On The Interpretation of The Civil Sphere

Understanding and Contention in Contemporary Social Science

Bibliographic Data

ID7426342
AuthorsJeffrey C Alexander (0000-0003-3600-8023, Yale University, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume48
Issue4
Pages641-659
Publication date2007-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociological Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0253 • E-ISSN: 1533-8525
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1533-8525.2007.00095.x
OpenAlexW1981641401
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited21

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NOTESNotes1 Author-Meets-Critics sessions were also organized in spring 2007, at the Southern, Pacific, and Eastern Meetings; at the ASA's New York meetings in August; and in September at the Glasgow meetings of the European Sociological Association. A response to some of these other critics will appear in the fall issue of Perspectives, the newsletter of the ASA theory section, and another response, to an essay review by Bryan Turner, will appear in a forthcoming issue of Citizenship Studies.2 "Much of contemporary political science," Elizabeth Clemens relates, "has refuted just this framing, arguing that political actors can be understood as consistently rational, but honest, cooperative and trustworthy only when it advances their self-interest," and she concludes by complaining (or exclaiming—it is hard to tell whether she is being ironic or not), "yet Alexander rejects this standard assumption of political theory." It seems to me, however, that rat choice in political science, or sociology for that matter, validates rather than falsifies the theory of civil binaries that I have proposed. In fact, not only does rat choice confirm the distinctively binary nature of lay and philosophical thinking about democracy and politics, but it quite neatly fits into one of its sides. A theoretical version of what I call the tradition of Thracymachus it offers the kind of narrow instrumental approach to rationality that Socrates attacked in Plato's dialogues—concerned with means, not ends; aggressive, not cooperative; manipulative, not straightforward; and without consideration for the values of others, unless such concern is to serve our side.3 Two articles I published on the Watergate crisis (CitationAlexander 1984, Citation1988) straddle the pre- and post-semiotic divide. The first was organized around the universalism/particularism contrast, while the second proposes the idea of more complex sets of binaries, although not yet the idea of the discourse of civil society. The notion of cultural discourse as a relational language built on self-generating antonyms bears a family resemblance, not only to the late Durkheim and semiotics, but also to Foucault's post-structural understanding. In History of Sexuality, Foucault maintained that the Victorian discourse of repression was paradoxically implied by the anti-Victorian discourse of sexual liberation, such that the latter was not, in fact, "repression free." My sense that the discourse of civil society is similarly divided, that it similarly interpolates each side with the other, led me to adapt Foucault's notions of a simultaneously repressive and "liberating" discourse from the sexual to the political scene. All of this is recounted in The Civil Sphere and elsewhere in the publications that are cited there. My point is that the discourse of civil emancipation also speaks the language of exclusion, often doing so with the heartfelt intention of protecting democracy from its enemies and even, sometimes, from itself. It can hardly be the case, then, that I conceptualize the codes of civil society, pace Antonio, as fostering "uncontested integration." This is Habermas' discourse ethics, not mine.4 I also noted CitationBaiocchi's (2006) research on the emergence of the discourse of civil society in Brazil's transition from authoritarianism and CitationHeins' (2006) on how the civil binaries have distorted some recent European intellectual discourse about America. For a historical investigation of the codes as structuring class conflicts in late 18th-century London, see CitationDavis (2007).5 At one point, Antonio implies that, while the quotations reproduced in The Civil Sphere do suggest binarism, they do not display the actual language terms that I attribute to the discourse of civil society. If this were so, it would certainly be a telling critique. I believe, to the contrary, that each quotation contains one or more of the civil binaries that compose the broader culture structure. This, at least, was my selection criterion for including a quotation. I briefly considered italicizing the actual items of the civil language inside each quoted text, but I decided this would be unnecessarily didactic and disruptive.6 As evidence for his assertion that "the connection between Alexander and Parsons is transparent," Antonio suggests that my "strong claims" about the civil codes actually "stand in for Parsons' evolutionary" theory. My discussion in the text above explains why this is not true. From the time when I first conceptualized these binaries as coded languages, I saw them as standing in marked tension, if not, in fact, as refuting, Parsons' cultural theory; when I conceptualized the irredeemable contradictions of the civil sphere, I understood myself to be falsifying the evolutionary optimism of modernization theory in general and Parsons' social and historical work in particular. My strong sense that Parsons had papered over the contradictory tensions between the subsystems (for him, AGIL), and overemphasized their complementary, was already very much part of Theoretical Logic, informing most of the second half of the fourth volume of that book (CitationAlexander 1983). As I developed my civil sphere theory, I devoted a large chunk of the concluding chapter of Neofunctionalism and After (CitationAlexander 1997) to a critique of Parsons' understanding of "societal community." More recently, in a more polemical essay (CitationAlexander 2005b), I demonstrate how Parsons' commitment to evolution allowed him not to face the dark sides of modernity, but to pretend, instead, that contemporary American society either had already, or was about to, fulfill itself in an ideal way.7 In his powerful and disturbing book, CitationJames B. McKee (1993) has shown how just such a delegitimating binary distorted the history of American sociological studies of race, typically reducing African Americans to creatures without the capacity to participate in modern society in order to explain, if not to justify, centuries of white rule. In an article building upon McKee, CitationMorris (2007:529) describes these "prescientific assumptions" in binary terms and attributes to them great symbolic power: "They led White sociologists to formulate two contrasting sociological populations: Whites were civilized, endowed with agency, and superior; blacks were subhuman, bereft