In Whose Keeper? Alan Wolfe writes of modernity and its discontents--the dilemmas faced by modern men and women in a world that has unleashed the power of the market and the state at the expense of civil society:
Because they are free but at the same time unsure what
it means to be obligated, modern liberal democrats need
one another more but trust one another less. At a time
when they have difficulty appreciating the past, they are
called upon to respect the needs of future generations.
When they seem not to know how to preserve small families,
they must strengthen large societies. As local communities
disintegrate, a world community become more necessary than
ever... The paradox of modernity is that the more people
depend on one another owing to an ever-widening circle of
obligations the few are the agreed upon guidelines for
organizing moral rules that can account for those
obligations. [5]
Modern men and women increasingly need to draw from civil society as an alternative reservoir of moral energy and support. For Wolfe, civil society in a modern world is a realm in which we may fully realize our potential as giving, loving, and socially creative beings. This facet of our human potential is only obfuscated by the workings of both the market and the state.
On the one hand, the market encourages and demands rational choice individualism: one's obligations to others are fulfilled by the unabashed pursuit of self-interest. The state, on the other hand, encourages a formal, abstract statism: one's obligations to others are fulfilled by a blind obedience to the state and its pursuit of disinterested authority. It is only in civil society that we may view moral obligations as a socially constructed practice.
Wolfe laments how the market and state have grown at the expense of civil society. It is not so much that modernity has destroyed some perfect world of family, friends and voluntarism that is supposed to have existed in days gone by. In Wolfe's estimation the sociological nostalgia for this era is misguided, if not futile: In the end, any attempt to resurrect civil society will falter, failing to live up to the demands of modernity. While cultural ties may have been stronger, families and communities more tightly knit, they were also repressive, confining and bigoted to an extent that is too often forgotten or dismissed by those who yearn for a return to some golden age of civil society. Indeed, it was the workings of the market and the state that unleashed and were buttressed by the strivings of African-Americans to be free of the oppression of racism and white women to be free of the patriarchal aspects of the family. As Wolfe points out, everyone has benefited from these changes. Racism can only cripple and distort the ties of civil society for they are premised on oppression. We are never really free to learn to live with one another under such conditions. Likewise, marriage and family life was oppressive for both men and women:
In the traditional family an artificial division of
labor in which fathers were responsible for income
and mothers for nurturance--by absolving fathers of
responsibility for the children and mothers of
responsibility for the family's finances--stunted
everyone. [54]
The civil society of the past, then, was a small world, governed by tradition and suspicious of those outside its stifling borders.
"We became modern," Wolfe argues, "for a reason." [18] The market, with its emphasis on individual choice and the demand that people create their own moral rules, encouraged the questioning of those unspoken rules that guided and held civil society together. Likewise, the state, with its emphasis on a collective--yet distant and impersonal--authority, became the sphere in which moral rules governing and enforcing our obligations to one another, especially distant, unknown others, could be officially codified. Some of the more inhumane and troublesome aspects of civil society were modified by the market and state. In turn, as thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment acknowledged, civil society was a bulwark against the harsher aspects of both the state and market. <...>
Wolfe complains that, today, social scientists increasingly see the mechanics of the market or the state as the only way to organize our relations to one another. Civil society is dismissed by contemporary thinkers who tend to favor either political or economic solutions to social problems. Indeed, civil society is a pesky weed that contemporary thinkers seem to want to eradicate from their respective gardens. Instead of wondering about the tenacity of civil society, instead of critically examining both its strengths and weaknesses, contemporary thinkers, at best, ignore it. Whatever their differences, those who prefer the free-wheeling individualism of the market or those who would rather an abstract, disinterested statism be our guide, together they share a disdain for civil society.
It is no accident, however, that contemporary thinkers have no toleration for theories of civil society. Such views are well within the liberal tradition, for it was also here that the private world of hearth and home was seen as an irrational and emotional underworld upon which was built the rational, hard-headed world of the academy, market and forum. The civil society envisioned by liberalism was found in group associations in which one recognized the mutual interdependence of common life. The civil society upheld by liberalism, if it was upheld at all, was a world that excluded the intimate interdependencies in families and extended kin networks. <...> Wolfe presses on, asking how market principles influence the ways in which we satisfy our obligations through space and time. Wolfe utilizes a three-pronged analysis, testing whether a reliance on market logic is a satisfactory way of organizing "inter-generational transfers, ties to others expressed through...charity, and the webs of social existence defined by common possession of cultural symbols." [158] <...> It appears that we increasingly fail to consider the needs of distant others, others who we will never know but, nonetheless, depend on. We prefer instead to follow the dictates of a market consciousness which focuses only on the short-term, rarely considerate of the past, too impatient for a long-term vision. <...>
The moral logic of the market takes for granted the intimate realm, while serving as an impoverished guide for ordering our obligations to strangers and distant others. These flaws prompt Wolfe to ask: What will happen as the logic of the market substitutes as a model for family and community relations? His answer: A reliance on principles of self-interest in civil society "will weaken a sense of obligation to anonymous others." [103] Only by acknowledging our dependence on those close to us can we even begin the project of recognizing our debt to those who we do not know and probably never will.
