Naked Power and the Civil Sphere

The Civil Sphere offers a bold and original thesis about the critically important role that civil societies play in Western democracies. Although I will challenge Alexander’s thesis, it is important to state at the outset that The Civil Sphere is a valuable book packed with rich social histories, lively engagements with ancient and contemporary theories, and novel interpretations. There is much to be learned here about the historic and sociological nature of racial, gender, and ethnic oppressions, and the struggles waged to overthrow them. This book makes an excellent case why social scientists and humanists should undertake serious study of civil society. In Alexander’s (2006) view, the civil sphere has been neglected theoretically, empirically, and substantively by contemporary philosophers, humanists, and social scientists. This is a shame because the civil sphere is a powerful actor that significantly shapes the politics, stratification orders, economics, social movements, and all important dimensions of modern societies. Moreover, the civil sphere designates those persons who are considered worthy and deserving rights and selects those who are to be viewed as damaged goods not fully possessing democratic sensibilities. These designations correspond roughly to a society’s stratification order. This book pays particular attention to those aspects of the civil sphere that encompass structures of feelings, symbols, psychological identifications, and sympathies, which in turn, determine to a significant degree, who gets what, when, where, and how. While structural domination, instrumental power, brute force, and strategic thinking matter in modern democracies, they are, according to Alexander, less consequential than this structure of soft power nestled in the civil sphere. Alexander warns that to ignore the centrality of this sphere is to engage in faulty social science. Equally disturbing, if scholars fail to study and theorize the civil sphere, they miss the opportunity to harness a liberating force capable of providing an exit from the iron cage of oligarchic bureaucracies and other crippling structures of human domination. Thus, the inability to recognize and understand the civil sphere forces us to live inside an impoverished house of social science and human possibilities. We owe Alexander an intellectual debt for directing attention to the civil sphere and its structure of feelings and cultural institutions that knit social actors into in and out groups, and provide that sense of “we-ness” and solidarity that is the essence of peoplehood. And if the civil sphere (and our understanding of it) holds the key that unlocks the door to human emancipation, we are deeply in Alexander’s debt. I am convinced by Alexander’s argument that key aspects of the civil sphere have a significant impact on social life. To be sure, solidarities that are able to bind members of