The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition and Civil Society.

by Edward Shils, edited by Steven Grosby; Liberty Fund, 2001, about $25.

WILL THE GOOD old days ever come back? Part of the trouble is that everyone has his own idea of what, or when, the good old days were.

A French diplomat of the ancien regime used to say that unless you lived before the French Revolution of 1789 you could have no inkling of the sweetness of life. Many an American Southerner is quoted as saying the same sort of thing in relation to the American Civil War or the War between the States. One English don liked to claim that the high point of civilisation had been reached in Cambridge colleges of his youth before the First World War and that the world had gone downhill ever since.

After the horrors of the twentieth century, it is certain that no one will step forward to locate the good old days in the trenches of the Western Front or in the soup lines of the Depression or in the death camps of the totalitarian states. Nostalgia, as some graffiti artist once painted on a wall, is not what it used to be!

Yet it seems impossible to leave any critique of our era without some idea of what the world should be like, of what it will be like when and if we return, not to utopia but to something that we would call normalcy. We have an incorrigible hankering for better times--for the good old days. One of the most favoured ideals is civility.

Few social philosophers have taken this hankering more seriously than the American Edward Shils (1910-95). He developed his ideas of civility, civil society and civilised politics in a series of urbane, learned and ironic essays that attracted the adjective "Shilsian". Often close to despair, he never quite abandoned his optimism, his confidence that an age of civility will one day be restored. Fortunately a collection of these essays, written over thirty years, has recently been published, edited by Steven Grosby.

Shils started from a critical reconsideration (not quite a rejection) of the ideological politics which began with the French Revolution, reached its high point in the twentieth century between the 1930s and the 1960s and continues to influence our political life.