LeVine and Salvatore 71e passage from a model of social relationships between Th ego and
alter (self and other) that is mediated by the common faith in God (the
triad ego-alter-God) to an ego-alter dyad unmediated by any transcendent
third instance constitutes a drastic rupture in the history of the emergence
of the notion of the social bond, incorporated in programmatic visions of
a “civil society”—a transformation corresponding to a passage from faith
to trust as the main glue of society.^16 Within faith-based relationships it
is the transcendent otherhood that helps the human self to know him-
self/herself and connect to terrestrial otherhood; trust implies a reciprocal
recognition of the other’s dignity and capacity to act, irrespective of the
outcome of the interaction, or at least without having any guarantee about
the outcome, which is no longer covered by strong role expectations.^17
n a counterprogram to the modern reconstruction of the social I
bond, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico
argued that humanity’s historical emergence into “the human age” of poli-
ties and civility was accomplished through the move to ever more com-
plex constructions of symbolic mediation between ego and alter.^18 In this
context, he focused on the collective power of senso comune, i.e., common
sense, intended as a stock of ordinary knowledge present in poetic dis-
course, and preceding the irruption of revelation into history.^19 The senso
comune placed myth squarely in the fundaments of the civitas—which,
importantly, can mean the state, citizenship, a city-state, or a city; that is,
various levels of political and social interaction and authority.^20
ut Vico’s notion of common sense was not to hold sway within B
the mainstream reflection on civil society. Hume, Smith and other pro-
toliberal thinkers grounded the emerging sociological dimensions of the
modern conceptualization of civil society not on a historicized common
sense but on a transhistorical notion of a “moral sense.” In so doing lib-
eral thought produced a highly simplified view of the human and social
actor. Of course, a complexification of civil society was undertaken by
several authors, following up on the Scottish Enlightenment and linking
it with other streams of Enlightenment thought and its critique through
Romanticism. Kant, Hegel, Marx, and later Nietzsche are highly original,
indeed towering figures of this train of reflection. It is telling that these
thinkers were located in a part of Europe (Germany) that lived through a
particularly ambivalent historical experience in the eras of the Protestant