From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action-so-called practices-and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a (...) new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances, whether individual or collective, can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become "de-fused" as societies have become more complex. Performances are successful only insofar as they can "re-fuse" these increasingly disentangled elements. In a fused performance, audiences identify with actors, and cultural scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective mise-en-scène. Performances fail when this relinking process is incomplete: the elements of performance remain apart, and social action seems inauthentic and artificial, failing to persuade. Refusion, by contrast, allows actors to communicate the meanings of their actions successfully and thus to pursue their interests effectively. (shrink)

In four closely interwoven studies, Jeffrey Alexander identifies the central dilemma that provokes contemporary social theory and proposes a new way to resolve it. The dream of reason that marked the previous fin de siècle foundered in the face of the cataclysms of the twentieth century, when war, revolution, and totalitarianism came to be seen as themselves products of reason. In response there emerged the profound skepticism about rationality that has so starkly defined the present fin de siècle. From Wittgenstein (...) through Rorty and postmodernism, relativism rejects the very possibility of universal standards, while for both positivism and neo-Marxists like Bourdieu, reductionism claims that ideas simply reflect their social base. In a readable and spirited argument, Alexander develops the alternative of a "neo-modernist" position that defends reason from within a culturally centered perspective while remaining committed to the goal of explaining, not merely interpreting, contemporary social life. On the basis of a sweeping reinterpretation of postwar society and its intellectuals, he suggests that both antimodernist radicalism and postmodernist resignation are now in decline; a more democratic, less ethnocentric and more historically contingent universalizing social theory may thus emerge. Developing in his first two studies a historical approach to the problem of "absent reason," Alexander moves via a critique of Richard Rorty to construct his case for "present reason." Finally, focusing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, he provokes the most sustained critical reflection yet on this influential thinker. Fin de Siecle Social Theory is a tonic intervention in contemporary debates, showing how social and cultural theory can properly take the measure of the extraordinary times in which we live. (shrink)

"Neofunctionalism and After" brings together for the first time in one volume all of Alexander's writings on neofunctionalism, the present volume also contains ...

Social theory between progress and apocalypse -- Autonomy and domination: Weber's cage -- Barbarism and modernity: Eisenstadt's regret -- Integration and justice: Parsons' utopia -- Despising others: Simmel's stranger -- Meaning evil -- De-civilizing the civil sphere -- Psychotherapy as central institution -- The frictions of modernity and their possible repair.

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning (...) is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

After introducing a perspective on terrorism as postpolitical and after establishing the criteria for success that are immanent in this form of antipolitical action, this essay interprets September 11, 2001, and its aftermath inside a cultural-sociological perspective. After introducing a macro-model of social performance that combines structural and semiotic with pragmatic and power-oriented dimensions, I show how the terrorist attack on New York City and the counterattacks that immediately occurred in response can be viewed as an iteration of the performance/counterperformance (...) dialectic that began decades, indeed centuries, ago in terms of the relation of Western expansion and Arab-Muslim reaction. I pay careful attention to the manner in which the counterperformance of New Yorkers and Americans develops an idealized, liminal alternative that inspired self-defense and outrage, leading to exactly the opposite performance results from those the al-Qaeda terrorists had intended. (shrink)

The following is simultaneously an essay in sociological theory, in cultural sociology, and in the empirical reconstruction of postwar Western history. Per theory, it introduces and specifies a model of cultural trauma - a model that combines a strong cultural program with concern for institutional and power effects - and applies it to large-scale collectivities over extended periods of time. Per cultural sociology, the essay demonstrates that even the most calamitous and biological of social facts - the prototypical evil of (...) genocidal mass murder - can be understood only inside of symbolic codes and narratives; that these frames change substantially depending on social circumstances; and that this culture process is critical to establishing understandings of moral responsibility. Empirically, this essay documents, in social and cultural detail, using both secondary and primary sources, how it was that the `Holocaust' gradually became the dominant symbolic representation of evil in the late twentieth century, and what its consequences have been for the development of a supra-national moral universalism that may restrict genocidal acts in the future. (shrink)

One of the most important contributions of the Parsonian tradition has been its conceptualization of the relative autonomy and mutual interpenetration of culture and social systems. The first part of this chapter defines three ideal types of empirical relationships between culture and society: specification, refraction, and columnization. Each is related to different configurations of social structure and culture and, in turn, to different degrees of social conflict. The second part of the chapter uses this typology to illuminate critical aspects of (...) the relationship between conflict and integration in the Watergate crisis in the U.S. (shrink)

This article examines a key question emerging from the strong program in cultural sociology — can art provide a window into social life? An examination of Giacometti's Standing Woman shows that art attempts to express cultural structures via immersion into and through the material surfaces of aesthetic form. Through an analysis of the iconic significance of family photos, furniture and celebrities, the article goes on to suggest that such iconic experience remains at the basis of contemporary social life. It explains (...) how we feel part of our surroundings, how we experience the ties that bind us to the people we know and how we develop a feeling for cultural hierarchy. (shrink)

This volume begins by challenging the bases of the recent scientization of sociology. Then it challenges some of the ambitious claims of recent theoretical debate. The author not only reinterprets the most important classical and modern sociological theories but extracts from the debates the elements of a more satisfactory, inclusive approach to these general theoretical points.

