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Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal

Connectedness
Armando Salvatorea
a
Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Naples 'L'Orientale', Naples, Italy
Online publication date: 21 June 2011
To cite this Article Salvatore, Armando(2011) 'Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal
Connectedness', Third World Quarterly, 32: 5, 807 — 825
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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 5, 2011, pp 807–825
Civility: between disciplined

interaction and local/translocal
connectedness
ARMANDO SALVATORE
ABSTRACT This study explores the question of if and how associative bonds
based on violence, control and self-restraint mediated by contractual relation-
ships become institutionalised within societies and discusses the cultural factors
Downloaded By: [Salvatore, Armando] At: 20:46 21 June 2011
that determine this threshold. It investigates the trade-off between formalised

forms of interaction that safeguard individual rights and secure state control,
and less formal modes of civility that deepen trans-state interconnectedness. It
asks whether civility is the result of a global civilising process in the sense
highlighted by Norbert Elias, whereby affect control is matched by formal
norms guaranteed by legitimate institutions, or whether it is rather the much
more complex constellation of specific actualisations of the more general trade-
off as just defined. After summarising the current twists of the meaning of
civility against the background of liberal and modernist precedents and
delineating the alternative patterns of civility within Islamic, especially modern
Ottoman, history, the analysis critically interrogates Weber’s notion of
Verbrüderung as the pre-modern root concept of organised forms of common
action, mutual solidarity and civic participation. Finally, it questions whether
this idea fits the historic forms of association in the Islamic world, in particular
the privileging of a lower threshold of institutionalisation of the associational
bond than has traditionally been found in the European experience—and which
survives in the current anxieties about resurgent mahalle (neighbourhood)
informal governance in the AKP’s Turkey.
When I moved to Berlin in 1995, in the core of the city the rubble of the
Berlin wall had just been carted off to open a new public space in the guise of
a shopping and tourist centre along the former no-man’s land separating East
and West in Potsdamer Platz. The forest of cranes crowding the sky over
Berlin quickly became a sort of logo of reconstruction. The remaking of the
heart of Berlin (the emotional navel of long-divided Europe) appeared the
Armando Salvatore is in the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Naples
‘L’Orientale’, Palazzo Corigliano, Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, 12, I-80134 Naples, Italy.
Email: asalvatore@unior.it.
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/11/050807–19

Ó 2011 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2011.578953 807
ARMANDO SALVATORE
obverse of the process through which policy makers and scholars alike seized
on the time-honored idea of civil society as the poisoned pill that both killed
off the Soviet empire and cleaned up its constituent polities.
If civil society had been partly responsible for the end of the Cold War, so
the story went, then it must be a necessary ingredient for democratisation and
development around the globe. The process rolled on dizzily, in sharp
contrast to how it was presented: as the retrieval of ‘normalcy’ after the
natural demise of abnormal regimes ultimately resting on ‘uncivil’ (almost
‘Asian’) despotism. A civil society industry, no less feverish and well funded
than construction works in Potsdamer Platz, took off, with donors, NGOs and
scholars vying with each other to test the concept on real states and living
societies: no longer just in Eastern Europe, but potentially everywhere.
Twenty years later leading social theorist and noted provocateur, Slavoj
Žižek, looked back to that time from what appeared, before the recent Arab
revolutions, as a consolidated ‘post-wall’ present and stated that, far from

marking the end of utopia, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the multiple
processes and businesses issuing from it ushered in a high conjuncture of
utopian thought and action.1 In the post-cold war, pre-‘war on terror’-long
decade of the 1990s, the civil society wave spilled over to the Muslim world
and furthered hopes for democratisation in the face of the perpetuation of
various types of autocratic regimes, variably associated with the ongoing
neoliberal globalisation. The enthusiasm petered out as fast as it had
mounted. Ever since, popular responses to oppressive state systems in the
Muslim majority world have become more sceptical, or at least more
nuanced, with regard to how ideas and practices of civil society can relate to
democratic transformations beyond the one-sidedness of its allegedly
‘original’ European model.2
One does not need a fine mind like Žižek’s to understand that, if the fall of
the Berlin Wall had revived utopia, 9/11 killed it again, or rather transformed it
into a dystopia, characterised by thin conceptions of ‘market democracy’ sitting
uncomfortably alongside the war on terror rhetoric, hedged by some kind of
liberal interventionist ‘ethic’. Civil society died as utopia, but its ghost, which
we can call ‘civility’, survived the death and morphed into a quite dystopian, yet
politically powerful idea—the more powerful since deeply ingrained in the long
trajectory of the European rise to world hegemony and its ‘civilising mission’,
As Žižek wrote in his latest book, if civil society fits into utopian, quasi-
millenarian expectations (see the spectacular rise of the stock exchange in the
1990s going into 2000, notably through the ‘new economy’ bubble in its latest
phase), civility can match the apocalypse of ‘the end times’ we are living in now,
and is rather an-ethical: ‘civility . . . assumes the key role when subjects . . . find
themselves in predicaments which cannot be resolved by way of relying on the
existing ethical substance. In such situations, one has to improvise and invent
new rules ad hoc.’3
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks the as yet rough idea of civility—ie of
building civil vs uncivil life, an idea at least overlapping with the ‘hard core’
notions of civil society—began to expand beyond its tight association with
Western models, whereby the ‘civil’ realm nourishes the ‘political’ order in an
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BETWEEN DISCIPLINED INTERACTION AND LOCAL/TRANSLOCAL CONNECTEDNESS
ultimately peaceful system of sovereign nation-states. Such ultimately irenic

sublimation of the real Westphalian order saw itself undermined by the
unfolding of a process that sociologist Norbert Elias stringently called a
‘civilising process’. By this, he intended a self-propelling cycle of taming
violence and increasing co-ordination among individual subjects via a
cumulative dynamics of self-restraint. This is reflected in etiquette and codes
more than in ‘ethical substance’ (to use Žižek’s neo-Hegelian parlance). The
process includes two aspects: the intersubjective dimension of civil relations
and the subjective attitude, ie the making of the cives (the ‘citizen’) from the
inside out. It is impossible to establish a priori which of the two dimensions
comes first. While the social bond per se does not exclude violence (material
or symbolic), being civil means being social within an order that only
tolerates a moderate and largely codified recourse to violence, while the
extent to which the subject internalises such modes and rules depends on the
interaction with other subjects. Elias paid particular attention to early

