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Book Review
Civil society and politics
ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
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The book shows that the dominant rhetorics of our time are unable to address major questions
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THE POLITICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE: Paul Ginsborg; Penguin India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 295.
Rarely are serious issues treated with such poise and style, and this book is crisp, incisive, and illuminating throughout. Paul Ginsborg, an accomplished Continental European scholar and inheritor of the Enlightenment, draws upon an immense reservoir of politics, philosophy, sociology, architecture, development studies, and literature — often providing his own translations from Renaissance Italian — to show that the dominant rhetorics of our time cannot address the major questions facing us.
Ginsborg shows how events around our own streets and neighbourhoods are located in and result from wider contexts of history, society, politics, and public policy, however disconnected we feel thence. In Ginsborg's home city of Florence, despite high levels of voluntary activity, a flourishing trade union movement, a huge university, and radical, socially-orientated Catholicism, the last decade has seen political disengagement by the residents, while in that period much of Italy faced political closure by its then president, Silvio Berlusconi, who owned vast tracts of the commercial media and while in office took almost total control of the state broadcaster, despite facing serious corruption charges. Citizens' disengagement showed in declining election turnouts, and the official opposition, the centre-left, appeared unable to understand the seriousness of the threat (this reviewer saw a similarity in the United Kingdom in the early Thatcher period in the 1980s). Ginsborg and friends responded by entering a mayoral candidate, who won 12 per cent of the vote; and Ginsborg deepened his analysis of the forces against politics.
Consumer capitalism
One is consumer capitalism. Fifty-one of the world's 100 biggest economies are corporations headed by people with demigod status. But their rhetoric of individual choice leaves even them helpless; consumer revolt and shareholder pressure terrify them, despite the gigantic payouts sacked CEOs get for failure. Ginsborg takes consumerism seriously; the consumer ends up choiceless, facing producers who slavishly imitate each other in a dystopian uniformity that the Soviet Union never achieved. Far from creating paradise, consumer individualism has caused the choking of cities by motor vehicles, rampant and destructive production and consumption, and the reinforcement of existing power; Ginsborg's analysis of the worldwide oppression — physical, financial, emotional — of women is not for the squeamish.
Family
Ginsborg's second focus is the family, which, as a site of emotions and affections, intimacy and dependency, education and socialisation, informs the way we connect to the wider world. Families have their own argots, codings, and habits, and have often resisted being shaped by mighty dictatorships; even Franco could not boost family attendances at Mass. Ginsborg, citing John Gillis — we all have a family we live with and another we live by — notes the family's capacity for exclusion and enclosure, for brutality and cruelty, in industrial as well as premodern societies.
Ginsborg could perhaps have said more about how industrial societies locate the family in public networks — of ante-natal clinics, perinatal care, local education authorities, and the like — in ways which could shock those accustomed to the `amoral familism' of premodern societies, where, as Derrida might have said, `Il n'y a dehors famille', which would be consistent with dynastic politics and business, nepotism, and indifference to the public realm. This holds despite the fact that — as this reviewer has argued in detail elsewhere — many of the purportedly rational managerial grounds on which industrial societies intervene in the family are incoherent, often generating actions as arbitrary as those in premodern cultures.
Civil society
The third concern of Ginsborg's is civil society, a form of association distinct from the private sphere, the economy, and the state. Engagement with it varies with prosperity and material equality; Sweden and the United Kingdom have higher rates of association than Italy, Romania, and Russia. Civil society, though often ordinary people's only defence against the state, is no substitute for the state. Participation in it is largely temporary, and public institutions often ignore it. Florence's centre-left council welcomed residents' recommendations but did nothing; in the United Kingdom, local authorities' designated email addresses for residents' ideas conceal the fact that, as this reviewer has found in Southampton, councils exclude from consideration residents' concerns about planning permission for their own neighbourhoods. Neither is civil society always nice; the Mafia and Ku Klux Klan subsist there, and Ginsborg details a salutary encounter with a group of pious Italian women accompanying their priest on a train.
If civil society cannot resolve conflicts of interest by itself, Ginsborg nevertheless concludes that it is an essential element in democracy; representative democracy can and must be made to work much better, representative and participatory democracy are in tension but not antithesis, and our public bodies must draw upon civil society to link families with the public space. Ginsborg shows how that might be done, how it has been done in some part in various states, and how it has been courageously attempted in India. Truly has this delightful book much to teach us.
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