This short book-cum-essay by one of the USA’s leading social theorists is part of a larger project, announced by Alexander in 2006,Footnote ¹ of establishing the “civil sphere” as a key tool of social theory. As was noted at the time, the term is a composite of “civil society” and “public sphere”.Footnote ² Like its component elements, it is intended to serve both analytical and normative ends. Analytically, it identifies a sphere beyond the economy and the state. Normatively, it delineates a space in which shared societal concerns with justice and solidarity trump the everyday business of utility maximization and the struggle for power resources.

With the distinction between the non-civil and the civil sphere, we find ourselves on familiar territory. It echoes—not so distantly—Émile Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane. For Alexander, as for Durkheim, we need both, acting as mutual correctives. But with the civil sphere the focus is on how the former—the sacred, if you will—modifies the latter’s excesses, not least the tendency towards ever-growing inequality. Seen in cultural terms, the civil sphere is, we are told, “organized around a discourse that sacralizes the motives, relations, and institutions necessary to sustain democratic forms of self-regulation and social solidarity” [5]. Alexander’s normative-political aims are aligned with those of Durkheim and (Karl) Polanyi: to identify those collective forces that can potentially contain the tendency of market society to force the division of labour (Durkheim) and/or temper the deleterious social and environmental effects of the disembedded economy (Polanyi). He is concerned too with the tendency of non-civil spheres to self-police and to reproduce patterns of behaviour and social practices that may, when they become exposed to wider scrutiny, trigger a social crisis in need of resolution at a societal level.

In this volume, the civil sphere concept is turned on that recurring concern of the social sciences: crisis. In the heyday of crisis theory, the 1970s, crises were thought of as endemic within the (late) capitalist economy and the state. The search was on to identify the nature of the crisis or crises, as fiscalFootnote ³ or as one of governabilityFootnote ⁴ or of rationality and legitimation.Footnote ⁵ This imagining of crisis as something real and systemic—as something either happening or waiting to happen—has wide and deep roots, not least in classical Marxism, but also looks forward to much of the analysis of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 and current responses to climate change and species extinction as crises in this sense. Let’s call this conventional sense of the term Crisis 1.

Alexander aims to change the way we think about crises by arguing that there is no necessary relationship between an endemic strain and its manifestation as crisis. More often than not, endemic problems remain confined to their specific spheres and do not make themselves felt at a generalized societal level. The implication is that the assumption—sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit—behind Crisis 1, that there are quasi-automatic mechanisms for translating systemic problems into crises, is mistaken. Something else must have intervened in those cases where a problem becomes translated into a crisis. This something—this translator—is human agency within the civil sphere. Only with “societalization”, the second key term in Alexander’s conceptual armoury, is a “hitherto routinely accepted practice” transformed into “a new social fact” [8]. Societalization requires a “semiotic shift” or “code switch” that recodifies a sphere-specific strain into one which is of broader moral and institutional concern to the wider society. Let’s call this view Crisis 2.

Crises in the second sense run a cyclical course according to Alexander: from a steady state in which the problem is contained within the boundaries of a specific sphere (T₁), via a point when internal practices and rationale become challenged and recoded as “dereliction of civil responsibility” [9] (T₂), to one in which institutional (e.g., legal) sanctions are introduced (T₃). This problematization or scandalization of the issue is followed by fightback from the leaders (the elite) of the sphere under public scrutiny (T₄), followed in turn by the reestablishment of boundaries bringing about a new steady state (T₅). Chapters 2 to 4 elaborate on the model while the remainder of the volume (chapters 5 to 7) takes the form of “theoretical-empirical” case studies that are “abductive” rather than deductive or inductive and are intended to demonstrate the “theoretical plausibility” of his approach [118, fn.1]. The organization of the case studies, strictly and somewhat mechanically, follows the above sequence.

Underlying this is both the macro-level process of differentiation—the separation of spheres that is the condition of the possibility of societalization—and micro-level processes involving actors and agency. The latter Alexander understands as a “series of performances and counterperformances” among “highly interested and motivated parties” [12] addressed to a specific audience, namely those sympathetic to the ideals of the civil sphere. Alexander is quite precise about who these agents are. The performers are “civil heroes”. Here we might think of the investigative journalist tenaciously exposing a cover up; the human rights lawyer seeking redress for wronged clients; or the social movement or NGO activist mobilizing around an issue of public concern. However, we might note that at least the first two are (also) acting as members of spheres outside the civil sphere, the media and legal system respectively. Alexander places a strict demand on such actors: they must have no ideological axe to grind but see themselves as acting as “the vessels of a transcendent morality” [15] and be committed to moral universalism. The proper work of the civil sphere is one of repair, amelioration and restoration, not polarization nor “destructive compromises” [22].

