Incivility is endogenous to civil society rather than its outside

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the relational distinction between civility and civil society as contested concepts rather than a simple binary.
• XREF: connects to: Casual sociability perpetuates the injustice it seems to soften; Civility discourse ties social decline to urban diversity and incivility — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 180; Incivility is endemic to civil society, not a departure from it. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 254