Sociabilitas

Conversatio, mutual conduct, had possessed loose affiliations with sermo in ancient and medieval times. During the Renaissance, conversatio shifted far closer to sermo and its constellation of cognate concepts. Stefano Guazzo elaborated an influential theory of civil conversation in his eponymous late-sixteenth-century dialogue, which reconceived conversatio in secular terms as the realm of society. This Italian conception of civil conversation then received a universalizing spin from the natural law jurisprudential tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf, transforming it into an amoral disposition toward sociability shared by all humanity. The long parallel tracks of sermo and conversatio now finally converged: sermo became conversation as conversatio became sociability. The convergence of sermo and conversatio made possible the establishment of a causal connection between the two concepts. This connection appeared viadoux commerce, the application of sociability to the realm of economics: sociability, by the means of economic self-interest, became the conceptual and historical predicate to conversation—and, as the Enlightenment progressively tied together manners with the civic humanist tradition, the predicate in turn for both virtue and liberty. Sociability thus at last substituted for Platonic love an amoral, entirely human motivation for conversation—the discourse of reason found its base in human passions.