Alexander’s argument is, as was to be expected, carefully and persuasively set out, and the case studies are often insightful. The latter also represent an attempt not merely to defend “hermeneutical reconstruction” against “positivist common sense” [119, fn. 1] abstractly but to put it to serious work. Nonetheless, open questions remain, and it is to these that I shall now turn.

First, as one reviewer has already noted, Alexander’s account is plausible in cases such as Church paedophilia (the subject of Chapter 4) but appears somewhat forced when applied to the financial crisis (Chapter 5).Footnote ⁶ This is not the only such case. On returning to Australia from sabbatical in August 2019, I was met by much talk from “highly interested and motivated parties” about the drought and its possible causes. That talk continued through the catastrophic bush-fire season that followed. But when the land is parched and the roads are strewn with roadkill as wildlife is forced onto the verges in a desperate search for the last green vegetation, or when the air is heavy with acrid smoke, that conversation was hardly necessary in order to realize that one was in the middle of a crisis. Those conversations where vital not in order to reveal the crisis, but as attempts to frame it and to counter alternative framings, not least those of the coalition government and a powerful national fossil-fuel lobby. Similarly, while there were certainly “civil heroes” at the early stages of the outbreak of COVID-19—i.e. those doctors in Wuhan who sought to draw attention to the outbreak—ultimately any cover-up was beyond the capacities of the authorities. Some crises simply look more like Crisis 1 than Crisis 2. They occur largely behind the backs of the actors and need little help in making themselves felt.

Such cases suggest that a social crisis may be a sub-class. The concept may best apply to the way in which patterns of behaviour thought acceptable, or at least tolerated, within some spheres become thematized as unacceptable at a societal level, #MeToo (the subject of Chapter 7) being the obvious current example. But, even in such cases, the question arises: For whom is this a crisis? Paedophilia in the Catholic Church certainly became thematized in the way Alexander describes as a social issue, but it was, and remains, primarily a crisis for the Catholic Church, manifested in defections among followers or offers of resignation from leading liberal Catholics such as Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising. Sometimes behaviours come to be viewed as unacceptable less through the efforts of civil heroes than through the effects of the crisis itself in the way, for example, the GFC revealed nefarious practices in the subprime mortgage sector. Occasionally it takes only a single event, such as the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, to trigger a social crisis.

Here the question is the converse of Alexander’s title: What makes a crisis social? It is only when we view all crises, and all aspects of crises, exclusively through the lens of cultural sociology, do these appear social all the way down. This is a useful corrective to overly mechanistic crisis theory—to “causal explanations in the realist mode” [111]—but it is just that, a corrective.

Secondly, like much social theorizing, Alexander’s argument is accompanied by a strong claim to novelty. We are offered a new theory of crisis, justifying neologisms such as “societalization” and the “civil sphere”. In one sense this is justified. The work offers striking and innovative arguments, but there remains the danger of overreach; of giving the impression that the approach is divorced from all that went before, or from what is going on outside cultural sociology. This problem has been highlighted by Volker Schmidt in a critique of an earlier version of the argument.Footnote ⁷ Schmidt points out in some detail that “societalization” is a key concept in the works of Marx, Simmel, and Weber.Footnote ⁸ It has the appearance of a neologism only because of the habit of mistranslating Vergesellschaftung as socialization, sociation, association, or associative relationship (Parsons). Schmidt further observes that the term has been used before in English, notably by Bryan Wilson and Bob Jessop. In this volume there is a long footnote [131-134, fn. 2] on Vergesellschaftung (and Vergemeinschaftung), likely in response to Schmidt, in which Alexander suggests that it is “a German active noun without any direct equivalent in English” and that his usage has a “decidedly different aim” [132, fn. 2]. Keith Tribe is probably correct in suggesting that whether one translates Vergesellschaftung as “societalization” (more literal) or “sociation” (less clumsy) is a matter of decision.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, the term had, as Klaus Lichtblau has shown, no fixed meaning in German social thought either, or even within Weber’s writing.Footnote ¹⁰ Given this indeterminacy of translation and the open-ended nature of the original usage(s), neither Schmidt’s strong claim (straight mistranslation) nor Alexander’s defence seem entirely convincing.