of agency, and inferior."8 Indeed, my point in stressing the centrality of mutual recognition and misrecognition is not only empirical but moral. Only by insisting on widespread human capacity can we avoid the simplifying dichotomies upon which civil restrictions rest. If we fight a revolution that dichotomizes humane friend and inhumane foe, how will we create a human and inclusive society afterward? Who will educate the educators, as Marx once asked? The 20th century is strewn with the rotting carcasses of would-be liberators—revolutions built upon dichotomizing rhetorics that have refused to recognize the humanity of fellow human beings.9 It is just such a philosophical anthropology of recognition that Hegel laid out in Phenomenology of Mind and that, via Hegel, informs such contemporary philosophers as Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth. For a critique, see CitationAlexander and Lara (1996).10 The transformation of the form of women's organizations from "womanly" clubs to more impersonal business models, which Clemens documents in her book, The People's Lobby (CitationClemens 1997:184–234), illustrates how one of these nontraumatic pathways of change facilitated the civil incorporation of women. While emphasizing organizational repertoires rather than cultural structures, Clemens implicitly evokes a performative understanding, writing that "by adopting techniques not traditionally associated with feminine activity, women sought to present themselves as legitimate political actors" (p. 207, italics added), and noting how, in the newly adopted organizational forms, "cash served both as a symbol of citizenship and as a medium of centralization" (p. 213). In her critical comment, Clemens acknowledges that in "cultivating greater communicative capacities and political development," even the more conservative first-wave feminists "deployed multiple substantive identities [that] can be arrayed as a series of overlain binaries in order to suggest a powerful, structuring, underlying code." I agree with Clemens that the continuing evocation of civil binaries neither reinforced purely traditional inequalities of gender nor introduced postgender criteria for evaluating women as citizens—which is precisely why, throughout my historical reconstruction of the shifting relation of gender and civil sphere, I employ the concept of "compromise formation."11 At various points in The Civil Sphere, I directly challenge Morris's (1984) account in theoretical and empirical terms, for example, footnote 33, pp. 637–41, where I also contest other instrumentalist explanations, including the emphasis on the Cold War and claims that white accessions at Birmingham and elsewhere were responses simply to local white businessmen's fears over profit loss (see below).12 In Sociology and the Race Problem, McKee argues that the racist distortion of black capacities (see note 7, above) explains why, before the 1960s, white American sociologists either dismissed the possibility for reform or adopted a paternalistic, white man's burden position. "A people so culturally inferior," McKee explains, "would lack the capability to advance their own interests by rational action." As blacks were "viewed as lacking a trained and experienced leadership, as still ignorant and mostly uneducated," they were portrayed "as incapable of participating in the political process." In other words, the failure to recognize black agency "was a logical extension of this image of the American black" (CitationMcKee 1993:8). Only with the antiracist reconstruction of the white political imagination, which was both cause and effect of the civil rights movement, could this serious misunderstanding begin to change, and white American sociology commence to give the power and the resources of the black civil sphere their due. In the final pages of The Civil Sphere's analysis of the civil rights movement, I speculate that the significance of black agency in the contemporary project of civil repair has, perhaps, still not been fully appreciated: "Despite the periodic calls for regulatory intervention made by liberal intellectuals and policy elites, the conditions that sustain the racial underclass will not be repaired until a new social movement can arise. Only a powerful and affecting social movement could mobilize the increasingly fragmented black community. Only skillful movement intellectuals could translate the particular experiences and conditions of the racial underclass into compelling codes and narratives that can gain psychological identification from the civil sphere outside. Social scientists and critics speak about repairing this new racial divide primarily in organizational terms, calling for massive state intervention and economic restructuring. However, such new forms of regulation depend on the creation of new forms of civil power" (The Civil Sphere, p. 390).13 That, nonetheless, throughout much of the decades-long backlash period, civil repair of racial (and gender and sexual) inequality actually gained momentum demonstrates the manner in which regulative institutions of civil society respond to communicative restructurings of social solidarity, and not simply to the strategic maneuverings of election fights. This momentum did not, however, ameliorate the problem of the racial underclass.14 It is, in fact, the central importance of these northern media, not the fact that some of their best reporters were of southern origins, that is the central point of Roberts and Klibanoff's The Race Beat. This position actually provides the dramatic conclusion of their book, where they draw from their interviews with John Lewis, the Congressman and former movement activist: "When he looks back on how he survived and how the movement kept going, he thinks about how hard the segregationists worked to keep the prying eyes of the press away. He can recall the security he felt when reporters—'sympathetic referees,' he calls them—were watching and the fear he felt when they weren't.... When he saw white thugs in Montgomery smash cameras, beat reporters, and rip up notebooks, he understand that there was an extraordinary power of communications operating parallel to, and intertwined with, the movement. It was, he felt, an allied force[:] 'There was a sense of righteous indignation on the part of the American people because of the message that the media was able to translate and send around the country and around the world'" (CitationRoberts and Klibanoff 2006:407). Lewis is speaking here, of course, only about northern media. Roberts and Klibanoff document how southern media, with a few notable exceptions, "threw their whole editorial weight" behind the backlash that developed against the black movement in the South (p. 74).15 All following quotations from CitationTavernise (2007

Civil society · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Political Science Research and Education · Social and Cultural Dynamics

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub