Derek Edyvane's "The Politics of Politeness"

Derek Edyvane is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He was previously a lecturer and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York where he earned his PhD. He works on incivility, injustice, citizenship, and the ethics of political resistance and is the author of two books: Community and Conflict (2007) and Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil (2012). He was awarded the Political Studies Harrison Prize for his article 'Incivility as Dissent' (2020).

Edyvane applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of Politeness: Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life, with the following results:

Politeness is often imagined as a stuffy affair of rigid conformity to social rules and conventions. But when we look more closely at how politeness actually works on the ground of everyday living, a much more interesting picture emerges.

Page 99 of The Politics of Politeness, which falls almost exactly halfway through the book and somewhere in the middle of Chapter 4, explores what happens when the usual norms of politeness are unclear or contested. In moments like these, politeness doesn’t retreat - it gets creative.

Taking the example of a shop-keeper who code-switches his manner depending on the customer, page 99 contends that this isn’t just savvy customer service, but rather a kind of social improvisation. In many everyday settings, politeness actually consists in the wisdom to depart from rigid etiquette and to adapt. It’s about crafting interactions that honour a deeper ‘civilizational’ ideal: the will to live decently alongside other people.

In this way, page 99 informs the reader of one of the book’s central ideas: its sense of the ritual-like nature of politeness and the suppleness of the ritual in the face of urban superdiversity. It also captures the book’s insistence on the embeddedness of the politeness ritual in a larger (and more controversial) civilizational bedrock.

Still, the Page 99 Test is not wholly satisfactory as a browser’s shortcut. It doesn’t quite capture the book’s core claim: that politeness is political. The book argues that the way we navigate politeness in daily life has real consequences for the health and vitality of democracy. And it argues that we can therefore use political theory to help us better understand the dilemmas of everyday civility.

That said, page 99 does offer at least a clue. After all, politics is often the art of negotiating difference and diversity. And what is politeness, if not a quiet, everyday way of doing just that?

Learn more about The Politics of Politeness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue