Civility can privatize public power and socialize arbitrary rule.

Evidence

So civility is founded on a tightly “circular” (and self-contained) order. Civility accordingly is what Mbembe, in a slightly different if related context, characterizes as “the privatization of public prerogatives,” thereby enabling power to be socialized, diffused through the state, collapsing stating (state-making, étatisation) as order of rule and conditions of being. Mbembe points out, again in pursuing an analysis to explain current conditions of authoritarian rule in contemporary Africa but I am looking to adapt the terms of his account to other more general purposes, that this process of privatization amounts to a “socialization of arbitrariness.” It is a cementing of the unnecessary, partial, and partisan, the dominating and coercive, to the benefit of one racial class at the expense of all others, “asserting rights (and the right) over persons and things” – arrogating to itself such power in the absence of consultation or negotiation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 247

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘civility’ as a self-contained circular order and ‘socialization of arbitrariness’ — useful conceptual machinery.
• XREF: connects to: Good manners can work against the functioning of the public sphere. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 102