Editors’ Note: Alejandro Portes continues HistPhil’s forum on “uncivil civil society.” I have adapted the title of this comment from the classic article by Sheri Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” published in 1997. Since that time, several additional studies have documented the close relationship between German associationism and the rise … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Kevin Butterfield continues HistPhil’s forum on “uncivil civil society.” Historians and social scientists studying the civil society of the early United States have rediscovered fears and anxieties within the much-celebrated notion of Americans as a “nation of joiners.” The emerging world of mutual aid organizations, reform societies, political clubs, and voluntary associations of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Candice Delmas continues HistPhil‘s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society” with a defense of uncivil disobedience. There is a ‘crisis of civility’, we are told, an ‘epidemic of incivility.’ We must #ReviveCivility to preserve our fragile bonds in civil society. We need to break free of our online bubbles and learn to talk and … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Nancy Rosenblum continues HistPhil’s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society.” ‘Civil society’: the phrase comes with built-in praise and promise. The crowded sphere of voluntary associations standing between public political life and private affairs is defined as sociable and civil. What civic education in public schools is for children, civil society is for promoting … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Sheri Berman continues HistPhil’s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society,” revisiting her seminal article, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” in World Politics. In 1997 I published an article entitled “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” that challenged a growing consensus on the part of academic and non-academic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Erin Pineda continues HistPhil’s forum on ‘Uncivil Civil Society,’ examining the civil dimensions of civil disobedience and their relation to our conceptions of civil society. The details hardly need rehearsing: on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building, mobilized by the belief that the recent … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer continues HistPhil‘s forum on ‘Uncivil Civil Society,’ highlighting the challenges in turning to the contrary-to-fundamental-public-policy doctrine laid out in the 1983 Bob Jones University Supreme Court case as a means of policing uncivil civil society. In a recent article, Zachary B. Pohlman and I consider the application to churches of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Simone Chambers and Jeffrey S. Kopstein kick off HistPhil‘s online forum on “Uncivil Civil Society,” revisiting an important article they wrote on the topic two decades ago. The “Uncivil Civil Society” forum will examine challenges to the neo-Tocquevillian strain of thinking that poses strong links between civil society and civil, liberal, and democratic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: As the first contributor to an ongoing forum that HistPhil will be publishing over the next several months on the “uncivil” nature and histories of civil society, Chiara Cordelli illuminates the uncivil dimensions of philanthropy. Philanthropy, once again, has stepped in to meet unmet needs. The amount donated in response to the pandemic … Continue reading
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