The Civil Power of the News

Jackie Harrison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030193805
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030193812
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This landmark book is concerned with the civil power of the news. This power can be seen in the ways the news engages with public sentiment through a focus on three invariant civil concerns: identity, legitimacy and risk. The book analyses how news stories engage with these concerns to make civil and anti-civil judgements, which influence public sentiment and determine the boundaries we place and maintain around the society we live in. Through historical and contemporary examples of this boundary shaping and maintenance, The Civil Power of the News presents a bold and original account of the architecture of news, the influence it has on our conceptions of civility, and, ultimately, the power it wields.

Part IThe Civil Power of the News Defined and Explained

© The Author(s) 2019

J. HarrisonThe Civil Power of the Newshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19381-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction to Part I

Jackie Harrison¹

(1)

Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Jackie Harrison

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1 Argument

The argument of Part I of this book can be simply stated. The civil power of the news resides in its relationship to public sentiment and the way the news reports our invariant civil concerns of identity , legitimacy and risk and subsequently how these invariant civil concerns are assembled and understood in the form of civil and anti-civil judgements. It is these judgements which contribute to the boundaries we ¹ place and maintain around civil society with regard to whom and what we regard as civil and anti-civil. The demonstration of this argument takes a little longer and requires that I start with some terminological clarity, especially with regard to what I mean by civil society, from which all else follows.

2 A Very Brief Account of Alexander’s CSI-CSII

In the ‘Civil Sphere’ (2006), Jeffrey Alexander argues that the term ‘civil society’ has gone through a particular intellectual history, which can be understood as consisting of three different understandings of civil society. He refers to these as CSI, CSII and CSIII . Briefly, CSI is a late seventeenth-century social and extensive understanding of the civil sphere, coinciding and emerging from the writings of Locke and Harrington, developed by Scottish moralists Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith and then by Rousseau, Hegel and finally used ‘energetically’ (Alexander 2006: 24) by Tocqueville. ² In essence, according to Alexander, CSI is an umbrella term for a ‘plethora of institutions outside the state’ (ibid.: 24) including the market, religious bodies and other cooperative bodies that created and utilised bonds of trust. Importantly, this conception of civil society had a ‘moral and ethical force’ (ibid.: 25) and an affinity with the development of capitalism. Indeed, at first CSI public life related to market life and capitalism was ‘benignly conceived’ of and viewed as an alternative to the excessive and repressive forces of aristocratic power (ibid.). However, this was to change as capitalism became more industrialised and followed the path of free trade and laissez-faire liberal economics.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the way of conceiving of society as CSI was supplanted by CSII, which held the view that capitalism was most definitely not a benign nor a progressive force. In short, civil society was no longer conceived of in associative and cooperative terms but was ‘pejoratively associated with market capitalism alone’ (ibid.: 26) and nowhere was this more so (for Alexander) than in the works of Marx who reduced the concept of civil society to an ‘epiphenomenon of capitalism’ (ibid.: 27). The critical concept now was the state and arguments (both radical and conservative) centred on the extent to which the state should be assigned the task of protecting the citizenry from the worst excesses of capitalism. From this, an intellectual polarity emerged which Alexander summarises accordingly: ‘for the right, the capitalism-civil society identification suggested abolishing society; for the left it suggested abolishing markets and private property itself’ (ibid.: 28). The concept of civil society had become bifurcated between understanding civil society through the diffuse inclusivity of CSI and the economic reductionism of CSII (ibid.: 31) neither of which addresses ‘the empirical and normative problems of contemporary life’ (ibid.: 32). In other words, for Alexander CSI and CSII are insufficient conceptual tools to enable us to understand civil society not least because ‘To identify civil society with capitalism (CSII ) is to degrade its universalizing moral implications’ (ibid.: 33). Recognising this requires that the civil sphere and its independence from the market be conceptualised and defined in different terms. Accordingly, Alexander (2006: 3) suggests that we should envisage civil society as ‘a world of values and institutions that generates the capacity for social criticism and democratic integration at the same time’ and as based upon ‘feelings of solidarity for others whom we do not know’. For Alexander, what we need to do is move beyond CSI and CSII into what he terms CSIII and it is this conception of civil society that this book uses throughout.

3 The Differentiation Between Spheres and the Institutional Base of CSIII

In a very important passage, Alexander (2006: 31) writes that ‘civil society should be conceived of as a solidary sphere , in which a certain kind of universalizing community comes to be culturally defined and to some extent institutionally enforced’. Accordingly, there is now a need to understand ‘civil society as a sphere that can be analytically independent, empirically differentiated, and morally more universalistic vis-à-vis the state and the market and from other social spheres as well’ (ibid.). Specifically, Alexander’s conceptualisation of CSIII envisages civil society as existing as ‘a sphere or subsystem of society that is analytically and, to various degrees, empirically separated from the spheres of political life, economic, family and religious life’ (ibid.: 53) with each sphere having separate and identifiable goals and aspirations. The differentiation between these spheres: civil, political (where political is understood as the administration and power of the state), market, familial and religious, is important because it is, as Alexander notes, a ‘dialectical’ and ‘functional’ differentiation (ibid.: 203). By this he means that non-civil autonomous spheres have aims and concerns that contradict the solidarising aims of the civil sphere (social criticism, democratic integration, civility, justice, reciprocity, and mutual respect). He puts this point accordingly (and it is worth quoting at length): ‘The goal of the economic sphere is wealth, not justice in the civil sense; it is organized around efficiency, not solidarity and depends more upon hierarchy than equality to meet its goals. Polities produce power not reciprocity, they demand loyalty, not criticism, and they seek to exercise coercive if legitimate forms of social control. The religious sphere produces salvation, not worldly just deserts; it is premised upon a fundamental inequality, not only between God and merely human believers but between God’s representatives, his shepherds, and those whom they guide and instruct on earth; no matter how radically egalitarian or reformed the message, the very transcendental character of religious relationships demand mystery and deference not reciprocity or dialogue of a transparent kind. In the family, the species is reproduced not only in a biological but a moral sense; it is organized more by passion and unconditional love than self-control and critical questioning, and it depends fundamentally upon authority and deference’ (ibid.: 203–204).

As to the differentiated relationship between the spheres, it is characterised by mutual ‘input’ and ‘intrusion’, ³ a never-ending clash of outlooks and values with varying degrees of outcomes. Indeed, Alexander puts the matter starkly, ‘The privileged accumulations of goods in noncivil spheres are used to achieve power and recognition in civil society, to gain access to its discourse and control over its institutions , and to re-represent the elites of other spheres as idea participants in the interactive processes of civil life’ (ibid.: 205). Correspondingly, and in order to maintain the democratic and just character of the civil sphere, it is necessary ‘for the civil sphere to “invade” noncivil spheres, to demand certain kinds of reform, and to monitor them through regulation in turn’ (ibid.: 34). Though to be fair to Alexander, this is not to say that there is nothing but endless conflict between the spheres, rather it is to recognise that ‘Divisions between spheres and the antagonisms they creat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. The Civil Power of the News Defined and Explained
• Part II. A Practical Demonstration of the Civil Power of the News Through an Analysis of the First British Railway Murder 1864
• Back Matter