The civil sphere Theory
Working group
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News
Post-Transformation and the Civil Sphere in Central and Eastern Europe offers a distinctive examination of civil society and democracy in a region shaped by the legacies of state socialism, democratic transition, and profound social change. Drawing on Civil Sphere Theory and introducing post-transformation as a framework for understanding contemporary Central and Eastern Europe…
What happens when schools can no longer bind society together? In an era of growing segregation, this book explores how Swedish schools and municipalities work to counteract inequality and foster civil inclusion. Through detailed case studies of school closures, mergers, and new openings, the authors trace how local actors try to achieve 'civil repair' …
First published in 2006, Jeffrey C. Alexander’s The Civil Sphere (TCS) quickly established itself as one of the classic works of post-classical sociology. In this interview, occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the publication of TCS, Christopher Thorpe, one of the current editors of Cultural Sociology, spoke with Jeffrey Alexander…
While domestic civil spheres extend Lockean ties of mutual understanding, they often legitimate a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ among nations outside their national boundaries. As cultural trauma theory suggests, however…
This book shows how four feminist mobilizations in the early 2020s in Mexico expressed widespread rejection of harassment, sexual violence, and femicide. It discusses the cultural environment in Mexico that has allowed violence and femicides to be interpreted as a serious situation, to the point that it questions the authority of presidential power and mobilizes public opinion for and against it…
The book reveals the ways in which the various components of CST come together to offer an illuminating framework for making sense of the complexities, ambiguities, and tensions inherent in modern democracies located in highly differentiated and pluralistic societies. It compares CST to civil society theories from the past and present, along with the idea of the societal community and Habermas’s theory of the public sphere…
While previous works focus on theological and philosophical approaches to interfaith dialogue, this study explores an interreligious civil sphere through the lens of cultural sociology. This article examines the Saparan-Aprilan (purification ritual) as a hybrid festivity in Central Java, Indonesia. The festivity is based on Christian narratives, local cultural texts, and Indonesian political codes as a social script for civic engagement…
How can state politics reconstruct unhealthy, undemocratic and unsound sports as a common good? This study explores the convergence of state and sport politics. Using cultural sociology, I unearth how the Nordic welfare state reconstructs children's sport and embeds it in its broader purview of civil society. Through document-ethnography of white papers from the Ministry of Health and Care Services, Ministry of Culture, and Ministry of Childhood and Families…
It was the intellectually brilliant, if not tragic, figure of Stefan Zweig who said that “one must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.” Aside from the fact that he was Austrian, a more pertinent reason for citing Zweig is that his words capture something of how I feel when I recall my experience of the recent CST Working Group conference…
This article discusses Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908) and Horace M. Kallen's essay ‘Democracy versus the Melting Pot’ (1915) as two different visions of future Jewish inclusion. Zangwill's play and Kallen's response reflect social changes at the time, and both visions consider Jewish history exemplary for the world-to-come…
The present paper delves into how symbolic boundaries in a school that is undergoing a desegregation process come to shape social boundaries of ‘we-ness’ and ‘otherness’. The theoretical framework of the study starts from an interest in analysing whether symbolic and social boundaries emerge…
Are members of the public still committed to democracy? Existing studies often ask whether members of the public sanction political actors who break institutional or procedural norms. In contrast, we study a shared cultural horizon, which grounds democracy as a way of living. Drawing on Civil Sphere Theory and the sociology of culture and cognition…