If you Google the word “civility,” the Internet tells you that it means “formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech.” This bothers me a bit because the word has had other meanings. Besides, demanding “formal politeness and courtesy” in politics can be a way of suppressing criticism and agitation. William H. Chafe describes how calls for civility were used against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.

My favorite meaning of the word “civility” (or its analogue in Italian: civiltá) comes from the Italian renaissance. For proponents of renaissance republics, civility meant speech and behavior that was egalitarian. Civility existed among people who treated each other as equals and therefore spoke plainly, practically, and with an absence of formal politeness.

For example, in the Discourses (book LV), Machiavelli writes, “Republics where political life has been maintained uncorrupted do not tolerate any of their citizens to be gentlemen, or to live in the manner of gentlemen: rather, they maintain equality among themselves. … ” He adds that in lands where many rich men live idly on inherited wealth, “there has never been any republic, nor any political life; because such generations of men are completely enemies of all civiltá.”

The last word is sometimes translated as “civil government.” Thompson’s Victorian translation simply says, “Such persons are very mischievous in every republic or country.” But literally, the idle rich are enemies of civility for Machiavelli, because civility is a conversation among equals aimed at making collective decisions.

Using the common Latin noun civis (“citizen”) as a root, it was possible to construct an abstract noun, meaning something like “citizenness”–civilitas. That word would be understandable in Latin, but it was rare, surviving only in a couple of texts. For one ancient author (Quintilian) civilitas meant the art of government; for another (Suetonius), it meant courteousness. They were thinking of different attributes of a Roman citizen. I doubt that anyone would have noted this range of meanings before the modern era of Latin lexicons.

Nevertheless, the Latin word civilitas was available to be imitated in modern languages, either by authors who found it in Quintilian or Suetonius or by those who re-invented it from its root meaning of “citizen.”

Around 1384, John Wylciffe used “civility” when translating this Biblical passage (Acts 22:26-28):

26 And when this thing was heard, the centurion went to the tribune, and told to him, and said, What art thou to doing? for this man is a citizen of Rome.

27 And the tribune came nigh, and said to him [Paul], Say thou to me, whether thou art a Roman. And he said, Yea.

28 And the tribune answered, I with much sum got this freedom. [Wycliffe's original version: "I with moche summe gat this ciuylite," Wycliffe's note: "cyuylitee, either fraunchise, either dignite of citeceyn."] And Paul said, And I was born a citizen of Rome.

Wycliffe first wrote “civility” for the New Testament Greek word politeian, and then revised it to “freedom,” meaning the rights enjoyed by a Roman citizen. The King James Version simply says: “And Paul said, But I was free born.”

In 1598, an English author helpfully explained, “Policy is derived from the Greek word politeia which in our tongue we may term civility; and that which the Grecians did name politic government, the Latins called the government of a civil commonwealth, or civil society.”

These meanings were political and related to republican government. However, Shakespeare used “civility” to mean something similar to “tameness” and “patience” and as the opposite of “distemper” (Merry Wives of Windsor iv. ii. 23).

In short, people have coined or re-invented the word “civility” several times to capture aspects of what they imagined Roman citizens to be like. Some of their associations involved politeness, and others involved equal rights. It is a shame to remember only the former.

Sources: My translation of Machiavelli. English references from the Oxford English Dictionary with my modernized spellings. See also learning from the Florentine republic; civility as equality; civic republicanism in medieval Italy: the Lucignano council frescoes; what does the word civic mean?;

(Columbus) These are my notes for a talk today at Ohio State University on the assigned topic of “civic partisanship”:

If “partisanship” means active membership in a political party, then it is desirable. Parties can be worthy components of our civil society, especially when parties are internally diverse and meaningfully organized at the local and state levels. However, participation in party organizations is very rare today. Parties have become labels for entrepreneurial politicians, and sometimes for voters, rather than organizations that do anything at the local, state, or national level.

For example, in my state of Massachusetts, which is heavily Democratic, the state Democratic Party has 6 employees and an annual budget of $7 million in an election year. In her uncompetitive reelection race the same year, one candidate, Elizabeth Warren, spent $28 million. Most people who volunteer in politics will work for candidates, not a party.

