Jeffrey C. Alexander

The Civil Sphere

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

What binds societies together and how can these social orders be structured in a fair way? Jeffrey C. Alexander's masterful work, The Civil Sphere, addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others--the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest--are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. Solidarity, Alexander demonstrates, creates inclusive and exclusive social structures and shows how they can be repaired. It is not perfect, it is not absolute, and the horrors which occur in its lapses have been seen all too frequently in the forms of discrimination, genocide, and war. Despite its worldly flaws and contradictions, however, solidarity and the project of civil society remain our best hope: the antidote to every divisive institution, every unfair distribution, every abusive and dominating hierarchy. This grand, sweeping statement and rigorous empirical investigation is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 814
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 48mm
• Gewicht: 1297g
• ISBN-13: 9780195369304
• ISBN-10: 0195369300
• Artikelnr.: 24439710

Autorenporträt

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

Inhaltsangabe

* 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
*
*
* 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
*
*
* 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
*
*
*
* New Forms of Symbolic Reflection and Social Response in the Fin de
Siècle: The Dilemmas of Assimilation Intensify
*
*
* The Crisis of Anti-Semitic Assimilation in the Interwar Period:
Resolving the Dilemmas of Assimilation by Going Backward
*
*
* 19. Answering the Jewish Question in America: Before and After the
Holocaust
*
*
* The Failure of the Project: Jewish Exclusion from American Civil
Society
*
*
*
* 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
*
*
* The Dialectic of Differentiation and Identification: A Crisis in
American Jewry?
* 20. Conclusion: Civil Society as a Project
* Notes
* Bibliography
* Index