modern European court life as the privileged model of action, interaction and
performance, producing increasingly stable patterns of co-ordination, whose
latently violent dimension was subject to an increasing restriction.4
The conceptual lopsidedness of new notions of civility dragged along by
the programmes and rhetoric of the war on terror, if compared with the
sophistication of Elias’s approach, might obliquely relate to the fact that the
Eliasian civilising process, though rooted within processes of modern state-
formation, appears to transcend the nation-state order and take a firmer root
within global ‘society’, however defined. Paradoxically perhaps, it fits well
what appears to be, with the onset of popular revolts and new ‘humanitarian’
wars in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) area, an incipient ‘global
civil war’. In this global dimension, no longer shielded by a universal
diffusion of Leviathan’s protective shadow, along with its protocols of
citizenship and welfare, actors have to continually redefine ad hoc rules. Then
terrorism itself, the alleged target of the war on terror, appears no longer
simply as the export staple of some rogue states attempting to blackmail the
hegemon but as the result of the activities of genuinely transnational
networks acting at a multiplicity of local levels. Gaddafi’s accusation that the
rebels of Cyrenaica are nothing less than al-Qa’ida affiliates is more than the
ranting of a collapsing despot: it can make some sense, even or especially for
Western audiences educated by the rhetoric of the war on terror, and more
specifically in a horizon of sense where each potential power that does not
take at face value the façade of postcolonial Leviathans is equated with
terrorism. What terrorist and revolutionary networks have in common is,
indeed, that they are intent on building cohesion in their own ranks, often
based on new types of authority resting on fictively reconstructed traditional
hierarchies (see the role of the ‘emir’ in this type of network, from North
Africa to Afghanistan). Yet ultimately the architects of the war on terror
(now carried under the banner of slightly or deeply revised slogans,
increasingly retrieving the rhetoric of humanitarianism), instead of
asking how ‘civil’ terrorism is, propound civility as a self-propelling
imperative that can only be enforced globally by a world power that is itself
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ARMANDO SALVATORE
post-Westphalian: a mega-Leviathan impersonating the authority of the

ultimate (and perhaps itself collapsing) Empire.
Yet even the logic of the war on terror admits that, while in the short term
civility should be enforced through repressive measures, in the long term it
needs an educational–civilising process of world conversion to liberal-
democratic institutional practices, implemented through a network of well
funded NGOs. What the planners of and participants in the war on terror
have failed to recognise is, as Elias explains, that the civilising process must
be a largely self-propelling movement within society and therefore generally
apolitical (ultimately independent of any Leviathan and its successors). If
mainly dependent on Westphalian or post-Westphalian coercive measures, it
will turn into its antithesis: a perpetual de-structuring of civil relations. This
dynamics, in turn, can lead by the very pressures of the global mega-
Leviathan to a process of state un-building which, looking at the past 10
years, is perhaps the central ‘collateral damage’ of the war on terror, if not a
self-fulfilling prophecy: it has occurred in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan,
but also in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and now, quite acutely, also in
Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.
Civil life in the Islamic sphere

What is even more remarkable is that, as far as the MENA area and the larger
Muslim world are concerned, the problematic character of their fuller
submission to a global (provisionally still ‘international’, though already
post-Westphalian), outwardly ‘civil’ (in kernel strongly military) system
retrieves older short-cut diagnoses of an ‘Islamic exceptionalism’. Such a
concept is often used, if only implicitly, to justify both direct armed
intervention into regional arenas and the revived educational (in the official
vulgate ‘institution-building’) project of ‘civilising’ (against all anthropolo-
gical, sociological and geopolitical odds) the societies and political systems of
the region by pushing them towards Western norms of free market
democracy.
What such abbreviated credos of the civilising process fail to capture is
that the militarisation and securitisation of Middle East politics—whether at
the prompting of the US and its allies or in response to the challenge they
pose—enfeebles even more the residual capacity of the region’s postcolonial
political elites to influence, or at least interact positively with, the ongoing,
largely autonomous processes of reconstruction of the social bonds and civic
connections at a local level. These communities in turn become ever more
disconnected from official politics, thus further undermining the fragile
mutual ties between state apparatuses and citizens.5 The reconstruction of
such ties through constitutional reform processes, like those starting in Egypt
in March 2011, is probably still strongly dependent on the larger co-ordinates
determined by the dialectic between popular unrest and revolution and the
largely self-serving, and therefore highly differentiated, responses of the
mega-Leviathan, with almost opposite standards applied in such places as
Libya and in Bahrain.
810
In this sense the flip side of the abridged discourse on civility is a still
poorly understood, utterly fragmented process consisting in devising local
variants of civil bonds which unsettle received models (those defining
purportedly normal relations between the ‘civil’ and the ‘political’ levels) by
sidestepping governance as centred on state institutions. Look at today’s
Egypt, where both before and after the revolutionary events of January and
February 2011 not only the old and new government elites, but also the
Islamists seemed only able to address—not to say to organise the lives of—a
few selected layers of the Egyptian urban and rural population, which until
the revolutionary outburst only knew the state through quotidian micro-
relations of subjection to power (see the contribution of Ismail in this
collection). Here the notion itself of the ‘political’ shows a significant entropy
if compared to common Western, liberal-democratic and secular-Westpha-
lian assumptions about the centrality of formal individual rights and duties
of citizenship. This permanent ‘political crisis’ accredits the sphere of civility

as exposed to the continuous reconstruction (or improvisation) of ad hoc,
basically an-ethical rules that a revamped constitutional ethos will have
difficulty in sufficiently capturing and absorbing. Within such inherently
unstable dynamics, older transnational trajectories of building civil life might
be retrieved and, in new guises, might interact or clash both with the
hegemonic, post-Westphalian slogans (more than notions) of civility and the
fragile grammar of constitutionalism.
Nor is this an entirely new discovery. Around the time when the 1990s
wave of civil society was mounting (indeed in a piece published in one of the
edited books that tried to ride the wave on the scholarly side), Şerif Mardin
warned us of a looming conceptual mismatch in the following words:
Orientalists, secular Jacobins, Marxists and ex-Marxisant scholars, as well as
bien pensant deconstructionists, will have to look at countries in the Islamic
culture area which do not have the Western historical background of civil
society as, nevertheless, operating with the collective memory of a total culture
which once provided a ‘civilized’ life of a tone different from that of the West
but sufficiently attractive in its own terms to have left a positive trace.6
Therefore, treating ‘civility’ as a mere late-comer in a long genealogy of both

analytical and policy-making buzzwords produced within the recent centuries
of first Anglo-Scottish and then Anglo-American political and intellectual
hegemony would be misleading.7 It is clear that the concept of civility
demarcates an articulate, yet not fully coherent (perhaps inherently inchoate)
field of intertwined ideas and keywords, reflecting specific and sometimes
competing ways of coming to grips with the relationship among individuals,
societies and the governing structures that rule them, both within specific
locales and in the ‘global village’.
In order not to equate this emerging civility with a vain postmodern
‘everything goes’, one needs to keep the bar on a classic social science issue
that has too often remained latent in discussions on civil society and civility:
the question of if and how associative bonds premised on the control of
violence and self-restraint mediated by contractual relationships of various
811
ARMANDO SALVATORE
(formal and informal) kinds become institutionalised within different

societies. This question also retrieves the related issue of the cultural factors
(including the so-called ‘social imaginary’) that determine this threshold and
at some junctures even act as surrogate for a deficit of legitimisation or lack
of institutionalisation of the bonds. The rather synthetic idea of ‘civility’ can
facilitate access to just this kernel of the problem, and in this way enrich the
meaning of the civilising process highlighted by Elias.
Entangled genealogies between classicist bias and liberal spins

