Liminal Civility and Its Discontents: The Unstable Relationship between Forms and Substance in Contemporary Accounts of Civility

Civility is a remarkably contested concept, and the contemporary theoretical accounts of civility as both a moral and political notion are widely divergent. This is particularly the case with conceptions developed by various theorists associated with, respectively, liberalism and critical theory as modern philosophical traditions wherein civility can be connected to both equality and inequality, inclusion and exclusion, and positive as well as negative features about maintaining a regulated space of politics. A recurrent feature in the literature is, though, a distinction between a formal and a substantial aspect of civility—or, at least, formal and substantial interpretations of what it is about. The formal aspect points to a plurality of actions, norms, and structures that can be associated with civility in a variety of forms, while the substantial aspect is about a single meaning that supposedly underlines such different forms. This entails a conceptual tension given that formality implies that civility has several meanings at once, while substantiality implies that it only has one. Through a critical reading of selected liberal and critical theoretical conceptions of civility and their unresolved tensions between its forms and substance, this paper proposes to rethink this particular issue as an internal dynamic within civility; that it exists and develops, as a social and political practice intricately shaped by the ways that we also describe what it is about, in a liminal state in-between having several meanings and one single meaning. Finally, I argue on the basis of this proposition that such liminality points to how civility continuously develops the relationship between ethics and politics—or more specifically that between moral norms and political conflicts—and that civility can therefore be conceived as a distinct mode of normativity in-between ethics and politics, which highlights the contingent and unstable relationship between the two.