Download The Civil Sphere By Jeffrey C. Alexander Publisher: Oxford

The Civil Sphere
By Jeffrey C. Alexander
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Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Pages: 816
Publication Date: 2006-08-03
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0195162501
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780195162509
Product Description:
How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world?
Jeffrey 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. A grand and sweeping statement, The Civil Sphere is a major contribution to our thinking
about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.
Summary: A Triumph of Interpretive Sociology
Rating: 5
The strength of an individual's social loyalties diminishes progressively as the target of
loyalty moves from family, to community, to nation, and beyond. The social distances
involved are also lessened by cultural, ethnic, and religious similarities. Family and
community ties have existed since H. sapiens emerged as a hunter-gather species, but other
loyalties are of more recent vintage. The rise of states in the early-modern period, for
instance, did little to instill in citizens a sense of national moral identity. Such a sense arose
only after the more recent nation-building period in modern Europe. Historian Eric
Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition (1992) provides a thoroughly researched analysis of
the historical process of the creation of social loyalties in the service of a variety of social
groups and movements. Once created, and consolidated by the extension of mass democratic
participation, of course, national loyalties have become keys to personal identification and
motivation in the 21st century.
But, what exactly is it that people have in common when they identify with others in
protecting and defending home and hearth? Who is the "we" when we say "we and they?" We
certainly do not mean the state or the economy, which we treat as instrumental toward
meeting our needs and of which we are generally otherwise wary. Nor is it simply the
citizenry. Indeed, through long periods of American history, blacks, Jews, Catholics, and even
women were "them" and not "us" when the basic political identifications of powerful
"insiders" were involved.
It is critical to understand that movements for racial and gender equality as well as religious
and ethnic tolerance, have not been simply materialistic ploys for gaining a larger share of the
pie for participants, but rather intimately involve transforming the social landscape by
admitting new, full-fledged members of the mutually-supporting "insiders" who define our
basic social identifications.
Of course, in the heat of struggle for a new social identity, "outsiders" rarely admit that they
simply want in. Rather they tend to make extravagant claims concerning the need to
reorganize social life as a whole to accommodate their presence, and they tend to view
pitched social battle, not a placid civil sphere, as the natural state of affairs. However, in
virtually all cases, once admitted into the realm of the "insiders," these claims diminish in
intensity and eventually are reduced to a low murmur, at best. In the long run, the natural state
of a relatively harmonious sphere of the "we," surrounded by a stable boundary separating the
"we" from the "they."
What, then, is the "we?" In The Civil Sphere, Jeffery Alexander, among the most respected of
contemporary sociologists, takes on the ambitious task of analyzing this hitherto unrecognized
object of loyalty and commitment available to members of democratic societies. The civil
sphere, for Alexander, is narrower than the "civil society" of classical political thought, as the
latter included all institutions and social practices outside the state, whereas the civil sphere
for Alexander excludes not only the state, but the economy and other organized institutional
forms as well. The civil sphere is an intentional community of individuals whose mutual
relations are of solidarity and empathy, and whose "civil power" is codified in communicative
cultural institutions such as the news and public opinion media and such regulative
institutions as political parties and voluntary associations, and common rituals that signify the
commitment to the social group, including charity, contributions to political candidates, and
participation in community-building. Of course, the civil sphere, like family and community,
is by no means devoid of internal strife; however, the tensions and discords of the civil sphere
have the capacity to be constitutive and transforming, rather than simply mutually destructive
zero-sum games.
The civil sphere is precisely the "we," and Alexander's primary task is to determine its
structure and defend its existence against those whose political understandings do not include
the presence or importance of such a sphere. For Alexander, the civil sphere is a complex of
social relations that exists, is socially constructed, and is worthy of our support. The most
formidable intellectual enemies of the civil sphere are forms of positivism and material
realism for which all subjective social identifications are merely instrumental to gaining
power and wealth. Alexander consolidates these enemies in a single personification, that of
Thrasymachus who, in Plato's Republic, defended a "might makes right" and purely material,
distributional view of morality. Alexander considers state and economy as sources of disunity,
fragmenting civil solidarity to the extent that material differences in power and wealth are not
legitimized according to the dominant social norms that govern social strategic interaction.
Thus, Thrasymachus rearing his ugly head is a symptom of social dislocation and
illegitimacy, rather than being the ontologically primary condition of social life.
Alexander's exegesis is a thick description of historicalj social dynamics, from the holocaust
to the civil rights and women's movements in the United States. While his hostility to the
reduction of social exchange to disputes of the distribution of power and wealth, it remains
true that a healthy civil sphere cannot thrive where inequality of opportunity is widespread,
because in such circumstances, the relatively dispossessed are perforce "outsiders," who can
but gain by breaking the lines of social solidarity in the civil sphere. In my estimation, the
poor in the world, and even the relatively poor in the United States, would do better to have a
better instrument of contestation, even if it did threaten the civil sphere. The normative value
of the civil sphere depends on a considerable degree of social equality in economic and
political life-chances, and disturbing the cozy "we are all one" of the civil sphere is a moral
duty, I believe, in the face of injustice. Alexander of course agrees. In the good society,
master and servant relate in the solidarity of the civil sphere, and to an amazing extent we
have achieved this condition in the United States, but certainly not completely. There remains
room for social movements for inclusion in the civil sphere. In the developing countries, the
emergence of a healthy civil sphere remains a task for future generations.
