. Roger Williams as the radical alternative. Also flagged by Bejan going in: Williams (of Rhode Island fame) represents a different, more expansive strand — someone who argued for tolerating even views he found offensive or damnable, on principle, rather than just tactically managing disagreement.

6. Early modern "civility" meant something broader than manners. Phil Withington's scholarship treats civility historically as a wider social and political category — tied to ideas of civic life, self-governance, and what it meted out to count as a legitimate participant in society — not simply etiquette at the dinner table.

7. Civility was also a tool of exclusion. Given Withington and Gallagher's work on identity, race, and mobility in early modern England, the episode likely covers how "civility" was historically used to classify some peoples and behaviors as civilized and others as not — with real consequences for who got treated as fully human under the law.

8. Courtesy literature shaped everyday conduct. The reading list points to conduct manuals and courtier literature (Castiglione's The Courtier and its European reception) as one channel through which ideas about proper, civil behavior spread through elite society — later loosening into broader civility norms.

9. Cross-cultural contact tested the concept. Given Gallagher's focus on early modern mobility, the discussion likely touches how civility got renegotiated at the edges of empire and trade — encounters where English travelers had to figure out what counted as "civil" behavior toward people with entirely different social codes.

10. The stakes are explicitly present-day. The framing — "talking with those who disagree with you" — points the historical material squarely at today's polarized public discourse, using the Reformation-era crisis of disagreement as a mirror for current arguments about free speech, tolerance, and who gets included in civil debate.

One fun texture detail: Bejan mentioned discussing "the wisdom of ... Bananarama" on air alongside Hobbes and Williams — I don't have the context for that reference, but it suggests the conversation had at least one lighter, pop-culture aside amid the political theory.