If a political party is not an organization but a label that people attribute to themselves and others, then partisanship is at least somewhat problematic. It discourages deliberation and cooperation with people who hold a different party label.

First, partisanship can encourage hostility. Affective polarization means disliking people of the opposite party. It has risen symmetrically for Democrats and Republicans to alarming levels. In 2020, the ANES asked people to rate the parties on a 10-point scale. Giving the other party a zero score suggests that one is affectively polarized. By that standard, just eight percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans were affectively polarized in 1978. These rates rose steadily in both parties during the 2000s, reaching 48% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats in 2020. That year, more than half of Republicans over the age of 60 rated Democrats at zero.

Note that youth were not especially polarized compared to older people. About 38% of people under 30 who identified as Republicans or Democrats rated the opposite party at zero. So if affective polarization is a problem, it is not especially a youth problem, and it’s hard to see K12 or college education as the main solution.

Second, even if it’s not hostile, partisanship can replace independent thinking about issues. There is no a priori reason that beliefs about Ukraine, vaccination, tariffs, abortion, and immigration should cluster in two ways, labeled Democratic and Republican. People should combine these issues in diverse ways. But there is evidence that many people put their beliefs together in packages based on cues from party elites.

That would be OK if it represented a valid division of labor. We could imagine that responsible and accountable professional leaders think carefully about issues and propose combinations of beliefs to busy citizens, who benefit from the professionals’ guidance. However, the influence of party leaders is problematic if they are self-interested and unaccountable, which is how I would broadly characterize elites today. Besides, in a two-party system, the choice of elites is badly constrained.

Third, when partisan labels are associated with left and right, this encourages a mental model in which everyone can be located on a spectrum. The very idea of polarization presumes that the left and right are located far apart or are moving further apart. This is a metaphor, not a fact, and it is misleading. People actually hold many beliefs that are more or less connected to each other with reasons. For example, I support Ukraine because I oppose authoritarianism. That is a pair of connected beliefs. Combinations of beliefs and reasons form networks. In any given group, individuals’ networks prove diverse when you map them. I have found that people who identify with the same party and leaders have unique networks.

When we think of people as polarized, we erase their individual thinking, which, in turn, discourages deliberation. There can be a vicious cycle in which we describe people as polarized, ignoring their uniqueness, which encourages them to become less individual and critical.

These points imply that we should teach students to appreciate actual parties but to be suspicious of partisan labels as heuristics. I also want to raise one other issue related to partisanship and civic education.

We have a civic religion in the USA, whose scripture is the Constitution. It is often used as the outline for studying government and politics. But the US Constitution does not mention parties, and its authors saw parties as grave threats to republican government. In a curriculum shaped by the text of the Constitution, political parties belong under the First Amendment as associations. This is misleading because they are integral to the political system.

What’s more, parties may be fatal to a constitution that establishes a presidential republic. In 1990, Juan Linz observed that every presidential republic except the USA had failed because the president sooner or later came into conflict with the legislature and was either defeated or became an authoritarian. One explanation of the survival of the US Constitution is that our two parties long encompassed opposing factions, notably white supremacist southern Democrats and progressive northern Democrats. Therefore, presidents were able to govern like prime ministers, assembling majority coalitions in Congress. That option ended during the Clinton Administration, when the parties sorted. Arguably, the Linzian nightmare has since played out.

94% of the time that the government has been shut down because of a conflict between the president and Congress has occurred since 1995. Three out of four presidential impeachments have taken place since then, but they have had no consequences for the president. Presidents of both parties have governed via executive order. Most recently, Trump has signed fewer laws but issued more consequential executive orders than any predecessor in the first 100 days.

If Linz’ theory is playing out, then it is political miseducation to teach students that the Constitution is an excellent design that, among other things, allows parties to flourish as voluntary associations. Perhaps the Constitution is, after all, a suicide pact. Students should at least be able to wrestle with that possibility. That would mean, not so much criticizing partisan attitudes or habits of thinking, but critically assessing a constitutional order that cannot handle parties as we know them.

See also: affective partisanship and young people; People are not Points in Space; the Constitution is crumbling; the relevance of American civil religion to K-12 education; and putting the constitution in its place