The conceptual origins of ideas of a civil realm of interaction and a civil
subjectivity conventionally go back to classical Greece, specifically to the
experience of Athens. If Aristotle saw the polis as grounded in the concept of
the citizen (polites), Aquinas gave a new spin to Aristotle’s notion of koinonia
politike, the term which would later be translated by Cicero as societas civilis,
by shifting the focus from the polis as the site of organised city life to societas
as the larger body of intersubjective relations, one not necessarily city-
centred.
In ancient thought there was no notion yet of the social as based on the
kind of interdependence based on interest and a functional division of labour.
The social only takes on full contours with the emergence of the modern
Westphalian state and modern capitalism. The elaboration itself on ‘civil
society’ by the Scottish Enlightenment pays tribute to the need to build up a
space which is largely autonomous for citizens to act, co-operate and build
solidarity ties in, yet also functional to state governance and the needs of a
‘commercial society’. This turn marked the overcoming of the Aristotelian
legacy of the virtue of the citizen and the emerging primacy of a notion of
disciplined, and in this sense ‘civilised’, agency largely functional to capitalist
development and, gradually, to new labour relations. The resulting model of
civil society, as elaborated by the Scottish Enlightenment, laid a primary
emphasis on the individual who knows his (more than her) own interest and
possesses a capacity to act autonomously, while sharing a sense of affection
and sympathy towards other individuals.8 The Scottish idea of civil society,
keeping just a tenuous symbolic continuity with the classic societas civilis,
referred to a society that is civil and peaceful, first of all, because the
institutionalisation and internalisation of the law of contract ensures a high
degree of predictability of social relations, and, second, because a ‘moral
sense’ secures ties of affection among individuals beyond commercial
interests and contractual relations. What counts here is not contract per se,
but its legal enforceability.9 As we will see shortly by referring to the historian
Marshall Hodgson, this legal enforceability is less a ‘contractualist’ than a
‘corporatist’ feature of the system, to the extent that it descends from the
corporate nature of key legal subjects: from the state, through commercial
actors, to the churches themselves (which are indeed the very prototypeof
corporate entities and their governance).
Cutting a long story short (and bracketing out the specific contributions of
the 19th century and early 20th century ‘fathers’ of sociology, although we
812
will need to come back to Weber on a key point), this type of civility could
only be stabilised by framing it in a disciplinary idea of ‘publicness’
determined, as shown by Adam Smith, by the constraining power of the gaze
of the co-citizen. Taking into account the substantial disconnections only
matched by a fragile symbolic continuity between classic philosophy,
mediaeval theology and modern socio-political theory is of some importance,
because it reminds us that the emergence of specifically modern notions of
‘civil society’ is far less uncontested than one might imagine, if we assume
these notions’ smooth rooting in an Aristotelian notion of politics. Yet it is
also true that the legitimacy crisis of postcolonial states, before the ‘civil
society’ wave of enthusiasm set in around two decades ago, prepared the
terrain for the shaping of ideas of a civility not strictly bound to the cultural
project of the nation-state, and, in this sense, vaguely neo-Aristotelian.
In the final analysis we need to be alerted to the fact that there is no single
uncontested idea of civility, not even in the trajectories of what we identify as

‘the modern West’. This is best exemplified in the work of GB Vico, a rough
contemporary of the earlier stages of the Scottish Enlightenment, yet also a
precursor of Gramsci. He provided an excellent example of a notion of
civility that can cope with the Westphalian constellation, yet he also spells
out much more honestly than his Scottish counterpart how the reshaping of
the ‘civil’ realm is a process through which the ethos of previous, ‘heroic’ ages
is diluted into the more relaxed mores of the members of a demos. Centuries
before Walzer (see the introductory piece by Volpi) Vico clearly demon-
strated the ‘post-heroic’ character of civility. Yet Vico’s view was also reliant
on a deeper anthropological awareness of the co-ordinates of the social bond
and its developmental potential, including the symbolic underpinnings of
diffuse authority, which not even the densely commercial, Scottish type of
civil society can dispense with. In this sense, he also showed that within civil
society patriarchal authority is diluted and disguised but not erased.10
Weberian brotherhood: the mother of all forms of civility?

Weber is often considered the champion of a eurocentric, rather evolutionist
perspective that considers Western formal law the apex of a trajectory of
rationalisation with no equal in other civilisations. Yet we find in Weber one
interesting escape from what he himself, far from triumphantly—indeed
overtly pessimistically—called the ‘iron cage’ of a one-directional, modern
rationalisation process radiating from northwestern Europe. Quite in a
Vichian mood, he explicitly worked on possible common roots of divergent
developments of patterns of rationalisation, at least within the wider West.
Incidentally, he never denied that what can be dubbed rational from the
viewpoint of the—still at his time—(colonially, globally) ‘winning’ Western
trajectory is not necessary rational from other civilisational angles.
Particularly, he focused on an issue that is often kept latent in discussions
on the conceptual cluster coagulating into ‘civility’: the question of how the
associative bond based on the control of violence and self-restraint is
institutionalised, at the moment of transition from heroic to civil modes of
813
ARMANDO SALVATORE
taming violence and the corresponding turning of poetic hymns into legal
codes (one of Vico’s key themes). Is ‘contract’ per se sufficient to facilitate
such a ‘prosaic’ transition? Are there cultural variables and communicative
factors that under normal conditions determine this threshold and in crisis
times might even be a surrogate for the institutional ties themselves? To
answer this, it is profitable to briefly revisit Weber’s concept of Verbrüderung
(‘brotherhood, confraternity’) as the pre-modern root of notions of organised
forms of acting in common, mutual solidarity and participation in local
settings, including city or city neighbourhood life (obviously bound by a type
of authority that, as Vico taught, is inseparable from some form of violence:
material, symbolic or both). This analysis might help assess whether this idea
fits into the historic forms of association found in the Muslim majority world
in the framework of ‘post-heroic’ patterns of civility, with particular regard
to their privileging a lower threshold of institutionalisation of the
associational bond and of deliberation procedures than found in the

European experience.
Weber saw in Verbrüderung, more than in Aristotelian constructions of the
polis, the ‘ancient’ root of the type of civility that supports modern polities: ‘a
community based on artificially created and freely willed mutual ties, not on
consanguinity’.11 Far from being a monopoly of Western Europe, this type of
confraternal bond characterises the overall ‘West’ (therefore including
Islamic civilization and its predecessors) as opposed to the ‘East’ of India
and China.12 Yet the kernel of the deepest layer of Weber’s argument on
‘confraternity’ and what constitutes the West as ‘Occident’ (and therefore
excludes Islam) is to be located in the flip side of the Western (first of all West
European) investment in processes of rationalisation of the associative bond
that are able to transcend the patterns of Verbrüderung. I refer here in
particular to late mediaeval developments within the burgeoning city life of
several parts of Europe, which were facilitated by the rise of the idea of
Anstalt (basically signifying ‘institution’, as opposed to Verein, meaning
‘association’). This metamorphosis of the confraternal bond required a
strong sacralisation of the bond itself, consisting in making ‘one’ out of
‘many’: a process exemplified by the constitution of a unitary juridical
personality out of a multitude of associates.13 It did not escape Weber’s
attention that such a corporate personality can only be the outcome of a
mutation of the initial associative model of the confraternity that in itself,
though reflecting traditional or charismatic forms of authority, stays ashore
of a full-fledged sacralisation and rather relies on codes of honor based on
webs of mutual respect and reverence towards the older ‘brothers’: what non-
sacral authority is ultimately about.
To the extent that a sacral aura or charisma that legitimises the bond (a
controversial Weberian idea that we don’t need to rehearse here) intrudes on
brotherhood, it is still spread through the grids of mutuality and hierarchy,
and in this sense is concretely (ie ultimately, contractually) enforceable. It is
distributed along the overlapping chains of dual relations of being brothers
and is therefore much less ‘collectivised’ than in the case of a formal
incorporation of the associative bond into a unitary juridical personality.
814
Incorporation derives rather from a different anthropological model, the

relationship between father and son, and from the idea of sonship as
correlated to fatherhood (an idea that, rooted in ancient myth, became
central to Christian dogma and provided a specific sacral twist to patriarchal
authority). At the historical juncture when it folds itself into both political
modernity and modern capitalism, incorporation articulates civility in a
peculiar way, which resists a smooth alignment with the grand Anglo-
Scottish (later Anglo-American) narrative of modern civil society, bracketing
out the symbolic inheritance of Leviathan (in spite of the fact that this
political myth was most lucidly formulated by Hobbes, an English political
philosopher).
Inspired by such Weberian interrogations, we should look at the issue of
formal vs informal institutions in a manner that avoids either a Western or an
Islamic exceptionalist bias. There is no Islamic exceptionalism in the sense of
an excess of informality which escapes the rationality of formal law in a

Weberian sense, whereby civil law does include the law of incorporation.
Indeed, rather than being a problem of rationalisation, the issue at its root
concerns first of all the sacralisation (even in a context, like the Westphalian
one, where the sacredness of the state as the body of Leviathan is ultimately
understood as ‘secular’) of the collective bond as ‘body’ or the avoidance of
such a sacralisation. In other words, if such a sacralisation is understood to
be the necessary price to be paid for civility in its modern Western sense, then
it might be rational not to be willing to pay the price, especially in a context
like the post-Westphalian age, where global society is swinging back towards
a desacralization of such bonds (although slowly desacralised states can still
be quite functional to world order). Especially at a post-Westphalian stage of
development of Western political modernity the issue of an inner resistance
to incorporation and of a re-emergence of patterns and grids of Verbrüderung
(in ways obviously limited by the necessity of postcolonial states to
appropriate and change the original nature of the Leviathan) cannot be
evaded. This is especially true where centralised governance cannot respond
to the needs and capture the imagination of large layers of the population,
not even in times of constitutional revivalism.
The Islamic civilizational ecumene: cradle of a pre-modern

cosmopolitan civility?
The Weberian idea of ‘brotherhood’ can be used profitably for expanding on
abridged notions of civility while keeping the anchoring of this latter concept
in the Eliasian vision of a civilising process. As synthetically put by Mardin,
who referred here particularly to the Islamic historic experience preceding the
trauma of exposure and subjection to European colonialism: ‘Civil
society . . . does not translate into Islamic terms. Civility, which is a latent
content of civil society, does’.14 Vico, as the alternate modern (yet Western)
theorist of a type of civility not intimately married to the fate of the
Westphalian state and to its normatively liberal articulations, can lead us into
discussing the Islamic case far from any purported ‘exceptionalism’ vis-à-vis
815
ARMANDO SALVATORE
universal norms. According to Marshall Hodgson, Islamic civilisation was

built on a complex field of tensions among city commoners, agrarian gentries
and nomadic pastoralists–warriors. Such a dynamics, originating from an
Irano-Semitic geo-cultural core, put a premium on the ‘refereeing’ role
exercised by urban guardians of the moral law, and showed a capacity to
expand into a hemisphere-wide—and within the framework of the age,
global—ecumene. This process facilitated the absorption of patterns of
civility from other Afro-Eurasian civilisational realms, particularly the Inner
Asian constellations that provided the springboard to the ‘ecumenic’
dimension of the political–military role of the nomadic component as the
factor of cohesion of ruling elites and as the kernel of pre-modern, or perhaps
even proto-modern, state governance (a theme mainly associated with Ibn
Khaldun, yet vastly transcending his elaboration on the notion of ‘asabiyya
as the concept that should capture a type of cohesion ultimately finalised to
‘state building’).
Particularly in the age situated between the sunset of the classical caliphal
era and the onset of the modern epoch (during the epoch that Hodgson
termed the ‘middle periods’ of Islamic history, roughly stretching from the
10th to the 15th centuries), Muslim society appeared to be a society of
networks more than states, while the idea of a governance legitimised in
Islamic terms was collapsed into more fundamental speculations about issues
of general order, particularly through the rising role of organised forms of
Sufism (which it is reductive to depict as the ‘mystical’ dimension of Islam, in
thought and practice). In other words, governance and its legitimacy
happened to be seen as largely divorced from state power and variably
related to the manifold dimensions opened by Islam’s steady growth:
territorial, social, intellectual and even ‘spiritual’. During this era Sufi turuq
(brotherhoods) played a key role in Islam’s global expansion across the
Eurasian depths, into the Indian subcontinent and far Southeast Asia, and
into sub-Saharan Africa. Their flexible and semi-formal model of organisa-
tion and connectedness, of balancing competition, co-operation and
hierarchy, suited the dominance of the network model. Sufis also provided
new sources for a fresh wave of reflection on the integration of various
dimensions of Islam: juridical like philosophical, exoteric like esoteric. In
many ways they filled the legitimacy gap left behind by the collapse of
caliphal authority by constructing webs of relations that balanced vertical
authority (the role of charismatic sheikhs and living saints) with horizontal
cohesiveness (the brotherhood pattern, fitting the Weberian model quite
well).
The egalitarian potential of Irano-Semitic civilisation to counter the
hegemony of the gentry through a stratum of guardians of the norm reached
its zenith during a period that saw the eclipse of the legitimacy of state
sovereignty in Islamic terms, which pre-Islamic Persianate court culture had
also contributed to buttressing. This was the high time of the social power of
the ‘ulama’, of their autonomous culture providing cohesion to intricate yet
well ordered social arrangements. This hegemonic pattern was kept together
by an articulate yet shared Islamic idiom combining formal pronouncements
816
with a degree of informality bound together by outward adherence to the

