بین گرامر و سبک: آدام اسمیت و جغرافیای اخلاقی جامعه مدنی

This examination of Smith's account of civility has significance for broader conceptual debates about civility by interrogating structural or geographical conceptions of civil society and suggesting instead that civil society is best understood in terms of its essential informality. Civil society is composed of human relationships that are neither as close and intimate as those of the family, with its emphasis on charity and magnanimity, nor as formal as those governed by the distant, abstract rules of citizenship and market economy. Rather, civil society—as I argue here—is constituted by a qualitatively distinct mode of human relationship that partakes of the informal, necessarily tacit dimensions of the virtue of civility.