Book Review: Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding, by Cornell W. Clayton and Richard Elgar

Abstract

Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding. Cornell W. Clayton and Richard Elgar, eds. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2012. 167 pp. $25.95 pbk.It seems as though we cannot keep civil tongue in our heads these days. Tea partiers shout down elected officials, cable TV pundits scream at each other, netizens cyber bully, and finger pointing has taken the place of compromise in an ideologically polar- ized Congress. Consequently, there has been great deal of rumination in the main- stream media about how incivility threatens our democracy, which has led to flurry of publications examining our current epidemic of political and cultural rudeness, including the collection of twenty-two essays compiled in Civility and Democracy in America.The essays evolved from three-day conference hosted by the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University in March 2011. There, panelists delivered that, apparently, were not based on scholarly papers, and the published essays reflect the informality of such presentations (see the video of the presentations at http://foley.wsu.edu/civility/). Thus, from an educator's view, the book seems ideal for high school civics class, or as gateway text to lead undergraduates to further readings and discussions about democratic discourse and deliberation theories.The essays tackle the issue of civility and democracy through the perspective of five disciplines: history, religion, architecture, philosophy and ethics, and communica- tion and media. With the exception of one journalist, the contributors are highly cre- dentialed, first-rate scholars. But here they are engaged mostly in exposition. Their mission, it seems, is to give the concerned citizen measured assessment of the current incivility controversy, hence the subtitle, a reasonable understanding.For example, Thomas J. Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, debunks the simplistic and conventional wisdom linking civility inextricably to fairness, justice, and equality. Sugrue says,Looking back at the 1960s through the prism of contemporary debates about what is civil and what is not, overlooks in the end the fact that to those whose power (economic, social, racial) was threatened by civil rights, the whole struggle was uncivil.The excellent forward, written by coeditors Cornell W. …