INTRODUCTION CIVIL REPAIR AND SOCIAL THEORY

The essays in this book develop a democratic theory of social reconstruction, not in a normative manner – the history of Western thought is replete with good intentions – but in a manner that is resolutely empirical and realistic. I advance a sociological theory of how democratic reconstruction works and deploy it to illuminate striking cases of civil repair in real social life.

Which is not to say that normative aspirations have no place. The theory being developed here is inspired by normative aspirations for democracy; it is not simply social reconstruction but civil reconstruction that is the topic of this book. What is crucial, however, is not whether theory has a normative dimension, but whether moral aspirations can be institutionalized inside actually existing societies. To the degree they are, a civil sphere exists, a relatively independent social world structured by a critical utopian discourse about the good society. While such a civil–normative discourse is highly generalized, it is continuously applied to the exigencies of time and space by communicative institutions – journalism, literature, voluntary associations, social movements, and polling. The result is public opinion, the continuous stream of judgments about whether individuals and groups, power holders, institutions, and events are civil or anti-civil, and to what degree. If they are deemed to endanger the civil-sacred, they trigger indignation about injustice, and from such outrage there emerge powerful social sentiments about “what is to be done” – today, in the here and now – to make society a more just, more democratic place.

At the core of civil reconstruction is extending and deepening feelings of social solidarity. Only if we feel connected to another will we be concerned about one another’s dignity, about the restrictions that inhibit others’ actions, about what we can do to help others become more free. The Bible’s golden rule and Kant’s categorical imperative mandate us to treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves. The social contract is a more mundane deux ex machina, calling us to respect the putative promises that allowed humankind to move from the state of nature to the protections of an orderly civil life. John Rawls suggested that justice will be achieved only if we can return to the “original position”; only if we don a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing our own social position will we be able to think fairly about just social policies, for we ourselves may be among the least privileged. These deeply humanitarian injunctions are morally instructive thought experiments, but they say little about how to get from here to there. One can do so only by developing a sociological understanding of how solidarity can be deepened, amid the stresses and strains, the inequalities and the repressions, the imagined fears and hoped-for possibilities, of actually existing social life.

Showing us how to get from here to there is exactly what social theory has too often failed to provide. The great social theories that have entranced the modern imagination have been unremittingly critical. Mired in despair about the modern condition, they offer scant hope for social reconstruction. They fail to illuminate the discursive pathways, the symbolic and institutional inventions, the creativity and persistence that are sustained even by the deeply compromised civil spheres of actually existing democracies.

While Marx sat in the reading room of the British Museum theorizing a capitalist order of ruling-class domination and unadulterated exploitation, the British civil sphere, for all its fissures and faults, made it possible for workers to fight for their rights, organize trade unions, shorten the working day, make alliances with middle-class reformers, elect members to parliament, and eventually put Fabian and Socialist parties into positions of state power. Weber likened modernity to a cold and hard cage of steel, theorizing the vertical powers of bureaucracy rather than the horizontal solidarities of democracy. Imagining a thoroughgoing process of cultural rationalization, Weber’s modernity banished not only utopian hopes for justice but also the very possibility of a meaningful and ethical collective life. Even as Durkheim put solidarity at the center of his thought, he was convinced that the core conditions of contemporary modernity – industrialization, secularization, and institutional differentiation – allowed egoism and anomie to prevail. Foucault built upon these pathways of despairing critique, subordinating truth to disciplinary power, obliterating autonomy by translating selfhood into subject position, and replacing self-government with governmentality. Bourdieu theorized society as a ruthless struggle for field position, mocking the very possibility of a moral universalism that might sustain a democratic life. Bauman equated modernity with alienation, homogenization, and powerlessness; his master binary of modern/postmodern obliterated the difference between democratic and anti-democratic modern forms; his late postmodernism decried a liquification that renders social actors supine.

There are good empirical and normative reasons to investigate the demonic dark sides of modernity (Alexander 2013) and to worry, if not despair, about escaping their awful effects – war and colonialism; orientalism and genocide; patriarchy; racial, ethnic, and religious hatred. But modernity is not only darkness. The one-sidedness of critical social theory is a product of the narrowness of its theoretical imagination, not keen observation of social reality. Too often it has failed to recognize the democratic thread in modern life, to give space and power to the emancipatory and participatory ideas that, while hardly triumphant, have pulsated persistently throughout the 2,500-year history of Western social life.1

If it was Weber who established the framework for a meaning-oriented historical sociology, it is to Weber we must look for the democracy gap in modern social science. In his study of Western history, Weber focused on religion and economics. He measured cultural power in terms of developments inside the Judeo-Christian tradition, ignoring the extraordinary force of “secular” civic-republicanism. Where is the Greek polis in Weber’s writing, with its genial republican thinkers and its revolutionary democratic institutions? Where are the extraordinarily influential, if also deeply compromised, Roman institutions of Senate and law, and their flawed but inspiring imperial efforts at extending cosmopolitan citizenship? Where are medieval parliaments? Weber is silent about the social and cultural achievements of the great Renaissance city states, inspired by humanism, outward looking and significantly democratic (Skinner 1978a; Pocock 1975). It is rather to the Reformation that Weber gives historical pride of place, fascinated by how its dour, self-lacerating asceticism energized modern capitalism. Blinkered by his focus on religion and economy, this foundational sociological theorist had almost nothing to say about the cultural and institutional foundations of Western democracy, whether republican or liberal.2 The seventeenth-century democratic revolution in England, the American and French revolutions a century later, the Age of Democracy in the century after that – these world historical movements that shaped modern civil spheres so powerfully merit scarcely a mention.3

It is true that the doyens of Western political theorizing were not sociologists but elite philosophers, whose writing is much more normative then empirical. But, as Quentin Skinner and colleagues have shown to great effect, republican ideals, and theorizing about how to institutionalize them, sank deep into the grassroots of late medieval and early modern societies (Skinner 1978a; Pocock 1975; Pettit 1999). By the end of the first millennium, republicanism was not only an intellectual idea but a social force capable of producing significant civil power, one that was deeply interlarded with Axial religious convictions about the critical leverage exerted by divine judgment. Martin Luther was able to reform the Church because he was immersed in the ideals of the republican tradition (Skinner 1978b). The founding figures of American democracy were cosmopolitan Christians and the masses fighting the American Revolution were God-fearing men and women, but the political ideas that inspired them and the Constitution they created were organized along democratic, republican-cum-liberal lines (Bailyn 1967; Wood 1969).

The civil sphere is much more than the extension of republican tradition. It is, in the first place, a thickly elaborated semiotic discourse, which defines the motives, relations, and institutions that inform not only the civil-sacred but also the anti-civil-profane. Social reconstruction is motivated by the need for purification; it is an effort to transform what has come to be experienced as evil and dirty into new social relationships, new motives, and new institutions, which can be experienced as sacred and good. Civil repair is triggered when feminists can persuasively pollute traditional male behavior as patriarchal and anti-democratic; when Black civil rights activists succeed in polluting whiteness as racial domination; when Dalit protestors can convince other Indians that casteism represents not Hindu purity but anti-civil filthy domination. Social activists’ harshly critical judgments can inspire successful social and cultural movements when they are broadcast...