The Civil Sphere (review)

This book aims at recasting the scholarly debate on democracy by proposing a new interpretation of civil society as a "civil sphere, a world of values and institutions that generates the capacity for social criticism and democratic integration at the same time. Such a sphere relies on solidarity, on feelings for others whom we do not know but whom we respect out of principle." This perspective is an extension of Jeffrey Alexander's "strong program" for a cultural sociology, which he masterfully articulated in 2003's The Meanings of Social Life. In The Civil Sphere, he applies this program to politics.

To do so, Alexander develops a normative theory of justice to replace both the idealist versions of civil society and the various strands of realism (the tradition of Thrasymachus, as he calls it). He argues that since the late eighteenth-century democratic revolutions, a civil sphere has emerged, which in turn has constructed "really existing civil societies." Such societies continuously face up to the challenge of successful, yet always partial, institutionalization. The civil sphere is constructed on the basis of cultural structures that form the basic underpinnings of democracy. Following the presentation of the normative and theoretical outline of civil society in part 1 of the book, part 2 is devoted to a lengthy description of these cultural structures. For Alexander, the basis of democratic politics is civil power, a new kind of power that is independent of the social power held by various groups. This civil power is expressed through regulative institutions—such as voting, political parties, democratic offices, and the law—as well as through communicative institutions that provide cultural authority. The communicative institutions include the civil society discourse (where a binary code of good and evil is created and projected into the civil sphere) and the institutions of public opinion, mass media, and voluntary associations. According to the author, these institutions do not play only an integrative role but can also provide the means to exclude people from the civil sphere—such as, for example, Jim Crow legislation.

Consequently, the "civil society project" remains partial and fragmentary, and the operation of its institutions is always subject to uncivilizing pressures. The author openly acknowledges that race, gender, and class have been seized and used by those in power to exclude participation of people into the civil sphere. Civil societies are bounded by time and space and draw boundaries between insiders and outsiders, thereby circumscribing the universalistic claims of civil discourse. Noncivil spheres—such as the economy or the polity—influence the operation of civil society by placing religious or ethnic minorities, women, and other groups outside the boundaries of the civil sphere. In the author's perspective, such contradictions are created not by the total absence of civil society but rather by the fragmented nature of its institutionalization. In his words, "The contradictions created by the boundary problems of civil and uncivil spheres are structural and in this sense permanent. They are created not only by objective deficiencies but by expectations, by the utopian aspirations of the civil sphere and by the very effort to institutionalize them. . . . In real civil societies, universalism will always be contradicted by particularities of space, time and function."

The incomplete institutionalization of the civil sphere does not mean that civil society is a sham, though. Rather, the author argues that the existence of social movements that have at times successfully challenged these injustices demonstrates that the possibilities for justice still exist. Therein lies the possibility for civil repair, which can restore the intrusions of noncivil spheres into the civil sphere. In a significant and radical revision of the scholarly tradition, the author rejects the entire school of social revolutions and argues instead that social conditions that propelled the great revolutions of the past (French, American, and English) are quite different from the social conditions generated by the emerging civil societies from the nineteenth century onward. Unlike the situation in the old regimes, postrevolutionary democracies possess in the civil sphere an...