This volume challenges prevailing understanding of the two great founders of sociological thought. In a detailed and systematic way the author demonstrates how Marx and Durkheim gradually developed the fundamental frameworks for sociological materialism and idealism. While most recent interpreters of Marx have placed alienation and subjectivity at the centre of his work, Professor Alexander suggests that it was the later Marx¿s very emphasis on alienation that allowed him to avoid conceptualizing subjectivity altogether. In Durkheim¿s case, by contrast, the author (...) argues that such objectivist theorizing informed the early work alone, and he demonstrates that in his later writings Durkheim elaborated an idealist theory that used religious life as an analytical model for studying the institutions of secular society. (shrink)

Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. While this new scientific concept clarifies causal relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions, and actions, it also illuminates a neglected domain of social responsibility and political action. By constructing cultural traumas, social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations, not (...) only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering, but may also take on board some significant moral responsibility for it. Insofar as they identify the cause of trauma in a manner that assumes such moral responsibility, members of collectivities define their solidary relationships that allow them to share the suffering of others. Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the ‘we’ and create the possibility for repairing societies to prevent the trauma from happening again. By the same token, social groups can, and often do, refuse to recognize the existence of others’ suffering, or place the responsibility for it on people other than themselves. Empirically, this article extensively considers trauma construction in the case of the Holocaust – the mass murder of Jews by the German Nazis – but also examines trauma processes in relation to African-Americans, indigenous peoples, colonial victims of Western and Japanese imperialism, the Nanjing Massacre, and victims of the early communist regimes in Soviet Russia and Maoist China. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the principal approaches to culture which are available in the social sciences today and places these debates within the framework of broader theoretical controversies. On the one hand, it is a critical comparison. On the other hand, it has a systematic dimension that casts these arguments in a cumulative form. While the ambition of this essay is to prepare the way for a critical synthesis, such a task will not be attempted here. Far from being aimed at (...) concluding judgments and summary evaluations, the purpose of this essay is to open up doors. In taking up general issues only as they are raised in the readings that follow, this essay will not lose sight of its introductory function. (shrink)

As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be sick. (...) This essay traces the intertwining of psychoanalytic and sociological methods that allowed Fromm to create such new ideas. At the same time, it highlights how Fromm’s sociology was hampered by an economistic Marxist approach to the institutions and culture of democratic capitalist societies. Such theoretical restriction prevented Fromm from conceptualizing how institutions like democracy, science, and psychotherapy can provide resources for widespread emotional recuperation and civil repair. (shrink)

Simmel develops his concept of the stranger in an overly structural and reductionist manner. Contrary to Simmel’s suggestion, there is an indeterminate relation between structural exclusion and the attribution of strangeness. After showing that ‘the stranger’ must be rethought in a cultural-sociological way, this essay demonstrates an alternative approach. Articulating a ‘discourse’ that structures Western projections of strangeness, I explore its relation to colonialism, racial and class domination, and national conflict in modern Western history. This approach suggests an alternative, not (...) only to Simmel but to Merton’s and Coser’s earlier structural-functional reconceptualization of stranger theory. (shrink)

This is an exploration of the creative work done by leading sociologists who were inspired by the scholarship of Neil Smelser.

Despite anxieties about the growing power of neo-liberalism, the crisis of the EU and the upsurge of right-wing political movements, it is important to recognize that utopian movements on the left have also in recent years been symbolically revitalized and organizationally sustained. This article analyses three recent social upheavals as utopian civil society movements, placing the 2008 US presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement in the USA inside the narrative arc that (...) began with the non-violent democratic uprisings against authoritarian governments four decades earlier. In this new utopian surge, however, there is an unprecedented connection of eastern and western impulses, demonstrating that the tide of democratic thought and action is hardly confined to Judeo-Christian civilizations. (shrink)

I make use of this reply to McLennan to offer an overall perspective on the development of my work, normatively, empirically and theoretically, and in its earlier neofunctionalist and later cultural-sociological phase. I argue that, despite periodic suggestions that my cultural sociology seeks to push sociology towards an absolute subjectivity, the social-epistemological framework of ‘multidimensionality’ around which I organized my first work, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, still holds. Cultural sociology introduces a method and theory for understanding a dimension of social (...) life, it is not an attempt to explain every part of social life. There is still structural power according to this perspective, but the nature and force of this power must be understood differently. It is a mistake for social science to take a ‘realist’ path, either in its epistemology or in its mode of explanation. (shrink)

