• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 644 0

rhetoric of local friendship and familiarity and toward a modernist style of disinterested correctness and precision mediated by explicit and supposedly universal rules of civic action. Skilled actors can invoke civil charm and chilly correctness as alternating means to self-interested goals once more easily attained through the elaborately courteous application of guile alone. The transition is thus not the unilinear path from the courtly to the civic that theories from social evolutionism to the more self-congratulatory histories of European culture and the more recent trumpetings of unabashedly protestant forms of "civil society" might lead us to expect.25

The tension between civic principles and the demands of civility is, then, a complex engagement between differing forms of social and political management. Less kindly critics complain that Romans are not so much accommodating as hypocritical. Their supple response to power gives Romans' everyday interactions a curiously complaisant quality. Romans, as a jeweler who had grown up abroad told me, have an endearing ability to stand aside when someone of greater economic or social status tries to dominate a conversation. I had gone with the jeweler in the hope of discreetly entering the inner circle of a rotating credit association that met regularly in a bar in the upper reaches of the district. There we encountered a wealthy resident who was clearly not a regular at the very working-class bar and who, realizing that we were not laborers either, proceeded to monopolize the conversation we were trying to start up with some of the artisans, boasting of how Rome was the most beautiful city of all the many he knew around the world and claiming that there were no artisans left anywhere. The other patrons simply sat quietly, ignoring this embarrassing tirade. Afterward the jeweler apologized to me for having been unable to get us out of the situation, but expressed appreciation for the others' discreet retreat, which he saw as a distinctively Roman maneuver-and which would not, he said, have any effect on any subsequent attempt on our part to speak with them.

The self-stereotype of the accommodating but sometimes manipulative Roman has certain consequences for the struggle to establish more "rational" forms of civic life. Arguing that it is hard to get people to act in concert against crime and corruption, for example, reproduces, in the form of an abiding cultural determinism, the endemic resignation (rassegnazione) to which such passivity is conventionally attributed. The hatred often expressed toward these forces, moreover, does not exclude the principles of civilta-principles that themselves bear witness to deeply entrenched hierarchies of authority and value-that we also encounter in small villages throughout the country. Indeed, harsh and uncouth speech are denounced as "not civile" in the sense of being incompatible with the successful conduct of civic affairs; the failure of some visitors or residents to close the front door of our palazzo properly-a serious security concern-was also so described by the landlord, albeit with a resigned expression that implied there was nothing to be done about the decline of interpersonal morality.

The downside of civility, its exclusionary side, is often clear from the use of language. As Inoue has noted for Japan, civil society merely masks the contradictions in the idea that difference and equality can coincide;2C it creates textual spaces that "allow the other to speak," but only under strict control. In Italy courtly manners have long been associated with affectations of disdain and detachment. Such attitudes, once associated with ideals of austere simplicity and modesty, transmute under conditions of modern capitalism into the overbearing and ostentatious violence of the nouveaux riches who are displacing artisans and aristocrats alike. In Monti, the triumph of this essentially neoliberal ethos has especially painful implications and effects. Unlike the former Soviet Bloc, where economic restructuring often used new forms