The Politics of Politeness

Politeness is political. It is easy to disregard our everyday, street-level interactions and the politeness, or impoliteness, by which they are marked, but those interactions determine the quality of the social atmosphere we inhabit, and democracies cannot flourish without an atmosphere congenial to their ends. We must therefore enlarge our understanding of citizenship to encompass the democracy of everyday living, and we must learn to think politically about the dilemmas of politeness it presents.

The Politics of Politeness develops the first sustained account of 'ordinary citizenship'. Arguing for the political significance of everyday urban interactions, Edyvane proposes an interpretation of politeness as civility and as a key political practice for democracies. Against recent conceptualisations of polite civility as a 'communicative' virtue, the book elaborates an innovative 'ceremonial' account that takes seriously the ritual-like character of polite interaction, and its embeddedness in a larger civilisational discourse.

Drawing on an eclectic range of sources from empirical ethnography to novels and TV shows, the book offers a new perspective on familiar dilemmas of everyday politeness. What should you do when codes of manners embarrassingly clash? Should you say something when a shop assistant slights another customer, or should you mind your own business? How should you finesse awkward encounters with beggars and vagrants? And is there ever any place for rudeness in polite society? By treating these dilemmas as political problems, as problems of democratic citizenship, we gain fresh insight into them: into why they matter, and how to navigate them more wisely.