Beyond Civility: The Competing Obligations of Citizenship

From the pundits to the polls, nearly everyone seems to agree that US politics have rarely been more fractious, and calls for a return to “civil discourse” abound. Yet it is also true that the requirements of polite discourse effectively silence those who are not in power, gaming the system against the disenfranchised. What, then, should a democracy do?

This book makes a case for understanding civility in a different light. Examining the history of the concept and its basis in communication ...