Here Wolfe moves toward a critique of the assumption that 'inward' moral codes associated with civil society translate poorly to the 'outward' realm of anonymous others. Such assumptions have led to a reliance on the state as a disinterested agent -- "as the only agent capable of serving as a surrogate for the ties of civil society." [109] However, the state works well only when it accompanies and strengthen ties already formed among family, kind networks, friends, neighbors, and associational groups. "To meet the complexities of modernity, we are better off extending inward moral obligation outward, rather than outward moral obligation inward" [104]. The state may be a more just way of ordering our distant obligations to one another, but the state is flawed in so far as it diminishes "our sense of responsibility for the fate of others." [113] <...>
A critique of modern political theory sets the stage for a critique of sociology. While civil society has been threatened by the colonizing impulses of the state and market, sociology is similarly imperiled by those seduced by the fantasy that modernity's dilemmas could be transcended by turning to either the market or the state for guides to ordering our obligations to one another and recognizing our interdependencies.
Social theory's concern with moral obligation has faltered, Wolfe thinks, not because it has been 'colonized' by other disciplines, but because of its own weakness: "its own inability to decide exactly what its subject matter should be." [145] The founders of the discipline came to terms with modernity, though never wholly embracing it. This is precisely what their heirs have failed to do. They have too readily embraced modernity, espousing social theories in which the individual is motivated either by rational self interest or the fear of a coercive authority. <...> Wolfe wants sociologists to be ambivalent. Sociology should concern itself with civil society--with the ambiguous realm of human relations that are not captured entirely by the logics of market or state. Its methodology, likewise, should reflect this ambivalence, utilizing empirical data and statistical analysis in conjunction with qualitative cultural and historical analysis. Wolfe sees sociology as the guilty conscience of economic and political science. Sociology should not dictate 'answers' to the problems of modernity but, rather, it should jettison the project of taking a stance either for or against modernity--for or against the logics of the market or the state. Our guides, Wolfe maintains, are none other than the founding triumverate: Marx, Durkheim and Weber. For Wolfe, what these thinkers share is their refusal to take a side: they were ambivalent about modernity and chose, instead, to negotiate a path between the Scylla of market individualism and the Charybdis of state collectivism. <...> For these reasons, Wolfe urges that sociology be the study of the social construction of morality. It must begin with an understanding of the moral self as existing contextually, and achieving self understanding through narrative: a web of stories connecting past, present and future, connecting self to others through space and time. The moral self weaves a web of stories which spiral around and connect moral passages which necessarily include others. people do not merely undergo or endure moral passages, for this would imply that one simply 'survives' change as something external to the self. Rather, people transform themselves through moral passages because they must interact with, listen to, understand and imaginatively take another's point of view. <...> Wolfe is quick to warn that he is not implying that there is a goodness somehow inherent in either the individual or society. Social theorists, philosophers, and psychologists have been all too eager to locate a heroic morality separate from the actual practices of our shared lives. Durkheim, for instance, located the source of morality in society which stood over and against the reality of human imperfection. The cognitive psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg or the moral philosophy of John Rawl's illustrate the opposite: moral maturity is something an individual is most capable of obtaining while standing outside of and against society. Only without the encumbrance of society can one espouse the principles of justice or attain the sixth stage of a principled morality.
Under the rubric of these theories, Wolfe claims, individuals appear as one-dimensional rule-followers. On the market-oriented view, freedom is equated with the freedom to choose; one takes no responsibility for deciding, along with others, what those choices should be. On the state-oriented view, freedom is equated with being free from personal responsibility for others; individuals absolve themselves of responsibility for deciding how to order their collective lives. Both orientations obscure our understanding that morality is contextual, that we create moral rules together, in conjunction with others. Both orientations relinquish the possibility of how those moral negotiations are shot through with relations of power and oppression that mean that moral rules also reinforce oppressive social institutions and practices. <...>
Wolfe has argued throughout Whose Keeper? that the best way to honor our obligations to distant others is by recognizing our dependency on and obligations to those who are close to us. Sociology must set itself the task of reminding people of the "world outside of the intimate sphere" and this will be increasingly necessary in a world--to use the well-worn cliche--that is growing smaller every day. <...> Revivifying the study of civil society cannot strengthen civil society. For Wolfe, this would be folly since he clearly sees theory as reflective of and shaped deeply by political-economic forces, not the other way around. However, sociologists, Wolfe thinks, can rescue from the theoretical dustbin an impulse to understand a moral logic nascent in modern human life, one which rejects the moral logics of both the market and the state. The organizing powers of the state and the technological advances that have accompanied the market must be complemented by a stronger civil society. Unlike the market emphasis on the individual and morality as individual choice, it is civil society that fosters an understanding of our selves as truly social beings and, thus, it is in civil society where we can appreciate our obligations and debts to others, intimate and distant. Unlike the state, with its emphasis on universal rules and the use of coercion to enforce them, it is civil society that fosters an understanding that moral rules are contextual and made collectively, requiring the participation of individuals to create and sustain them.
A host of difficult moral issues, often revolving around technology and the organizational skills of the state, challenge our capacities as moral agents who recognize our social interdependencies. Modernity has bequeathed us--or, as Wolfe continually insists, we have bequeathed ourselves--a man-made environment, society, that we must learn to live in, rather than dominate, control and destroy. We need civil society--and sociologists need a healthy ambivalence to the study of civil society--if we are to become truly modern and act on our freedom to define who we are and how we will live together.