Special Issue of Philosophy and Society on Jeffrey Alexander’s Civil Sphere Theory

We are happy to announce that the special issue of Philosophy and Society (36:1, 2025), Resilience and/or Vulnerability of the Civil Sphere, edited by CCS Faculty Fellow Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, CCS Faculty Fellow Elisabeth Becker, and Milica Resanović is available now.

“This special issue arose out of a conference hosted at Heidelberg Univer­sity ‘The Civil Sphere: Global Perspectives on Culture and Politics,’ from Oc­tober 18-19, 2023. The conference united scholars working in the field of cul­tural sociology from across the globe, with the shared goal of engaging with and further developing Civil Sphere Theory, considering its global dimensions, in particular. While the conference provided an intellectual opportunity for scholars across neighboring disciplines to employ cultural sociological theory and methods in order to speak to key sociopolitical shifts, including contem­porary refugee and migration waves, global environmental degradation, en­during racism, and political waves of populism, we have since entered into a time of notably increased democratic crisis. We believe that the contributions in this special issue, both as individual papers and as a whole, are therefore more relevant than ever–both in and beyond the academy.”

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, Elisabeth Becker, and Milica Resanović

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RESILIENCE AND/OR VULNERABILITY OF THE CIVIL SPHERE

• Editorial Introduction

  Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, Elisabeth Becker, Milica Resanović; 3–10

• Civil Society IV: Democratic Solidarity and the Non-Civil Scaffolding of the Civil Sphere

  Galen Watts, Mervyn Horgan; 11–40

• Membership, Migration, and Inclusion in the Civil Sphere

  Peter Kivisto, Giuseppe Sciortino; 41–62

• The Civil Sphere and its Resilient Tribalist Discontents: A Muslim Ban Cloaked in Sacralized Binaries

  Daniel Joseph Belback; 63–98

• The New Global Public: Surveillance and the Risks to the Civil Sphere

  Jessica Dawson; 99–118

• Rehearsing Civility: Bridgebuilding in Polarized America

  Emily B. Campbell; 119–138

• The Potential for Civil Resilience. Staging Inequalities in a Stigmatized Neighborhood

  Anna Lund, Rebecca Brinch, Ylva Lorentzon; 139–164

• ‘TIPNIS somos todos’: Discourse of Indigenousness within and beyond a national civil sphere

  Danny Daniel Mollericona Alfaro; 165–192

STUDIES AND ARTICLES

• The End of Art, Modernism and Postmodernism

  Gustavo Torrecilha; 195–218

• From the Postmodern to the Metamodern: The Hegelian Dialectical Process and its Contemporarization

  John David Vandevert; 219–242

• The Forgetting of Hegel in Ernesto Laclau: An Unfortunate Disengagement

  Martin Retamozo; 243–256

• An Absolute Hegelianism for Postmodern Times: Hegel with Lacan after Bataille and Derrida

  Rutwij Nakhwa; 257–276

• Lyotard versus Hegel: The Violent End of Postmodernity

  Andreas Herberg-Rothe; 277–296