Casual sociability perpetuates the injustice it seems to soften

Evidence

This world of sociability, the only one in which a democracy of equals is possible without friction, is an artificial world, made up of beings who have renounced both the objective and the purely personal features of the intensity and extensiveness of life in order to bring about among themselves a pure interaction, free of any disturbing material accent. If we now have the conception that we enter into sociability purely as “human beings,” as that which we really are, lacking all the burdens, the agitations, the inequalities with which real life disturbs the purity of our picture, it is because modern life is overburdened with objective content and material demands. Ridding ourselves of this burden in sociable circles, we believe we return to our natural-personal being and overlook the fact that this personal aspect also does not consist in its full uniqueness and natural completeness, but only in a certain reserve and stylizing of the sociable man. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 378 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Keane concludes that “all known forms of civil society are plagued by endogenous sources of incivility,” that “incivility is a chronic feature of civil societies, one of their typical conditions, and, hence, normatively speaking, a perennial barrier to the actualization of a fully ‘civilized’ civil society” (the emphasis is his). This draws attention to the relational distinction between civility and civil society (a surprisingly rare contribution to the voluminous literature on civil society, actually). But, for all that, I would say, more pressingly, that these concerns throw in question the very idea of a “more civilized” civil society. Indeed, they call into question the notion of a separate, stand-apart, idealized private sphere of the civil over and against the state. The civil either is (to be) a defining condition of state formation, a brake on state power within the state, as a constitutive condition of its self-expressed formation and being, or the state as a matter of fact will be uncivil not over and against some outside order but as a denial, a negation, of what gets marked as civility as a matter of state self-definition – at least to greater or smaller degree. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 254 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sociability is free from the gravity of fixed content — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2304; Games let people play with the forms of sociability itself; Sociability among equals is an artificial stylized game, not a return to natural self — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 378 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Sociability among equals is an artificial stylized game, not a return to natural self #contradicts (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 378
• Games let people play with the forms of sociability itself #expands (0.75)
• Incivility is endogenous to civil society rather than its outside #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 254
• Sociability is free from the gravity of fixed content #qualifies (0.72) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2304