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The Civil Sphere By Jeffrey C. Alexander 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