The Politics of Politeness

Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-19-890476-2
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Format (B × H): 177 mm x 227 mm, Gewicht: 485 g

Politeness is political. It is easy to disregard our everyday, street-level interactions and the politeness, or impoliteness, by which they are marked, but those interactions determine the quality of the social atmosphere we inhabit, and democracies cannot flourish without an atmosphere congenial to their ends. We must therefore enlarge our understanding of citizenship to encompass the democracy of everyday living, and we must learn to think politically about the dilemmas of politeness it presents.

The Politics of Politeness develops the first sustained account of 'ordinary citizenship'. Arguing for the political significance of everyday urban interactions, Edyvane proposes an interpretation of politeness as civility and as a key political practice for democracies. Against recent conceptualisations of polite civility as a 'communicative' virtue, the book elaborates an innovative 'ceremonial' account that takes seriously the ritual-like character of polite interaction, and its embeddedness in a larger civilisational discourse.

Drawing on an eclectic range of sources from empirical ethnography to novels and TV shows, the book offers a new perspective on familiar dilemmas of everyday politeness. What should you do when codes of manners embarrassingly clash? Should you say something when a shop assistant slights another customer, or should you mind your own business? How should you finesse awkward encounters with beggars and vagrants? And is there ever any place for rudeness in polite society? By treating these dilemmas as political problems, as problems of democratic citizenship, we gain fresh insight into them: into why they matter, and how to navigate them more wisely.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Edyvane, Derek

Über Autor(innen)

Derek Edyvane is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He was previously a lecturer and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York where he earned his PhD. He works on incivility, injustice, citizenship, and the ethics of political resistance and is the author of two books: Community and Conflict (2007) and Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil (2012). He was awarded the Political Studies Harrison Prize for his article 'Incivility as Dissent' (2020).