A New Statesman Best Book of the Year A Church Times Book of the Year We are facing a crisis of civility, a war of words polluting our public sphere. In liberal democracies committed to tolerating active, often heated disagreement, the loss of this virtue appears critical. Most modern appeals to civility follow arguments by Hobbes or Locke by proposing to suppress disagreement or exclude views we deem “uncivil” for the sake of social harmony. By comparison, mere civility—a grudging conformity to norms of respectful behavior—as defended by Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams, might seem minimal and unappealing. Yet Teresa Bejan argues that Williams’s outlook offers a promising path forward in confronting our own crisis, one that challenges our fundamental assumptions about what a tolerant—and civil—society should look like. “Penetrating and sophisticated.” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review “Would that more of us might learn to look into the past with such gravity and humility. We might end up with a more (or mere) civil society, yet.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A deeply admirable book: original, persuasive, witty, and eloquent.” —Jacob T. Levy, Review of Politics “A terrific book—learned, vigorous, and challenging.” —Alison McQueen, Stanford University

In a time of fractious politics, being rude can feel wickedly gratifying, while being polite can feel simple-minded or willfully naïve. Do manners and civility even matter now? Is it worthwhile to make the effort to be polite? When rudeness has become routine and commonplace, why bother? When so much of public and social life with others is painful and bitterly acrimonious, why should anyone be polite? As Amy Olberding argues, civility and ordinary politeness are linked both to big values, such as respect and consideration, and to the fundamentally social nature of human beings. Being polite is not just a nicety--it has deep meaning. Olberding explores the often overwhelming temptations to incivility and rudeness, and the ways that they must and can be resisted. Drawing on the wisdom of early Chinese philosophers who lived through great political turmoil but nonetheless avidly sought to "mind their manners," the book articulates a way of thinking about politeness that is distinctively social. We can feel profoundly alienated from others, and others can sometimes be truly terrible, yet, as the Confucian philosophers encourage us to see, because we are social, neglecting the social and political courtesies comes at perilous cost. The book considers not simply why civility and politeness are important, but how. It reveals how small insults can accumulate to damage social relations, how separating people into tribes undermines our better interests, and how even bodily and facial expressions can influence our lives with others. Many of us, in spite of our best efforts, are often tempted to be rude, and will find here tools for fighting that temptation.

Winner of the Everett Lee Hunt Award 2014. Winner of the NCA Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award 2013 from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research The crisis of incivility plaguing today's workplace calls for an approach to communication that restores respect and integrity to interpersonal encounters in organizational life. Professional civility is a communicative virtue that protects and promotes productivity, one's place of employment, and persons with whom we carry out our tasks in the workplace. Drawn from the history of professions as dignified occupations providing valuable contributions to the human community, an understanding of civility as communicative virtue, and MacIntyre's treatment of practices, professional civility supports the «practice» of professions in contemporary organizations. A communicative ethic of professional civility requires attentiveness to the task at hand, support of an organization's mission, and appropriate relationships with others in the workplace. Professional civility fosters communicative habits of the heart that extend beyond the walls of the workplace, encouraging a return to the service ethic that remains an enduring legacy of the professions in the United States.

The author of "Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby" and "The Culture of Disbelief" proves that manners matter to the future of America. Not an exercise in abstract philosophizing, this book delivers an agenda for the practical implementation of civility in contemporary life.

Contributors from philosophy and political science discuss the observation that civility, civic virtue, tolerance, and socio-cultural unity have declined while exploring the nature of civil society, the conflict between individual liberty and the common good, and the role of law and government policy in weaving the threads of the social fabric. From publisher description.

During the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.