Along a similar vein, the striking similarity between “civil sphere” and Habermas’s use of the terms “lifeworld” and “public sphere” makes one wonder whether we really need a new term here. The point is not that we are being offered “old wine in new bottles”—we are not, there are genuine insights—but rather that the common practice in social theory of over-egging the claim to originality brings with it the danger of creating a closed sphere of its own; a community built around a theory and its lexicon—a matter of community building, not just theory building. The risk is that the terminology “itself becomes its own intra-institutional siloed theory.”Footnote ¹¹

Thirdly, and most importantly, the civil sphere, as Alexander conceptualizes it, may not be the appropriate vehicle for the normative and political project that partly motivates his work: support for liberal progressivism and democratization. As Bachrach and Baratz pointed out long ago, one test of democracy is whether it addresses the problem that “those who most need to participate in the political process are the nonparticipants.”Footnote ¹² The civil sphere is both (i) too exclusive, despite the concern with the incorporation of marginalized groups, and (ii) too monolithic to address that problem. With respect to (i), the civil sphere is a pretty exclusive club. It requires its members to be fully signed up to universalist principles and to forego particularistic (individual or group) interests and ideology. Religious conservatives, cultural separatists or radical feminists need not apply. The voices that speak for the collectivity, for a shared societal morality, appear to be drawn from a narrow source, making the civil sphere also civil in tone. It is not simply, as has often been noted, that Alexander’s focus is on the US (Chapter 6, on phone hacking, being an exception), but that the civil sphere is quite group-specific even within that already narrowed field of vision. The danger of confusing the local—even the parochial—with the universal has been the constant companion of social theorizing. With respect to (ii), while Alexander’s view of society is pluralistic—recognizing the multiplicity, or even autarchy, of non-civil spheres—he views the civil sphere holistically, as a unity; as a totality. Implied here is a kind of sociological and political holism that Alexander seeks to harness for a progressive and anti-hierarchical politics. But can this be done?

Nancy Rosenblum has cogently argued that political holism is anti-pluralist, anti-majoritarian and anti-political, and thus has a more natural affinity with autocracy than with democracy.Footnote ¹³ Rosenblum’s general characterization of holism seems to capture well the assumptions that underlie the notion of the civil sphere:

Alexander’s distaste for “destructive compromises” would appear to fit into this thought style.

Returning to sociological terrain, perhaps we can highlight this issue most clearly by briefly comparing Alexander’s conception of the civil sphere to Émile Durkheim’s “political society”, which he contrasted with a society of individuals. The two concepts are strikingly similar and share a common concern, namely that, in Durkheim’s words, “there exists today a whole range of collective activity outside the sphere of morals.”Footnote ¹⁵ However, behind these similarities lurk important differences. For Durkheim, “political societies are of necessity polycellular or polysegmental.”Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, he does not exclude a priori associations with particularistic interests; indeed they are at its heart. Nor is societal morality a given, existing prior to the negotiations and conflicts within political society. It emerges out of these. Participants are not selected because they already possess the appropriate concern with the common good; they are no heroes. They learn that in the course of their interactions within political society, which we can imagine as much less civil in tone and a lot noisier. While Alexander does not see the civil sphere/political society as a place for learning civic morals, Durkheim most certainly does. In brief, whereas Durkheim is usually taken to be the archetypical holist, his sociological holism, unlike Alexander’s, does not translate into political holism of the kind Rosenblum has in mind. Political society remains pluralistic and multivocular, in contrast to the monolithic nature of the civil sphere. If you want sociological support for progressive liberalism, or a reformist socialism, Durkheim still seems to be the more promising candidate.

Future analysts and theorists of crisis will need to take note of Alexander’s point that crises manifest themselves at a societal level and that this requires agency, but there remains ambiguity as to whether a social crisis refers to a specific kind of crisis, as terms such as “economic crisis” or “environmental crisis” do, or whether a social crisis is not a crisis at all, but simply the latter’s reception and representation within the public sphere. Similarly, the concept of the civil sphere hovers between apolitical universalism and insularity.