same moral law—which resulted in a rather ‘contractual’ model of civil life.
Particularly during the epoch that witnessed the most dramatic expansion
of Islam (both as faith and as norm) across Afro-Eurasian depths, the vitality
of the Islamic ecumene was characterised by a mercantilist spirit that
favoured a type of contractualism with no need of a strong state. Here
Hodgson’s view of an Islamic contractual vs a European corporatist view of
the social bond comes to full fruition. And it shows that to construe an
Islamic exceptionalism on the basis of a purported deficit in institutionalising
autonomous collective bodies is a dubious operation, a truly ‘orientalist’ one,
anxious to open a wide cultural divide between the ‘West’ and the ‘world of
Islam’. Further it is to misrecognise Islam’s belonging to the ‘wider West’,
characterised by a common matrix of civility rooted in a brotherhood-based
governance of the social bond. One of the main features of the dynamism of
the Islamic ecumene was a low propensity towards what later became a
‘Western’ type of civility, because of the historical lack of formalised
municipal autonomies and of a state–civil society dialectic. Hodgson
emphasised, however, that it was exactly because of the absence of chartered
autonomies that the cosmopolitan tendencies of Muslim cities became
particularly accentuated. Internally the city was socially fragmented; yet
social groups in one city became closely tied to their counterparts in other
cities. They came to depend on the common norms of city life throughout the
Islamic world, which were a combination of shari’a and adab (rules of court
behavior comparable to those enucleated by Elias in the West European
case), whose trade-off also depended on whether an urban centre was more
mercantile-oriented or rather tied to ruling courts. In other words, Islamic
contractualism and cosmopolitanism could only thrive together because soft
municipal autonomies needed no incorporation—an idea that, according to
Weber, is theological or even ‘magical’ before it becomes political and
juridical, and can therefore be unattractive for a society culturally controlled
by referees of a moral law (shari’a) facilitating contractual relationships from
the family level to the commercial sphere .
As previously mentioned, the very notion of an autonomous civil realm in
a modern liberal sense can only be said to exist as a response to states
beginning to encroach on peoples’ lives in unprecedented and routinised ways
through institutions such as a permanent standing army and modern
administrative agencies. This was a complex and unique development,
whereby the state promoted the formation of a bourgeoisie both loyal to it
and autonomously entrepreneurial, an increasingly intimate marriage of state
regulation and capitalist markets. Specifically it was neither the rise of a
mercantilist spirit amenable to a capitalistic economy nor state centralisation
and regulation which were unique in themselves, but rather their combina-
tion. Such a unique development should be seen as a token of a distinctively
European exceptionalism (or what we might call the far Western Eurasian
exceptionalism of the Weberian ‘Occident’). It consists less in institutional
performance than in the particular legitimisation of institutions that become
consecrated, if not outright sacralised, in the form of, literally, collective,
817
ARMANDO SALVATORE
more than connective, bodies: from the municipal councils of the mediaeval
towns and cities to the monarchs and their councils.
According to this interpretation, within the Islamic ecumene it was not just
more difficult, but less necessary, to build up a state than the one that
emerged in Europe and became the ultimate guarantor of a specific type of
civility, implemented though the monopoly on violence and enforcing the
implementation of contracts, with a varying intervention of intermediate
bodies. What is specific to the state–civil society dualism in Europe is a
singular development: the imaginative rooting and normative success of the
idea of incorporation,15 since, after the late Middle Ages, the state remains,
at all stages of its development, the body-politic, the Leviathan, ie a
legitimate collective agent acting on behalf of collective security and public
welfare. Especially since the most recent Western narratives of civility have
put a premium on cosmopolitan opening and transborder connectedness,16
the dynamism of Islamic civilisation can no longer easily be downgraded to a

defective exception to a Western norm. It is rather the Western, albeit
hegemonic, road to building and propagating a normatively laden, cluster-
like notion of civility that appears anomalous. Just look at the detour it
needed before civility could claim a global normative status, through the
building of strong states that thrived and expanded via the formation of
colonial empires, characterized, unlike the Islamic expansion, by a sharp
discontinuity between ‘motherland’ and ‘colonies’.
Hodgson had the merit of underlining the fact that Islamic law facilitated
social mobility but was inimical to institutional development. In Max
Weber’s Economy and Society the question of moral vs formal law is more
explicitly the focus of analysis than the issue of contractualism vs
corporatism. Yet, matching Weber with Hodgson, it is possible to argue
that the absence of municipal law and formalised frameworks of self-
government in Islamic history does not amount to the lack of social
autonomy and civil agency. The coverage of overlapping dimensions of a
‘social contract’ through shari‘a is not a functional equivalent of Western
developments of Roman law for the simple ‘Weberian’ reason that the former
did not require the raising of the threshold of institutionalisation of collective
social agency through a sacralisation of collective bodies. Yet it should also
be observed that in the latter phase of the ‘middle periods’, through a
singular fusion of Irano-Semitic brotherhood ethos and Inner Asian nomadic
warrior–knightly codes, an original type of Sufi–knightly culture with strong
state-building potential saw the light: this was evident both in the Ottoman
and the Safavid cases, in spite of their finally diverging doctrinal outcomes
(orthodox Sunni vs Shi‘i).17 The state-building dynamics that originated
out of the organised violence of the Sufi–knightly confederations produced
a type of post-heroic civility that is different from, yet compares well with,
the Eliasian scheme illustrating the taming of the warrior ethos via an
increasingly effective confinement in centralised courts.
No doubt one should examine the fine patterns of each and every instance
of the civilising process itself before certifying analogies of outcome.
What can be said here on a theoretical level is that the process unfolds as
818
a long-term pattern of collective agency, interaction and co-ordination,

which cannot be unsettled as long as it works efficiently in providing a
balance between moderately formalised rules and a broad range of informal
arrangements facilitating mutuality, exchange and solidarity. In itself, during
the ‘middle periods’, the process appears, through the reconstruction of
historians like Hodgson, as neither an alternative type of state formation nor
simply as its dark side. The pattern mutates in parallel to the evolution of
techniques of control of the territory and transborder interconnectedness.
The first nucleus of the Ottoman state was based on such an inter-tribal and
inter-confessional coalition, with a Sufi orientation whose original nature,
even at the zenith of Ottoman power and prestige in the 16th century, was
never replaced by an essentialised charisma of sovereignty (which is common
even to different European cases, like England and France). Yet, by being not
only the main Islamic empire of the modern era, but also the one directly
confronting European powers (before being dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe/
on the Bosphorus’, ie on the borders of Europe), the Ottoman state was also
exposed to the influence of the hegemonic, global trajectory of the civilising
process originating from Europe. This became visible in the reform process of
the last period of the empire and especially in the founding and unfolding of
the Republic of Turkey.
Civilising as citifying vs the re-imagination of local and translocal

