The emergence of civil society in the eighteenth century

In this sequel to Civility and Society in Western Europe, 1300-1600, Marvin Becker continues his study of the interior life of Western culture. Here Becker treats the rise of civil society in England and Scotland as it worked to reorganize the spaces and practices that constituted human sociability. For Becker, the emergence of civil society marks the tilt from familiarity toward impersonality, from public toward private, from social solidarity toward self-interest. He shows how these cultural changes from an archaic to a commercial social model called for new approaches to human nature, ethics, and politics, which Becker summarizes as a scaling down of expectations. Through an analysis of the writings of Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and others, and culminating in the leading figures of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment, Becker traces the decline of the medieval conception of society, characterized by the correct performance of duties and obligations and which prized above all else honor, heroism, and charitable benevolence. In its stead emerged a new view of society based on self interest and privacy and in which sociability was reduced to the minimum required to guarantee economic freedom and property rights. The result projected a notion of society as an abstract entity with a life of its own, independent of personal ties of duty and obligation. This concept came to fruition in England and Scotland at what Becker calls a "privileged moment," when political and religious stability combined with rapid commercial expansion. Although there were differences in the ways their societies were transformed, eighteenth-century England and Scotland provide the clearest expression of the newly emerged civil society.