Jeffrey Alexander est un sociologue américain et l'un des plus éminents théoriciens sociaux du monde. Il est la figure fondatrice d'une école de sociologie culturelle qu'il nomme le « programme fort ». Cette approche explore les codes culturels profonds et les systèmes symboliques qui façonnent le comportement humain et les structures sociales. Son travail se concentre sur la manière dont les significations sont créées, diffusées et comment elles influencent nos vies collectives et nos perceptions de la réalité, offrant un regard profond sur l'ordre social et la dynamique culturelle.
Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences
Focusing on Clifford Geertz as a theorist, this volume explores his significant influence across various disciplines beyond Anthropology. It offers a comprehensive and impartial examination of his contributions, filling the gap for an authoritative work on this pivotal intellectual figure.
In this book Jeffrey Alexander develops a new sociological theory of social crisis and applies it to a wide range of cases, from the church paedophilia crisis to the #MeToo movement. He argues that crises are triggered not by objective social strains but by the discourse and institutions of the civil sphere. When strains become subject to the utopian aspirations of the civil sphere, there emerges widespread anguish about social justice and the future of democratic life. Once admired institutional elites come to be represented as perpetrators and the civil sphere becomes legally and organizationally intrusive, demanding repairs in the name of civil purification. Resisting such repair, institutional elites foment backlash, and a war of the spheres ensues. This major new work by one of the world’s leading social theorists will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally.
What binds societies together and how can these social orders be structured in a fair way? Jeffrey C. Alexander's masterful work, The Civil Sphere, addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others - the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest - are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. Solidarity, Alexander demonstrates, creates inclusive and exclusive social structures and shows how they can be repaired. It is not perfect, it is not absolute, and the horrors which occur in its lapses have been seen all too frequently in the forms of discrimination, genocide, and war. Despite its worldly flaws and contradictions, however, solidarity and the project of civil society remain our best hope: the antidote to every divisive institution, every unfair distribution, every abusive and dominating hierarchy. This grand, sweeping statement and rigorous empirical investigation is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.
Performativity has emerged as a critical new idea across the humanities and social sciences, from literary and cultural studies to the study of gender and the philosophy of action. In this volume, Jeffrey Alexander demonstrates how performance can reorient our study of politics and society. Alexander develops a cultural pragmatics that shifts cultural sociology from texts to gestural meanings. Positioning social performance between ritual and strategy, he lays out the elements of social performance - from scripts to mise-en-scène, from critical mediation to audience reception - and systematically describes their tense interrelation. This is followed by a series of empirically oriented studies that demonstrate how cultural pragmatics transforms our approach to power. Alexander brings his new theory of social performance to bear on case studies that range from political to cultural power: Barack Obama's electoral campaign, American failure in the Iraqi war, the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, terrorist violence on September 11th, public intellectuals, material icons, and social science itself. This path-breaking work by one of the world's leading social theorists will command a wide interdisciplinary readership.
In this book, one of the world s leading social theorists presents a critical, alarmed, but also nuanced understanding of the post-traditional world we inhabit today. Jeffrey Alexander writes about modernity as historical time and social condition, but also as ideology and utopia.
This is a new, original social theory of trauma by one of the world s leading social theorists. * Argues that traumas are not merely psychological but collective experiences and that they play a key role in defining the origins and outcomes of critical social conflicts.
This insightful book by Jeffrey Alexander and Bernadette Jaworsky explores the source of Obama's political power, arguing that his success in the 2012 election stemmed from cultural reconstruction rather than money or demographics. It highlights the importance of narrative and symbolism in modern politics, showcasing Obama's skillful storytelling and improvisation.
This book examines the Holocaust's significance and its implications for humanity through essays by prominent historians and scholars. It discusses how the Holocaust evolved into a universal symbol of evil, the potential risks of its trivialization, and the importance of understanding its legacy in contemporary contexts.
This comprehensive reader will give undergraduate students a structured introduction to the writers and works which have shaped the exciting and yet daunting field of social theory. Throughout the text, key figures are placed in debate with each other and the editorial introductions give an orienting overview of the main points at stake and the areas of agreement and disagreement between the protagonists. The first section sets out some of the main schools of thought, including Habermas and Honneth on New Critical Theory, Bourdieu and Luhmann on Institutional Structuralism and Jameson and Hall on Cultural Studies. Thereafter the reader becomes issues based, looking at: * Justice and Truth * Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Globalisation * gender, sexuality, race, post-coloniality The New SocialTheory Readeris an essential companion for students who will not just use it on their theory course but return to it again and again for theoretical foundations for substantive subjects and issues.
Max Weber
"A provocative analysis of some of the central aspects of Weber's theoretical and methodological work."--S.N. Eisenstadt