Alexander's style of thought is similar to that of such great sociological thinkers as Durkheim,
Parsons, and Habermas (especially the latter), but this style of thought is somewhat foreign to
the other behavioral disciplines (economics, psychology, anthropology, biology), although it
has parallel presence in political science (e.g., de Tocqueville). Alexander's analysis is akin to
policy recommendation in economics--not the sort that deals with day-to-day macroeconomic
regulation or trade policy, but rather the sort that urges economies to adopt certain basic
institutions and to have a vision of the harmonious working of a particular articulation of state
and market, under the aegis of a complementary social philosophy to which all parties attest.
The weakness of Alexander's argument lies in his inability to offer strong support for his
"anti-Thrasymachus" position. One could argue that he is preaching to the choir, because he
offers no concrete proof that people are really motivated by moral ideals and altruistic
solidarity, as opposed to this being a façade masquerading brutal self-interest. For economists,
of course, self-interest was identified with rationality until recent years, and biologists still
have great difficulty in dealing with human altruism. Other-regarding preferences were
virtually ignored until recently in both economics and biology, although they are standard fare
in anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. In economics, the notion that enlightened
self-interest allows individuals to cooperate in large groups goes back to Bernard Mandeville's
"private vices, public virtues" (1705) and Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (1759). The great
economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth considered self-interest "the first principle of pure
economics" (1925). In biology, the selfishness principle has been touted as a central
implication of rigorous evolutionary modeling. In The Selfish Gene (1976), for instance,
Richard Dawkins asserts "We are survival machines---robot vehicles blindly programmed to
preserve the selfish molecules known as genes... Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,
because we are born selfish." Similarly, in The Biology of Moral Systems (1987), R. D.
Alexander asserts that "ethics, morality, human conduct, and the human psyche are to be
understood only if societies are seen as collections of individuals seeking their own selfinterest." More poetically, Michael Ghiselin (1974) writes: "No hint of genuine charity
ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid aside. What passes for
cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. ...Scratch an altruist,
and watch a hypocrite bleed."
Of course, most sociologists rather dramatically disagree with this depiction of human nature,
but until recently, we lacked evidence supporting the sociological view. Two major
theoretical developments, however, have virtually destroyed the scientific arguments in favor
of the model of human behavior as fundamentally selfish. These developments are compatible
with views other than Alexander's, but they effectively undercut the major "received wisdom"
critiques of his analysis.
The first of these developments is the characterization of human nature as the product of a
long-term dynamic of gene-culture coevolution. The centrality of culture and complex social
organization to the evolutionary success of H. sapiens implies that individual fitness in
humans depends on the structure of social life. Since culture is limited and facilitated by
human genetic, it follows that human cognitive, affective, and moral capacities are the
product of an evolutionary dynamic involving the interaction of genes and culture. This is
gene-culture coevolution (Cvalli-sforza and Feldman 1982; Boyd and Richerson 1985;
Dunbar 1993; Rricherson and Boyd 2004). This coevolutionary process has endowed us with
preferences that go beyond the self-regarding concerns emphasized in traditional economic
and biological theory and embrace a social epistemology facilitating the sharing of
intentionality across minds, as well as such non-self-regarding values as a taste for
cooperation, fairness, and retribution, the capacity to empathize, and the ability to value
honesty, hard work, piety, toleration of diversity, and loyalty to one's reference group.
Gene-culture coevolution is the application of sociobiology, the general theory of the social
organization of biological species, to species that transmit culture without informational loss
across generations. An intermediate category is niche construction, which applies to species
that transform their natural environment to facilitate social interaction and collective behavior
(Odling-smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003).
To understand gene-culture coevolution, we begin by noting that the genome encodes
information that is used both to construct a new organism and to endow it with instructions
for transforming sensory inputs into decision outputs. Because learning is costly and errorprone, efficient information transmission ensures that the genome encodes all aspects of the
organism's environment that are constant or that change only slowly through time and space.
By contrast, environmental conditions that vary rapidly can be dealt with by providing the
organism with the capacity to learn.
There is an intermediate case, however, that is efficiently handled neither by genetic encoding
nor by learning. When environmental conditions are positively but imperfectly correlated
across generations, each generation acquires valuable information through learning that it
cannot transmit genetically to the succeeding generation because such information is not
encoded in the germ line. In the context of such environments, there is a fitness benefit to the
transmission of epigenetic information concerning the current state of the environment.Such
epigenetic information is quite common (Jablonka and Lamb 1995) but achieves its highest
and most flexible form in cultural transmission in humans and to a considerably lesser extent
in other primates (Bonner 1983; Richerson and Boyd 1998). Cultural transmission takes the
form of vertical (parents to children), horizontal (peer to peer), and oblique (elder to younger),
as explained in (Cavalli-sforza and Feldman 1981), and prestige (higher status influencing
lower status), as described in Henrich and Gil-White (2001).
