In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England by Keith Thomas

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England by Keith Thomas Robert G. Walker Keith Thomas. In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England. Waltham, MA: Brandeis, 2018. Pp. xvi + 356. $95; $45 (paper). Mr. Thomas has a problem: how to write a conscientious piece of social history about a slippery term, civility, over a relatively long span. His solution is to produce an extremely well-documented study (1,690 endnotes in eighty-seven pages of small print) that records the frequent lack of linear change and the crosscurrents affecting the concept. The book seems to be written by an author who has read everything for an audience that may have read very little. As such it elicits a mixed response. A foreword by David Katz speaks of [End Page 102] "Thomas's method of blanket reading," and, like Mr. Thomas's later comment about his annotation method, seems an apology as much as an explanation. Of course, the subject is complex. "Civility" was used in various senses, foremost among them "politeness" on the one hand and "the state of being civilized" on the other. There are numerous nuances in between, as Mr. Thomas points out, in a method he calls "illustrative rather than comprehensive." He relies often on philology to make his points, which are valid and thoughtful. A small sample: "in seventeenth-century England, 'civil' people were increasingly referred to as 'civilized"'; "the notion of civilization is essentially relative; it has to have an opposite to be intelligible"; "'courtesy' … related initially to the behavior associated with the court. … It was the essential attribute of courtiers. 'Civility,' by contrast, was the virtue of citizens"; and "only in the early nineteenth century did the word 'civilization' come to be employed in the plural, first in France and only later in Britain." Mr. Thomas is aware of the hazards of this philological approach. After citing Locke, Hume, and Henry Pelham on the relationship between civility and possible forms of government, he writes, "these disagreements … reveal that 'civil' and 'barbarous' were rhetorical terms, carrying a high emotional charge, but distinctly protean and often lacking any universally agreed content." Most eye-opening is his treatment of the various ways "uncivilized" was used to justify suspending consensus social values when dealing with a foreign people, whether that people were obviously outside the bounds generally agreed on at the time as civilization, or whether it was simply convenient to construe them as outsiders, as in the case of the Irish and Scots. The Duke of Cumberland's slaughter of the Jacobites at Culloden then can be seen not as a one-time butchery but in keeping with a line of thought apparent for a century before. Still, the very slipperiness of the terms somewhat undercuts Mr. Thomas's approach. He rarely argues his points, and so his book often seems to be a listing of "one damn thing after another." (An exception is his occasional disagreement with fellow historian Norbert Elias.) By spending this time discussing Mr. Thomas's method, I do not mean to imply he is unaware of its limitations; he cautions at one point that "allowance has to be made for the context in which [contemporary] assessments were offered," and I would extend that caution to the entire text. But who except perhaps Mr. Thomas is able to evaluate the context in each case when in a randomly selected passage of three pages he refers to the statements of Richard Price, Hume, Montesquieu, Godwin, Lord Kames, Boswell, Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Hobbes, Sidney Webb, John Osborne, and Cavendish? When Mr. Thomas writes the following in a discussion of the relationship of genocide to views of civilization, he perhaps unwittingly casts doubt over his entire enterprise: "In 1763 the commander-in-chief of the British army in America sanctioned a plan to eliminate hostile Indian tribes on the Pennsylvania frontier by distributing blankets infected with smallpox." His source is a 2007 study. But the "plan"—if that is what it was rather than the crazy scheme of an inferior officer—was sanctioned only after the fact and was totally ineffective. Moreover, the American academician...