Civility

From RhetorClick

Note: this is a collection of notes for future addition somewhere:

A lot of contemporary scholarship on deliberation talks about "ideal speech situations," rational argumentation, following norms, and staying productive, all of which point toward some kind of civility. The Journal of Public Deliberation publishes about this, but it's also in other places (like John Gastil's book By Popular Demand)

Other than scholars of deliberation, Gerard Hauser's 2002 Introduction to Rhetorical Theory talks about being open to other viewpoints and remembering that we may be wrong. He cites Henry Johnstone's binary of bilateral and unilateral discussion, but that's quite a bit older.

Robert Ivie's book Democracy and America's War on Terror also touches on the idea of civility. He says, for example, that "[t]he better alternative is a democratic rhetoric of identification that deploys reason to build bridges between otherwise warring communities both at home and abroad" (91).

This is a bit older, but Wayne Booth's idea of Listening-Rhetoric, or rhetorology, is fundamentally about seeking common ground, listening, and being civil, even in the face of profound disagreement (he hits this heavily in his book The Rhetoric of RHETORIC).

Sharon Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse comes to mind. It's a few years old now (2006?) but it might be worth your time. She does brilliant work integrating Chantal Mouffe's notion agonistic pluralism into so-called non-political public debates that might otherwise be governed by fundamentalism/s.

A good place to start might be the presentations at the conference on civility and democracy at the National Constitution Center in March 2011. At the website you can watch a keynote address advocating civility by Amy Gutmann, President of U Penn, along with videos of some of the breakout sessions, which included an impressive list of scholars in history (e.g. Alan Brinkley), religious studies (e.g. Thomas Kidd), communication studies (e.g. Kathleen Hall Jamieson), and other fields, most of whom have written about civility in one fashion or another. Here's the link:

http://constitutioncenter.org/programs-events/public-symposium-on-civility-and-democracy/

Ken Burns even made a promo clip promoting the conference: http://www.pbs.org/about/news/archive/2011/ncc-ken-burns/

Hope this helps, although I should warn you that the only people arguing AGAINST civility at the conference are the Tea Party activists and Newt Gingrich's former press secretary! Politics sure make for strange bedfellows.

The first thing that came to my mind is the "Civility Web Site" at John's Hopkins:

http://krieger.jhu.edu/civility/ The project identifies some scholarship and history of calls for civility that might be of interest.

http://nicd.arizona.edu/research_briefs

There are scholarly accounts that seek (more or less openly) to re-establish civility--perhaps Stephen L. Carter's book _Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy_ (Basic Books 1998) would fall into this category.

Perhaps more relevant for your very interesting project would be work that (1) rhetorically unpacks the concept of civility and/or (2) analyzes the argumentative effects of appeals to civility.

An example of (1) would be "The Rhetoric of Civility and the Fate of Argument" in Swearingen (ed.) _Rhetoric, the Polis, and the Global Village_ Erlbaum 1999 (pp. 247-253).

Please also look at Susan Herbst's recent book "Rude Democracy: Civility and Uncivility in AMerican Political Discourse" (not sure I got the subtitle exactly right). This is an important --if brief-- examination of the civility question that goes beyond the usual scholarly prescriptions of proper civil argument and discourse, and analyzes some of the uses and history of incivility. For example, she argues that incivility can be a stratgeic rhetorical move, e.g. Sarah Palin.