connectedness
Contrary to the instrumental view of some European authors from the
Enlightenment era (like Montesquieu), the Ottoman state did not embody the
despotic antithesis to European civility. It was, rather, based on a dual type
of civilising process. Adab was a cultural tradition whose sources were
distinct from the Qur’an and the hadith corpus. It was inherited from
Persianate court culture. A possible synthetic definition of adab is ‘the
ensemble of the ethical and practical norms of good life, ideally cultivated by
a class of literati in the context of a court culture’.18 An important feature of
the culture of adab as feeding into an Eliasian type of civilising process lies in
the fact that it was primarily a court culture, but also one that provided
patterns of civilised behavior, presenting a model to other layers of the
population. In this sense it was also innervating ‘state-building’:
It provided significant nexuses between general ideas of the body politic, the
main vectors of monopolization of power and patterns of intervention on
society (essentially, the organization of violence and taxation), the self-
understanding of emerging elites and the inward-projection of the norms
produced in the process and that resulted in containing and metamorphosing
violence.19
Yet it has escaped the attention of most scholars that the broader ‘reform’
discourse and programme that went through various stages in the Ottoman
realm during the 19th century transcended the adaptation of adab to
European patterns and colonial conditions, and resulted in a re-inscription of
819
ARMANDO SALVATORE
the social bond itself into the idea of ‘being/become citified’. Michael Gasper
has finely highlighted the many nuances of another keyword, tamaddun
(meaning ‘civilisation’ in the sense of ‘citifying’, including a consciously
steered and willed civilising process tied to urban life), as a key arrow of the
late 19th century Muslim reform discourse, within which Egypt played a
central role. This idea reflected the emerging ‘iron cage’ of civility in the era
of the colonial state out of a more complex and balanced tension between
city, countryside and desert or steppe within pre-colonial Muslim realms. In
the corresponding reform discourse a correct moral disposition tied to being
‘civil’ (muatmaddin) was considered necessary for the proper exercise of
practical knowledge. Ultimately (and paradoxically) the targets of tamaddun
were the fallahin (peasants). Discussions of the dangers of ignorance in
its many forms occupied a prominent place not only in the discourse of
Muslim reformers, but in the general press of the time as well. These
discussions reflected the virtues of the urban, educated population, opposed

to the purported ‘ignorance’ of the rural, uneducated fallahin.20 Seldom did
this plea result in a mere moralising discourse. It was more often sustained by
a view of objective social relations, or interdependencies, resulting from the
way such educated subjects were expected to enter into relationships with
each other.21
The development highlighted by Gasper is probably a specific variant—in
an environment where the city–countryside dynamic is less affected by a
nomadic component—of a wider process unfolding in the geopolitical realm
long hegemonised by the Ottoman Empire. Şerif Mardin has studied the issue
intensively with regard to the last period of the Empire and the ensuing
trajectory of the Turkish Republic, up to the current era characterised by the
rise to power and social hegemony of the Islamic AKP (Adalet and Kalkınma
Partisi). Mardin has suggested overcoming any dichotomy between
formalised civility and informal patterns of connectedness by emphasising
that whatever the ‘elective’ process of formation of confraternities, ie the
issue of the collective agency at play, the main structuring vector of what we
call here civility is always dependent on processes of formation of communitas
in the sense elucidated by Victor Turner.22 Mardin has suitably renamed the
issue at stake as one of ‘Islamic bonding’.
As Mardin himself reminds us, he was alerted to the growing symbolic
power of this dichotomy over the past century of Turkish history by Yakup
Kadri Karaosmano glu, a novelist and a prominent character in Turkish
intellectual history. Back in 1974 Mardin quoted Karaosmanoglu as
affirming a social and cultural dichotomy within Turkish society in the
familiarly crude terms of an ‘Oriental’ vs an ‘Occidental’ type of articulation
of the social bond, the former being represented by the mahalle. Definable as
the overlapping of informal relationships and governing structures on a local
level (from neighbourhood to municipality), the cultural flair of mahalle
became manifest as ‘that of a group of slothful males wearing loose
fitting cloaks and lounging in sleepy coffee houses where they listened to
blaring alaturka music’.23 In recent years, in the context of modernist
republican anxieties not just about the measures and reforms of the AKP-led
820
government but also about its broader social consequences and cultural
manifestations, Mardin has intervened in the Turkish press and with his
scholarly authority contributed to igniting a debate on so-called ‘mahalle
pressure’. Although the issue of the reinterpretation of mahalle as raised by
Mardin is quite broad and complex, not surprisingly press discussion has lent
primary attention to the allegedly conformist, and therefore not only
‘unmodern’ but ultimately less-than-civil if not outright uncivil, nature of
mutual relations rooted in such neighbourhood environments. Thus Mardin
has tried to scratch beneath the simple stereotypes that oriented the analyses
of what he derogatorily termed ‘journalistic sociology’. This intervention of
serious, theory-informed historical sociology into a public debate revolved
around Mardin’s correction of the above quoted, stereotyped image of the
mahalle. He reminded readers how in the Ottoman Empire mahalle was the
equivalent of a municipal unit with a specific authority structure, while also,
and quite indissolubly, functioning as a matrix of ‘socio-religious’ group

formation. This is, in its specific context, a good instance of what in
Weberian parlance is a brotherhood or, as Mardin prefers to say, Bund: a
German word that is shunned by Weber and especially by later German
sociologists for its fascist accretions.
Noteworthy is that from Weberian analysis to Turkish-republican
journalistic sociology what has been lost is the ‘structural’ matrix of group
formation and function, which in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed some
congruous level of institutionalisation at the municipal level. What has been
more recently put into relief in the Turkish public debate is, instead, a less-
then-civil dimension of cultural behaviour, mainly characterised by improper
appearance: an impression basically reflecting the gaze of the modern West,
concerned as it is with a purported deficit in the alignment of outward
conduct and inward morality in non-Western contexts. Yet Şerif Mardin tells
us that this is not just the outcome of a myopic ideological ‘otherisation’ of
Islamic traditions as the inner obstacle to republican secular modernism. In
the past decades of the Ottoman Empire the structural aspects of Weberian
brotherhood underlying the function of mahalle started to be overlaid by the
emergence of a social imaginary, supported by a deeply cultural process
consisting in reconstructing mahalle as the marker of ‘Islamic bonding’. The
first key transformation allowing for this disconnection between the
‘structure’ and the ‘culture’ of mahalle has, according to Mardin, been
the increasing detachments of the ‘ulama’ from their mahalle clientele, which
became evident in the course of the emergence of a public sphere controlled
by formerly Ottoman literati in the late Empire. The result was the quasi-
homologation of the educating–civilising role of the ‘ulama’ to one of the
bureaucrats/literati, the practitioners of adab (edep in Turkish). Did the
Ottoman Empire with this transformation—remembering Vico—enter a
truly post-heroic stage of civility by overcoming the earlier duality of the
civilising process (shari‘a vs. adab)?
For sure, by de-institutionalising the mahalle Ottoman reformers set it free
to become the matrix for a process of re-imagination of community based
less on tight cultural traditions than on the competencies of the new
821
ARMANDO SALVATORE
‘lackluster ‘‘amateur’’ specialists of Islam who knitted their own interpreta-