Unrivalled in scope and depth, and prepared by one of the acknowledged giants of contemporary social theory, this boxed set provides a magisterial review of the central canons, discourses and research programs in social theory. The reader is provided with a route-map through the complex terrain of social theory from classical to contemporary times. Alexander distils an amazingly rich set of resources into eight exceptional volumes. For the specialist who does not have all of these materials to hand, the set (...) offers an incisive and invaluable research aid. For the non-specialist, the volumes constitute an elegant and reliable entry into the heart of what is important in social theory. For specialist and non-specialist alike, Alexander's choices will be a fascinating insight into his view of the essentials in the Western tradition of social theory. The collection begins with a specially prepared essay by Alexander that precludes a view of social theory as a "glorious" onward march. Instead, he concentrates on the relativity of social theory, a relativity that derives from the status of sociology as a human science rather than a science of nature. The Introduction provides the reader with a guide through the main structural shifts in social theory. It demonstrates why the classics are significant and elucidates their contemporary relevance; and indicates the limitations of the classical tradition, tracing where these limitations have borne fruit in contemporary research initiatives and achievements. Alexander identifies central canons in sociological research and lays the groundwork for framing each. Urbane, shrewd and compelling, Alexander's mapping of the canons will inspire debate in sociology and offers an exciting new reorientation for reading and understanding social theory. (shrink)

This four-volume set presents an unrivalled collection of the key literature in European sociology. The prestigious texts range across the European tradition from enlightenment to contemporary theory. The collection explodes the myth that the European tradition in sociology is a debate with the ghosts of Karl Marx and Max Weber, demonstrating that the tradition is far more deeply rooted and broadly based. Volume 1 is devoted to the emergence of European sociology. The contribution of classical political economy and the Enlightenment (...) is examined. Commentaries on the work of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Taine, Rousseau, de Tocqueville, Comte and St. Simon are included. The volume creates a vivid and compelling picture of the origins of European sociology. Volume 2 covers the rise of the classical period in social theory. It includes commentaries on the contribution of Marx, Spencer, Dilthey, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel. An overview of the main contributions of the founding fathers is also included. Volume 3 moves on to explore the main developments in the first half of the twentieth century. The contributions of the Durkheimian Tradition, Mauss, Mannheim, Lukacs, Gramsci and British sociology are presented. The volume provides a synoptic view of the diversity and emerging complexity of European sociology. Volume 4 identifies the main developments from post-industrial theory to the present day. The volume includes commentaries on the work of Aron, Foucault, Habermas, Giddens, Bourdieu, Boudon and Gellner. Selections on structuralism, polysemy, the positivist dispute and the neo-liberal tradition widen out the picture. The collection is the benchmark work for understanding the history, contribution and dilemmas of the European tradition. Full account is taken of the reference needs of students as well as of academics. Each hardcover volume of 416 pages is bound to the highest standards. The lettering on the cover is gold embossed. The slip case for the four volumes is also embossed. The volumes are not available separately. (shrink)

Civil Sphere Theory provides a more dynamic, cultural, and democratically oriented model of contemporary society than either conflict or modernization theory. Civil spheres expand and contract in contradictory ways. Utopian periods of utopian repair trigger defensive efforts that primordialize and exclude. Late 20th century civil repair generated new relations of economic production and more multicultural modes of integration. Early 21rst century reactions have highlighted dangers, demanding more cultural homogeneity amidst rising concerns about inequality. There is increasing disillusionment about the possibility (...) for democratic progress. (shrink)

In this volume the author maintains that sociology must learn to combine the insights of both Durkheim and Marx and that it can only do so on the presuppositional ground that Weber set forth. Alexander maintains that the idealist and materialist traditions must be transformed into analytic dimensions of multidimensional and synthetic theory. This volume focusses on the writing of Talcott Parsons, the only modern thinker who can be considered a true peer of the classical founders, and examines his own (...) profoundly ambivalent attempt to carry out this analytic transformation. (shrink)

Avant-garde theatre is often invoked as the bellwether for a society that has become postdramatic – fragmented, alienated, and critical of efforts to create collectively shared meanings. A theatre whose sequenced actions have no narrative mirrors a social world where the most conflictual situations no longer appear as drama but merely as spectacle: a society where audiences look on without any feeling or connection. Because only half right, these theses about postdramatic theatre and society are fundamentally wrong. As modern societies (...) have expanded and differentiated, the elements that compose performances have become separated and often fragmented in both theatre and society. If they can be brought back together again, performances are viewed as authentic and meaningful. If fusion cannot be achieved, performances fail to communicate meaning. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that a shared ambition to fuse fragmented performative elements has defined the most important strain of avant-garde theatre over the last two centuries. Most radical theatrical innovation has sought to open live drama back up to the telos of myth and ritual. Neither in theatre nor social life can the world transcend dramaturgy; it is fundamental to the search for meaning in a world beyond cosmological religion. (shrink)