Comments on: Civil Society and Empire

By: chris

chris — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:49:13 +0000

I wonder if I am the only person so old as to find this usae of ‘civil society’ a bit confusing. In the god/bad old days, the phrase sinply meant a political society.

By: Patrick S. O'Donnell

Patrick S. O'Donnell — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:34:50 +0000

Jim,

Thanks for providing a further introduction to and clarifying comments about your book. I look forward to reading it.

By: Jim Livesey

Jim Livesey — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:53:41 +0000

Pat, always happy to find another person who still cares about questions of method in intellectual history. As it turns out this book doesn’t really need too much scaffolding. People like Keane and Kaldor all acknowledge that the concept, in the form we still use it, was put together in the eighteenth century. No need for any complicated argument about causality, agency for ideas or path dependency when the theorists ask you for a grounded account of where they got their concept. One of the things I’m most anxious to do in the book is to separate accounts of association, a technique for putting together any kind of complex social system, from civil society, which is a way of describing the norms for associations. So the coffee house stuff (and all that wonderful stuff about agricultural shows, sorry Chris) is really secondary to the argument.
There is a more systematic debate to be had about responses to Cambridge School intellectual history, but one thing at a time.

By: Patrick S. O'Donnell

Patrick S. O'Donnell — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:05:12 +0000

al,

I plan to. Perhaps others have already read the book.

By: alex

alex — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 11:31:17 +0000

Dunno, Pat, maybe you could read it?

By: nonesuch

nonesuch — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 04:05:23 +0000

I just read “Bowen’s Court” by Elizabeth Bowen, which is obsessed with the Irish provincial elite, I wonder if it figures in this book, I look forward to reading it. Bowen’s Court is interesting – bit long. Found it more arresting than the bits of her fiction I’ve read thus far, need to try more of the fiction. Haven’t been gripped as of yet.

By: Patrick S. O'Donnell

Patrick S. O'Donnell — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:30:51 +0000

I wonder whether or not these alternative “roots” of civil society (the ‘bourgeois public sphere’) took the same or similar form to their (later?) counterparts elsewhere in Europe (e.g., Britain, France and Germany in Habermas’s stylized account) namely, as bourgeois coffeehouses, salons, “table societies,” and so forth.

I’m also curious to what extent, if any, the book might rely on “genetic” and/or post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments (which need not be fallacious). This was prompted by the following from the book’s summary at the link to the publisher’s page: “Livesey demonstrates how western governments, for example, have appealed to the values of civil society in their projections of power in Bosnia and Iraq.”

By: alex

alex — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:10:05 +0000

Bloody interesting bloke, Jim. My meatspace alter-ego holds him in high regard as an intellectual historian.

By: Chris Brooke

Chris Brooke — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:15:39 +0000

Is it mostly about agricultural shows? (I’d be very happy if it were mostly about agricultural shows.)