Is civility a sham?

The first work of its kind in English, Roger Williams's handbook of Narragansett language is a conversation manual, travel narrative, ethnography and collection of moralizing poetry by turns. Before he was exiled by Massachusetts Bay and founded the tolerant colony of Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, Williams learned about the challenges of toleration and "un-murderous" coexistence first-hand among the local American tribes. His discovery that there was more civility among the Native Americans than the "unchristian Christians" of New England inspired his theory of "mere" civility as the bond of tolerant societies divided by fundamental disagreement.

Today, politicians warn that we face a crisis of civility. But is civility really a virtue, or is it a covert demand for conformity that silences dissent? This book sheds light on our predicament by examining early modern fears about wars of words as an obstacle to religious toleration. From early modern hate speech laws to fights about the "offensiveness" of atheistical speech, Bejan shows that, when it comes to crises of civility, there is truly nothing new under the sun. Against efforts to silence or exclude the "uncivil" from public life, she defends the theory of mere civility put forward by Roger Williams, the 17th-century founder of Rhode Island, as a promising path forward in our current crisis — one that fundamentally challenges modern assumptions about what a tolerant, or civil, society should look like.

This brilliant book explores our discomfort with political persuasion as an irrational appeal to prejudice by tracing the "rhetoric against rhetoric" historically, from Hobbes to Kant and Habermas. Beautifully and clearly written, Garsten's book offers a master-class in historically-informed political theory, recovering an art of persuasive speaking that appeals to one’s fellow-citizens as they are and where they are as a virtue not a vice — and one essential to truly democratic politics.

Kaplan traces the many different strategies of coexistence adopted by European Christians in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. From divided cathedrals to hidden churches, to forest masses and foreign embassies, this fascinating book demonstrates how the toleration of religious differences was widely practiced before it was theorized — and that its "progress" was far from obvious or straightforward. Many of the early modern challenges Kaplan describes are familiar, and the "flashpoints" of conflict recognizable today.