Rethinking the Culture Wars Concept

Performance and Counter-Power (1): The Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Sphere1 Sociologists have written much about the social forces that create conflict and polarize society, about the fragmenting structures and compelling powers of political, economic, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender groups. But they have said very little about the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of civic solidarity itself. They are generally silent about the sphere of “fellow feeling” — brotherly, sisterly and human feeling – that makes society into society and about the processes that fragment it. I would like to approach this sphere of fellow feeling from the perspective of "civil society." The concept of civil society has, of course been a topic of enormous discussion and dispute throughout the history of social thought and is also hotly disputed today. I will approach civil society as a sphere, one that articulates solidarity in a universalistic way. This sphere, or subsystem, is a social world of distinct proportions that is analytically and, to various degrees, empirically separated from political, economic, religious, and family life, and from such communal associations as ethnic groups. To the degree that such a universal moral community achieves some substantial sociological weight, it indirectly exercises material power via such distinctively regulative institutions as constitutions and legal codes, on the one hand, and the institution of "office" and the franchise, on the other. I call these institutions “regulative” for they have the power to control, even to coerce, non-civil institutions in the name of the universalizing criteria of civil society itself. As I see it, however, the civil sphere must also be understood as encompassing institutions of a less regulative kind, particularly what I would call the factual and fictional media of mass communication. Announcing the ESA Research Network for the Sociology of Culture From Opinion Polarization to Policy Conflict, Institutional Divides, and Media Attention One of the most interesting sessions that I attended at the ASA meetings in Philadelphia occurred on the very last day: a thematic session called “Sociology in the Culture Wars: From Public Issues to Personal Problems and Back Again.” The speakers—Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Frank Furstenberg, Kathleen Gerson, and Michael Kimmel—discussed recent political debates about issues such as the family, abortion, and claims about biological differences in the workplace. The focus of discussion was on how sociologists can participate as actors in these culture wars, with valuable contributions of their own. Two conclusions were put forth. The first, coming from most of the panelists and several members of the audience, was that progressives need to make better use of the media. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein seemed skeptical about the value of this suggestion, and emphasized instead the need for a feminist return to radical policy solutions.