Few causes in democratic politics can seem more quixotic, more Pollyannaish, and more superficial than the call for more civility. Who, after all, would identify incivility, among the many problems and injustices of the world, as the issue worth spending time and energy fighting? Understood as bad manners or impoliteness, incivility seems simply to be the price paid for a contentious and participatory politics open to people who really do disagree with one another on fundamental questions. The call for a more “civil” politics can thus appear as little more than a whiny complaint from the haves against the insistent and disruptive language of the have-nots as they demand to be heard and heeded. Civility can therefore seem to be a defensive and inherently conservative demand and, worse, one that is not courageous or straightforward enough to defend the status quo it implicitly prefers.

There are moments in public life, however, when even the most committed skeptic of civility will find it difficult not to wish for more of it. When negotiations over important matters in Congress break down over a careless ad hominem remark, or when verbal disagreements on the street or in the public sphere erupt into fatal violence, one is reminded of just how fragile the peaceful and productive practice of political controversy is. When President Obama called for more civility during his remarks at the memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011, it would have taken a hard person to roll his or her eyes at the sentiment. To anyone who has personally borne the brunt of hateful speech, the harms feel real enough. One imagines that even those scholars who spoke out against the restrictiveness of civility at the conference from which this volume arose would have been offended had their voices been drowned out by insults and interruptions from the audience.