tion of Islamic traditions by exploiting the media (and in a more general
sense the emerging public sphere in Turkey)’.24 This process prepared the
terrain for the emergence of new Islamic leaders like Said Nursi and
Fethullah Gülen, the latter being a particularly strong advocate of an Islamic
educational civility that can be folded into universal norms almost at
command. Yet this latter process did not occur in purely virtual or artificially
recreated spaces. It unfolded in parallel to an inversion of the late Ottoman
and early republican centralisation process and in the context of a process of
administrative decentralisation that retrieved the importance of municipa-
lities. Now the Islamic re-imagination of mahalle carries an extra-territorial
dimension, and so becomes the carrier of a corresponding form of civility.
While in the long term the most obvious beneficiary thus far has been the
ruling AKP (which built up its strength first of all in the municipalities), the
swift success of the Fethullah Gülen community, whose goals are not aligned
with those of the AKP but are more truly transnational, witnesses the
unfolding of a less state-bound type of civility.
Mardin concludes by noting that, while it is easy to see in the movement of
Fethullah Gülen the most powerful example of this power of reconstruction
through education and the media, it would be more useful—pace Gülen
himself in spite of his understandable insistence on the unique character of
his movement—to attempt a broader characterisation of the aggregative
forces that work across space and time in Muslim societies in rooting local
patterns of civility within broader translocal patterns of connectedness.
Accordingly, the ultimate frontier of a reconstructed Islamic civility takes
form around the educational–civilising programme carried by a brother-
hood-like transnational organization. More than a new avant garde, the
brotherhood of Fethullah Gülen provides just the latest example of the
Eliasian idea of an internalisation of codes of conduct functioning as
the ‘inner’ engine of the global civilising process. The hidden axis between
the public dimension of state law and the functional privateness of homo
clausus needs to be continually recreated through means of communication
of models of behaviour and mechanisms of inculcation of norms of
conduct which summon back the bottom-up process of making sense of
the world from within the ‘lifeworld’. This sphere of quotidian life is
imbued with customary meanings, which are in turn rooted in networks of
mutual obligations. What the example of the success of the ‘community’
of Fethullah Gülen shows is that standard accounts of Eliasian civility
discount a poor sensitivity towards the extent to which a civilising process
has to rely on a culturally specific imaginary that is inevitably subject to a
piecemeal reconstruction, unfolding in parallel with the transformations of
Leviathan’s successors and approximations (from the late Empire to the
new Republic). One could suggest that the rationality embedded in the
process mainly resides in the competence to anticipate effects through an
increasing internalisation of constraints: a competence that actors can
best be taught through culturally specific modes of education and
inculcation.
822
Conclusion: the metamorphosis of civility at the margins of political agendas

Is civility the ghost or the essence of civil society? Or it it rather its obverse,
which thrives in pure form when the ‘moral sense’ postulated as its glue by
the Scottish Enlightenment has dried up or revealed itself for what it was:
a naı̈ve late-utopian screen covering up an emerging an-ethical order
(basically a late-Westphalian one)? Žižek would seem to agree with the latter
answer when he suggests that civility ‘supplements the lack or collapse of
the substance of mores’.25 But he also emphasises that civility rules over the
need for an ‘intersubjective space in which, through complex interaction,
a solution can be agreed upon’.26 Here we come extraordinarily close to what
a civility declined in an Islamic idiom, by selectively invoking and
implementing Muslim traditions (from ‘juridical’ to ‘mystical’, from fiqh to
tasawwuf, including the ways to bridge their inherent tension), looks like.
Perhaps paradoxically, this is the shift from the last wave of the ‘Western
dream’ of civil society in the 1990s,27 to the dystopian discourse on civility
escalating in the frame of the securitisation implemented by the war on terror
and cognate campaigns. Islamic de-institutionalised or under-institutiona-
lised practices of civility facilitating local and translocal connectedness enjoy,
paradoxically, a new legitimacy (alternately as a threat’ or as a ‘resource’ for
the imperial mega-Leviathan). As a result, they have the potential to appear
as particularly tangible and concrete practices, in terms of their capacity to
provide coherence and meaning to civil bonds, certainly more tangible than
any militarised slogans or residual utopia. It is certainly too early to conclude
that emerging transnational forms of Islamic civility exalt movement and
dispersion and shun institutionalisation, or at least contribute to lowering its
threshold. In the era of the war on terror and of its humanitarian precedents
and follow-ups, civility still has to cope with Westphalian paradigms of
sovereignty, now metamorphosing in parallel to the expanding extraterritor-
ial prerogatives of the hegemon, now ever less restricted to a single
superpower and ever more resembling the shadow of an inconspicuous, yet
militarised superstate. As a result, civility increasingly depends on a fragile
trade-off between a cultural propensity and a cultural resistance to the idea of
incorporation, in its long journey from mediaeval municipal autonomies to
such a shadow of a global Leviathan. As much as this idea is reflected in the
civil codes that have been almost universally adopted in the Middle East and
in the wider Muslim world in colonial and postcolonial times, with the cover
provided by an unending series of constitutional reforms, the degree of its
‘ultimate’ (since culturally rooted) legitimacy is not comparable to its status
in Europe and the ‘West’. Incorporation binds ‘power’ (both economically
and politically) in ways that diverse and often contradictory manifestations
of a ‘new’ civility can, to some extent, play with, without necessarily
succumbing to it.
Indeed, even with regard to Europe, I would be cautious in affirming an
irreversible cultural rooting of civility as necessarily bound to respond to
sovereignty. I would rather opt for a neo-Vichian minimalist consensus,
according to which civility is inherently post-heroic: in the first instance
823
ARMANDO SALVATORE
(particularly in certain historically key locales) tied to relaxing mores and

pragmatic interests, protected by a civil law guaranteed by the state, yet in
more general terms quite amorphous and protean. This might be especially
the case when civility is exposed to the influence of intensified migrations that
also support the formation of transnational networks, and cannot be
absorbed without residues (dialectically, as Žižek would wish to see, or
otherwise) in the allegedly superior rationality of the state.
Rather than a common normative ground, we should speak of a common
introspective reflex modelled on the Eliasian model, based on which the
patterns of civility consecrated ‘on high’ (both through securitisation and via
Western-controlled NGOs) are inhaled down the hierarchy of the world system
and interfere with more mobile patterns at both local and translocal levels.
These are nurtured by much more untamable imaginaries, but do not
necessarily clash with the global legal frameworks and can sometimes even
benefit from them (as in the case of the deregulated micro-entrepreneurship of

