Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society

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Abstract
By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social group at all, then it consists not only: 1) in the argumentative contesting of a whole range of not-as-yet wholly formulated visions of future ways of ‘going on’, but also in: 2) the provision of the historically developed socio-ontological resources required for their realization. Civil society thus contains the ‘seeds’ of future possibilities. Taking activity in this realm seriously means that our current task in social studies, is not the scientific one of discoveringan already existing order, but that of enabling the reinstitution of what, traditionally, was the task of rhetoric: to explicate, in a non-eliminative form of competition involving rival formulations, the implications of different accounts of the nature of our social lives together.

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