Per Mouritsen, 2003. What’s the Civil in Civil Society? Robert Putnam, Italy and the Republican Tradition

[Jan28th; political review, thought analysis]

Daron Acemoglu cited Putnam’s book Making Democracy Work when talking about the importance of social norms indevelopment, but this paper gives a criticism, based on political thoughts—a little technical for political economists.

Italy,which is not naturally a unified nation, has a long history of local separation.The large-scale decentralization in 1970 offered an experiment to investigate whether democracy works. Under this scenario, Putnam’s famous book analyses the divergent results of democratic reformation in Northern and Southern Italy, and back-traced such a divergence to the evolution of social civicness. Specifically speaking, the Northern Italy has a tradition of autonomous city-states in the Renaissance period, which breeds a civil society composed of voluntary trust, cooperation and equal participation in common-good issues, while the Southern Italy has only seen a history of hierarchy and feudalism, which gives rise to small-community-oriented “amoral familism” (Banfield) and clientilism.

Mouritsen’scriticism toward Putnam, the self-professed heir of Tocqueville and the republicanism, is both theoretical and empirical. 1) Fundamentally, Putnam’s big causal interpretation violates the Republican Tradition. He only stresses the role of bottom-up voluntarism for the working of democracy, but overlooks the importance of top-down macrofactors, say, class-based movement, rules of law, and the process of unification and centralization. So his theory seems more like a liberal fashion instead of a republican way. 2) Putnam’s over-simplified statement of the effect of pacific trust and cooperation among individuals neglects the function of social conflicts. Trust, based singly on grass-root synergy, is impractical, because trust is constructed on the ground of the trust-worthiness of others; experiences, instead of traditions, are the starting point of trust, and the interaction among different individual sets relies on macro institutions. 3) Furthermore, his functionalist treat of society as a smooth welfare machine, while neglecting civil conflicts is criticized. As Mourisen puts it, conflict acts ‘as a stimulus for establishing new rules, norms, and institutions, thus serving as an agent of socialization’.