the Anatolian province that provides the main infrastructures of the Islamic
imaginary in the Turkish case). In this unstable context the kernel of civility as
legally and morally framed self-restraint, and therefore as a key presupposi-
tion of co-operation and connectedness, can easily slip into an imaginary of
incivility (now, as I edit this conclusion, also luring behind Western anxieties
about the ‘true nature’ of the revolutionaries of Cyrenaica), depending on
who articulates the political agenda and based on whose priorities.
The key differentiating factor here probably lies buried in the fact that the
municipal origins of civility are articulated in different ways depending on
whether power is incorporated or not, and on whether city vs countryside
dynamics also includes a nomadic (‘tribal’) component that can at least
symbolically rewrite the idea of the law (nomos as nomadic pasture vs nomos
as positive norm28). At the very least, the growing Islamic focus on
transnational interconnectedness invites us to transcend a eurocentric
modernist approach to civility tied to models of governance and solidarity
confined within the rationales of nation-states and of their successors, like the
European Union.
Notes
1 S Žižek, ‘Post-wall’, London Review of Books, 19 November 2009, p 10.
2 As a late addendum on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of late 2010/early 2011, which brought
down Ben Ali and Mubarak after 24 and 30 years, respectively, of dictatorial government (the Tunisian
one was a particularly harsh dictatorship that was also facilitated at its beginning by the Italian
military services), one can observe that, at least at first sight, in comparison with the 1990s, the rhetoric
of civil society is, at best, marginal among key actors and observers alike. In an interview for the Italian
state TV channel Rai News 24 one blogger—who played a key role in the first stage of the revolt in
Tunisia, was imprisoned, and finally released—bluntly stated that the only actors he trusts in the new
situation are ‘his friends and the military’: not a typical pledge of ‘trust’ in and within civil society. The
same applies to the leading activists and bloggers of Egypt’s ‘Facebook revolution’. This is also
confirmed by the astounding popularity enjoyed by the ‘official’ Facebook page created by the
Egyptian supreme council of the armed forces right after the removal of Mubarak from power. It
reached half a million ‘fans’ in a few days and navigated towards the million target in a few weeks. For
the importance of the theme of trust with regard to civil society, see A Seligman, The Idea of Civil
Society, New York: Free Press, 1992; and Seligman, The Problem of Trust, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997.
824
3 S Žižek, Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2010, p 324.

4 N Elias Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976 (first published 1939).
5 See F Volpi & F Cavatorta (eds), Democratization in the Muslim World: Changing Patterns of Authority
and Power, London: Routledge, 2007.
6 Ş Mardin, ‘Civil society and Islam’, in J Hall (ed), Civil Society: Theory, History and Comparison,
Cambridge: Polity, 1995, p 295.
7 A Salvatore, The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007, pp 215–241.
8 Ibid.
9 Mardin, ‘Civil society and Islam’, p 288.
10 Salvatore, The Public Sphere, pp 186–209.
11 W Nippel, ‘The Napoleonic empire and the Europe of nations’, in A Pagden (ed), The Idea of Europe:
From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p 132.
12 ‘According to Western interpretations, the rigid caste system established in India after the victory of
Brahmanism prevented (particularly through its exclusion of any kind of commensality between
members of different castes) the emergence of any confraternal structure. In the Chinese case it was the
ancestor cult that had the corresponding effect, since it bound the city-dwellers to their respective sibs,
or clans, and villages of origin’. Ibid.
13 M Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen: JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972, pp 397–440.
14 Mardin, ‘Civil society and Islam’, p 279.

15 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, pp 429–436. In these pages Weber contrasted the Anglo-Saxon and
the German models of incorporation and institution building.
16 MA Bamyeh, The Ends of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
17 B Rahimi ‘Between chieftaincy and knighthood: a comparative study of Ottoman and Safavid origins’,
Thesis Eleven, 76(1), 2004, pp 85–102.
18 A Salvatore, ‘Eccentric modernity? An Islamic perspective on the civilizing process and the public
sphere’, European Journal of Social Theory, 14(1), 2011, p 59.
19 Ibid.
20 M Gasper ‘’Abdallah Nadim, Islamic reform, and ‘‘ignorant’’ peasants: state-building in Egypt?’, in A
Salvatore (ed), Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam, Vol 3, Muslim Traditions and Modern Techniques of
Power, Hamburg/New Brunswick, NJ: Lit/Transaction, 2001. See also Gasper, The Power of
Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
21 Salvatore, ‘Eccentric modernity?’, pp 61–62.
22 Ş Mardin, ‘A Muslim imaginary’, unpublished paper, June 2009.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Žižek, Living in the End Times, p 324, emphasis in the original. What perhaps needs emphasising is that
these are among the very few words Žižek italicises in his more than 400-page-long book on the post-
utopian ‘end times’. I should add here that in this essay I have used and twisted some key references of
Žižek to civil society and civility in such a way that he would probably disagree with my core argument
on the an-ethical character of the ‘new’ civility. Especially in his latest book he tends to emphasise a
residual ‘ethical substance’ of civility that is due to resurface—‘dialectically’, as he would say, in his
neo-Hegelian parlance—in spite of all odds during our uncertain journey through ‘the end times’.
26 Ibid.
27 Mardin, ‘Civil society and Islam’.
28 C Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York:
Telos, 2006, p 344.
Notes on contributor
Armando Salvatore is a sociologist of culture and communication who
investigates various dimensions of religious traditions and secular formations
in historical and comparative perspective and works on public sphere theory.
He teaches at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, Department of Social
Sciences and Humanities, and runs a research project on sovereignty and
solidarity at the Humboldt Center for Social and Political Research, Berlin.
His latest book is The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam
(Palgrave 2007, 2010).
825

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On: 21 June 2011

Third World Quarterly

Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal

Online publication date: 21 June 2011

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Civility: between disciplined

that determine this threshold. It investigates the trade-oﬀ between formalised

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/11/050807–19

revolutions, as a consolidated ‘post-wall’ present and stated that, far from

ultimately peaceful system of sovereign nation-states. Such ultimately irenic

interaction with other subjects. Elias paid particular attention to early

post-Westphalian: a mega-Leviathan impersonating the authority of the

Civil life in the Islamic sphere

of citizenship. This permanent ‘political crisis’ accredits the sphere of civility

Therefore, treating ‘civility’ as a mere late-comer in a long genealogy of both

(formal and informal) kinds become institutionalised within diﬀerent

Entangled genealogies between classicist bias and liberal spins

uncontested idea of civility, not even in the trajectories of what we identify as

Weberian brotherhood: the mother of all forms of civility?

associational bond and of deliberation procedures than found in the

Incorporation derives rather from a diﬀerent anthropological model, the

an excess of informality which escapes the rationality of formal law in a

The Islamic civilizational ecumene: cradle of a pre-modern

universal norms. According to Marshall Hodgson, Islamic civilisation was

with a degree of informality bound together by outward adherence to the

the dynamism of Islamic civilisation can no longer easily be downgraded to a

a long-term pattern of collective agency, interaction and co-ordination,

Civilising as citifying vs the re-imagination of local and translocal

discussions reﬂected the virtues of the urban, educated population, opposed

and quite indissolubly, functioning as a matrix of ‘socio-religious’ group

‘lackluster ‘‘amateur’’ specialists of Islam who knitted their own interpreta-

Conclusion: the metamorphosis of civility at the margins of political agendas

(particularly in certain historically key locales) tied to relaxing mores and

beneﬁt from them (as in the case of the deregulated micro-entrepreneurship of

3 S Žižek, Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2010, p 324.

14 Mardin, ‘Civil society and Islam’, p 279.

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