The parallel between cultural and biological evolution goes back to Huxley (1955), -whitenlaland06} for details. The idea of treating culture as a form of epigenetic transmission was
pioneered by Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) to
represent an integral unit of information that could be transmitted phenotypically. There
quickly followed several major contributions to a biological approach to culture, all based on
the notion that culture, like genes, could evolve through replication (intergenerational
transmission), mutation, and selection.
Gene-culture coevolution allows us to explain why humans have other-regarding preferences,
why we care intrinsically about such character virtues as honesty, loyalty, honor, and courage,
why we sacrifice to help others, and why we have such prosocial emotions as empathy,
shame, guilt, and self-esteem. It is important to note that these are not just luxuries indulged in
by the relatively well-off. Rather, they are embraced in virtually all communities, rich and
poor alike (Banerjee and Duflot 2008).
The second theoretical development is behavioral game theory, in which game-theoretic
categories are used as methodological underpinnings of empirical studies of human behavior
(Gintis, Bowles, Boyd, and Fehr 2003). These studies have shown incontrovertibly both that
people generally have a variety of prosocial other-regarding preferences and moral standards
that they try to satisfy even when it is otherwise costly to do so, and that these preferences
satisfy the economist's traditional criteria for rational choice. These results show that moral,
prosocial, and other-regarding preferences are built into the structure of preferences, so the
ancient dichotomy between "material" and "moral" payoffs cannot be maintained. There is a
unity to human choice, in which people ineluctably trade off among altruistic and selfregarding goals.
The rationality of altruism and morality discovered using behavioral game theory, by the way,
solves a central problem of Parsonian sociology: the so-called "oversocialized" actor in
Parsons' model. Because Parsons separated action into material and moral, the former
governed by economic theory and the latter by sociology, he had no analytical instrument for
expression the limitations of moral training. Thus, if one is socialized to behave honestly,
according to Parsons, one will do so no matter what the "material" cost. However, we now
know that people value honesty along with material reward and will trade off between them:
the more costly it is to be honest, the more likely it is that individuals will behave dishonestly.
I hope the reader will excuse this long detour into social theory. I defend myself by noting
that these two recent theoretical innovations, with widespread empirical support, will allow
for a more methodical development of Alexander's notion of the civil sphere, and might also
give us some insight into the social conditions under which we might expect a civil sphere to
emerge in a given society.
Summary: Advance Praise for The Civil Sphere
Rating: 5
"Arguably the most probing and insightful examination of civil society in America since
Tocqueville's Democracy in America. He offers a penetrating and original causal
interpretation of the success of the Civil Rights Movement, and addresses with understanding
and fresh perspective the question of Jewish assimilation in post-civil rights America.
Alexander's long awaited book establishes a new benchmark for cultural sociology and social
theory with its rigorous theoretical and historical analysis of transformative societal change." - Victor Nee, Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology, Cornell University
"Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere is the most important, effective, and readable book in
his distinguished career. A powerful and provocative account of civil society, this brilliant
piece of theorizing is fueled by an expansive moral vision. Alexander punctures the
overblown claims of other thinkers both left and right, and stunningly combines theoretical
vigor with a subtle, becoming humility in the face of the best achievements and most
compelling aspirations of the civil sphere." -- Michael Schudson, Professor of
Communication, University of California at San Diego
"An original portrait of civil society which addresses issues which must be addressed if we
are to live in peace with those unlike ourselves. The Civil Sphere is remarkable for its clarity
and depth of exposition. All readers will benefit from Alexander's ideas: he does not try to
batter the reader into submission; instead, he embodies the very ideal of civil society, by
inviting the reader to argue with him. In sum, an extraordinary and necessary book." -Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology, The London School of Economics
"This is a Herculean labor in which Alexander not only deconstructs the discourse of "civil
society" but reevaluates the entire tradition of political and social thought which attempted to
establish, justify, and actualize this abstract idea." -- Hayden White, Professor Emeritus of the
History of Consciousness, University of California
"Long recognized as one of the world's foremost intellects, in The Civil Sphere Jeffrey
Alexander delivers a masterpiece. In this breathtakingly erudite tour of literature, history,
philosophy, and social science scholarship, from Hannah Arendt to Woody Allen, Alexander
takes on in a single volume both foundational questions of the human condition and the
political exigencies of our day. The result is a book that will wholly transform the conceptual
landscape; from this point forward we will recognize that the civil sphere's potential for social
justice can only be an ongoing project, never a finished achievement." -- Margaret R. Somers,
Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
"The Civil Sphere is at once an energizing ideal for democratic society, and a source of
violations of its own ethos. Jeffrey Alexander's well-argued book identifies this crucial level
on which liberal democratic societies must operate and offers an insightful and non-reductive
account of the struggles against such violations, for what he calls "civil repair". He provides
fascinating analyses, among other events, of the civil rights movements, and of modern antiSemitism." -- Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University