The Meanings of Social Life

Jeffrey C. Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, and co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology.

"Alexander effectively positions meanings at the center of a cultural form of public sociology that is concerned with symbolic codes, their social production, and their distribution through carrier groups and social movements The Meanings of Social Life provides the urtext for a new cultural framing of sociology."--John R. Hall, Contemporary Sociology

• Introduction: The Meanings of (Social) Life: On the Origins of a Cultural Sociology ; 1. The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics (with Phillip Smith) ; 2. On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The "Holocaust" from War Crime to Trauma Drama ; 3. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity ; 4. A Cultural Sociology of Evil ; 5. The Discourse of American Civil Society (with Phillip Smith) ; 6. Watergate as Democratic Ritual ; 7. The Sacred and Profane Information Machine ; 8. Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo: How Intellectuals Explain "Our Time" ; Notes ; References ; Index