As far as I’m concerned, Alexandra Hudson’s The Soul of Civility ultimately centers on rhetoric. Sure, I may have a vested interest in things being about rhetoric, and I do, but two things can be true at once. Admittedly, the book is not merely about rhetoric in the narrow sense of public speaking or persuasion. Instead, this book is about the formation of the self that speaks, judges, interacts, and interprets our shared world. Yes, the book features discussions of manners, democracy, and public life, but I see a deeper meaning: free societies depend on more than just institutions and laws; they also depends on the rhetorical capacities of its citizens. This is why Hudson’s work aligns with emerging discussions of what I call intrapersonal empowerment and rhetorical agency. The crisis of civility is a crisis of internal rhetoric.
Hudson argues that people have an innate tendency toward excessive self-love, i.e., a disposition that prioritizes one’s ego, grievances, impulses, and desires above all else. (This is not to be confused with healthy self-love, which is part of the “emerging discussions” mentioned earlier.) When unchecked, this tendency corrodes pluralistic and civil societies. People become incapable of disagreement without dehumanization, incapable of criticism without contempt, no longer recognizing the legitimacy of others.
Hudson’s take on “self-love” can also be understood rhetorically. Human beings are interpretive by nature and constantly engaged in internal narration (intrapersonal rhetoric). We tell ourselves stories about who we are, who others are, what events mean, and whether the world respects or diminishes us. This intrapersonal rhetoric shapes our emotional reactions long before they become public speech. To put it succinctly, public discourse begins as private discourse, and recognizing this reality is an imperative next step in preserving civil discourse.
The nature of that intrapersonal rhetoric, which can also be understood as a kind of conversation with oneself, should not be neglected. The person who internally rehearses narratives of humiliation, resentment, superiority, or perpetual victimhood will eventually communicate those orientations outwardly. Likewise, the person who rehearses reflection, emotional discipline, curiosity, and self-awareness is more likely to engage others constructively, even amid serious disagreement. Civility is an outward expression of disciplined intrapersonal rhetoric.
In today’s world, discourse treats every emotional impulse as rhetorically sacred and every disagreement as existential aggression. (Social media has done nothing but worsen this.) This results in a culture in which emotional escalation and its corresponding rhetoric becomes normalized. We tend to react before looking into things and condemn before we have sufficient information to make a decision. It almost seems as if outrage is more important than the truth. Hudson’s defense of civility pushes against this entire communicative environment. Her argument implicitly revives an older rhetorical tradition stretching back to antiquity. Thinkers like Aristotle, Cicero, Erasmus, and others put forth the belief that communication is inseparable from character formation.
Rhetoric is not simply about winning arguments. It is about becoming the kind of person capable of living a happy and fulfilling life with others!
This is a vital point because many of today’s conversations about personal power misunderstand power itself. Empowerment is more than unrestricted self-expression or removal of social restraints. Real empowerment requires the ability to govern oneself. It is about emotional self-management, self-regulation, and self-awareness, which means one’s intrapersonal rhetoric is key to civil discourse. Why? Because a person who cannot regulate anger, interpret disagreement charitably, or maintain perspective under pressure may be too reactive to take part in generative dialogue with others.
For this reason, I think Hudson’s take on civility aligns with what I would call rhetorical empowerment: the cultivation of individuals capable of navigating volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (aka VUCA) during disagreements without devolving into resentment or the need to dominate. Civility, then, must be about developing the rhetorical maturity necessary for a free and pluralistic society.[i]
In The Soul of Civility, Hudson lays out this path. For Hudson, civility recognizes that others have dignity irrespective of ideological agreement. It acknowledges that democratic coexistence requires more than tolerance in the procedural sense; it requires rhetorical habits that affirm the humanity of our dissenters. Opposition is not enemy-hood, and disagreement need not require degradation. That insight might be the book’s most important contribution to civil discourse.
The Soul of Civility reminds us that rhetoric is more than just the art of persuasion. It is a way of inhabiting reality. The health of civil society depends on more than what is said and how it is said. It also depends on the quality of the conversations people have with themselves. A free and civil society is endangered if its citizens lack the internal capacities necessary for reflection, restraint, humility, and sound judgment. Hudson rightly points toward something deeper than manners and decorum. She points toward the recovery of rhetorical self-governance as a sine qua non of civil society, a disciplined practice of humanization that allows people to maintain both dignity and disagreement without collapsing into hatred, narcissism, victimhood, despair, or a sense of irrelevance. Citizens would do well to cultivate mastery of the rhetoric within before trying to reform and shape rhetoric without.
[i] This is why Hudson’s work and mine also intersects with the concept of mattering and “mattering studies” a burgeoning academic subfield that I count among the aforementioned emerging discussions. Much contemporary polarization reflects a crisis of recognition. People increasingly feel unseen, disposable, or culturally invisible. In response, many seek significance in less civil ways, like ideological absolutism, virtue signaling, perpetual grievance, and general intolerance of differing viewpoints, especially viewpoints they think suggest that they do not matter as much as they would like. (For example, upon hearing “Black Lives Matter,” many white people interpreted it as “White Lives Don’t Matter.”) For this reason, public discourse becomes less about deliberation than about securing validation on an existential level.