The Civil Sphere

Jeffrey C. Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, and co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. He is also the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford, 2003).

The Civil Sphere offers grand theorizing in ways that remind us of both what we are and what we can be. Jeffrey Alexander offers sociology at least a place from which it may begin again.

• Introduction PART I. CIVIL SOCIETY IN SOCIAL THEORY 1. Possibilites of Justice 2. Real Civil Societies: Dilemmas of Institutionalization Civil Society I Civil Society II Return to Civil Society I? Toward Civil Society III 3. Bringing Democracy Back In: Realism, Morality, Solidarity Utopianism: The Fallacies of Twentieth-Century Evolutionism Realism: The Tradition of Thrasymachus Morality and Solidarity Complexity and Community Cultural Codes and Democratic Communication PART II. STRUCTURES AND DYNAMICS OF THE CIVIL SPHERE 4. Discourses: Liberty and Repression Pure and Impure in Civil Discourse The Binary Structures of Motives The Binary Structures of Relationships The Binary Structures of Institutions Civil Narratives of Good and Evil Everyday Essentialism The Conflict over Representation 5. Communicative Institutions: Public Opinion, Mass Media, Polls, Associations The Public and Its Opinion The Mass Media Fictional Media: Factual Media: Public Opinion Polls Civil Associations 6. Regulative Institutions (1): Voting, Parties, Office Civil Power: A New Approach to Democratic Politics Revisiting Thrasymachus: The Instrumental Science of Politics Constructing and Destructing Civil Power (1): The Right to Vote and Disenfranchisement Constructing and Destructing Civil Power (2): Parties, Partisanship, and Election Campaigns Civil Power in the State: Office as Regulating Institution 7. Regulative Institutions (2): The Civil Force of Law The Democratic Possibilities of Law Bracketing and Rediscovering the Civil Sphere: The Warring Schools of Jurisprudence The Civil Morality of Law Constitutions as Civil Regulation The Civil Life of Ordinary Law Solidarity: Individuality: Legalizing Social Exclusion: The Antidemocratic Face of Law 8. Contradictions: Uncivilizing Pressures and Civil Repair Space: The Geography of Civil Society Time: Civil Society as Historical Sedimentation Function: The Destruction of Boundary Relations and Their Repair Forms of Boundary Relations: Input, Intrusion, and Civil Repair PART III. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE CIVIL SPHERE 9. Social Movements as Civil Translations The Classical Model The Social Science of Social Movements (1): Secularizing the Classical Model The Social Science of Social Movements (2): Inverting the Classical Model The Social Science of Social Movements (3): Updating the Classical Model Displacing the Classical Model: Rehistoricizing the Cultural and Institutional Context of Social Movements Social Movements as Translations of Civil Societies 10. Gender and Civil Repair: The Long and Winding Road through M/otherhood Justifying Gender Domination: Relations between the Intimate and Civil Spheres Women's Difference as Facilitating Input Women's Difference as Destructive Intrusion Gender Universalism and Civil Repair The Compromise Formation of Public M/otherhood Public Stage and Civil Sphere Universalism versus Difference: Feminist Fortunes in the Twentieth Century The Ethical Limits of Care 11. Race and Civil Repair (1): Duality and the Creation of a Black Civil Society Racial Domination and Duality in the Construction of American Civil Society Duality and Counterpublics The Conditions for Civil Repair: Duality and the Construction of Black Civil Society Duality and Translation: Toward the Civil Rights Movement 12. Race and Civil Repair (2): The Civil Rights Movement and Communicative Solidarity The Battle over Representation: The Intrusion of Northern Communicative Institutions Translation and Social Drama: Emotional Identification and Symbolic Extension The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King and the Drama of Civil Repair 13. Race and Civil Repair (3): Civil Trauma and the Tightening Spiral of Communication and Regulation Duality and Legal Repair The Sit-In Movement: Initiating the Drama of Direct Action The New Regulatory Context The Freedom Rides: Communicative Outrage and Regulatory Intervention Failed Performance at Albany: Losing Control over the Symbolic Code Birmingham: Solidarity and the Triumph of Tragedy 14. Race and Civil Repair (4). Regulatory Reform and Ritualization The First Regulatory Repair: From Birmingham to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Second Regulatory Repair: Rewinding the Spiral of Communication and Regulation The End of the Civil Rights Movement: Institutionalization and Polarization PART IV. MODES OF INCORPORATION INTO THE CIVIL SPHERE 15. Integration between Difference and Solidarity Convergence between Radicals and Conservatives Recognition without Solidarity? Rethinking the Public Space: Fragmentation and Continuity Implications for Contemporary Debates 16. Encounters with the Other The Plasticity of Common Identity Exclusionary Solidarity Forms of Out-Group Contact Nondemocratic Incorporation Internal Colonialism and the Civil Sphere Varieties of Incorporation and Resistance in Civil Societies 17. Three Pathways to Incorporation The Assimilative Mode of Incorporation The Hyphenated Mode of Incorporation The Exception of Race: Assimilation and Hyphenation Delayed The Multicultural Mode of Incorporation 18. The Jewish Question: Anti-Semitism and the Failure of Assimilation Jews and the Dilemmas of Assimilative Incorporation Anti-Semitic Arguments for Jewish Incorporation: The Assimilative Dilemma from the Perspective of the Core Group Initial Jewish Arguments for Self-Change: The Assimilative Dilemma from the Perspective of the Out-Group The Post-Emancipation Period: Religious and Secular Modes of Jewish Adaptation to the Dilemmas of Assimilation Restructuring Organized Judaism: Religious Conversion: Secular Revolution: New Forms of Symbolic Reflection and Social Response in the Fin de Siècle: The Dilemmas of Assimilation Intensify Irony and Absurdity: New Religious and Secular Literary Genres: Zionism: The Effort to Withdraw from Western Civil Society: The Crisis of Anti-Semitic Assimilation in the Interwar Period: Resolving the Dilemmas of Assimilation by Going Backward Restrictions on Jewish Incorporation in the Unites States: Europe's "Final Solution" to the Jewish Question: Resolving the Dilemmas of Assimilation by Eliminating the Jews: 19. Answering the Jewish Question in America: Before and After the Holocaust The Dilemmas of Jewish Incorporation and Communicative Institutions: Factual and Fictional Media: The Dilemmas of Jewish Incorporation and Regulative Institutions: The Law: The Failure of the Project: Jewish Exclusion from American Civil Society Anticivil Exclusion from Education: Anticivil Exclution from Economic Life: Just Fate or Dangerous Exclusion?: Responding to Nazism and Holocaust: America's Decision to be "With the Jews" Beyond the Assimilative Dilemma: The Postwar Project of Jewish Ethnicity Making Jewish Identity Public: The Multicultural Mode of Jewish Incorporation Making the Good Jew "Bad": Phillip Roth's Confidence: The Universitality of Jewish Difference: Woody Allen as Cultural Icon: The Dialectic of Differentiation and Identification: A Crisis in American Jewry? 20. Conclusion: Civil Society as a Project Notes Bibliography Index