Civil society is itself chronically uncivil and cannot be idealized

Evidence

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: Civil society may be structured by perpetual war between forces — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 37; Incivility is endogenous to civil society rather than its outside — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 254; Civil society itself exercises hegemony and thus is the State proper — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 972 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Incivility is endogenous to civil society rather than its outside #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 254