Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to recover the ancient but neglected concept of politeness, and to show its utility to under-stand some dimensions and problems of our society. In the first part of the paper some weaknesses of Rousseau's philosophy, whose ideas -in my opinion- are very influential on the contemporary crisis of courtesy norms, are discussed. In the second part, taking as a starting point the tradition of gentility, from Greek and Roman philosophy to Enlightenment, it is shown that politeness is an essential dimension of social life, whose nature and features are very similar to language