The civil sphere and its resilient tribalist discontents: a muslim ban cloaked in sacralized binaries

This article introduces a theory of societalized politics to investigate crisis events in the German civil sphere between 2015 and 2024, and to proffer an answer to the disputed question of the preconditions that facilitated the rapid rise of right-wing populism in the German context. Drawing on civil sphere and societalization theory, the article specifies the foundational cultural elements, or binary cultural codes (BCCs), upon which German political elites crafted meso-level narratives to contest and manage strains in the civil sphere. Through an analysis of communicative and regulative institutions’ responses to the arrival of refugees in 2015, and the publication of the Correctiv.org report and the backlash protests it inspired in 2024, the article charts the rise of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and explains its success as due in part to its leaders’ capacities to represent themselves and their supporters as embodying the BCC’s civil democratic signifiers. Introducing a theory of societalized politics, the analysis demonstrates a processual approach to the construction and contesting of crisis events that emerge within the civil sphere itself. The article also introduces a civil sphere theory of right-wing populism, which frames the phenomenon as the elevation of nativist, primordial signifiers born foremost of the noncivil spheres of ethnicity and religion. It concludes by arguing that while the German civil sphere is in flux, the post-Potsdam civil protests indicate a significant portion of the nation’s publics remain committed to universalistic, civil democratic principles.

The author, sharing the opinion of transitionologists about value turbulence in a transitional society, considers the cultural media discourse of the present time as an object of research. Propagating eternal values, it stands above all other thematic acute social discourses, is indicative precisely because of its neutrality, supra-situationality, reflexivity. The subject of the analysis is the cognitive mechanisms of axiomarkation and axioconstruction in the cultural media discourse of the transition period, the purpose of the work is to identify certain patterns of axiomarkation and axioforming. The material was published on two value–relevant events in 2023– Anastasia Ivleeva’s party and the release of the TV series “The Word of the Kid. Blood on the asphalt”, they were extracted from official sources of information, as well as from the media claiming to have unbiased coverage.Using the content analysis method, the author comes to the main conclusions: 1)in the cultural discourse of the transitive period, transition zones are formed in which other thematic discourses are localized; 2)the proportion of the presence of other thematic discourses in it and the degree of manifestation of the assessment depends on the type of media. In the official media, cultural discourse is increasingly marginalized, moving away from the supra-temporal, begins to function like highly social discourses, and rigid value categorization and structuring of information are becoming more and more clearly manifested in it. In the discourse of culture of independent media, axiomarkation and axioconstruction are carried out in a factual coordinate system; 3)the main cognitive mechanisms of value categorization are, firstly, opposition using various kinds of binary oppositions that go far beyond the sphere of culture, and secondly, staging; 4)the addressee of the cultural discourse of the transition period becomes a witness to several value programs – “old” and “new”, which are in conflict and competitive relations, while in the official media the new axiological project is spoken of as already approved and the only possible one, which is inherent in design, competitiveness.

How can civil sphere theory contribute to class analysis? In contrast to critics who suggest Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere does not take class seriously, this paper argues that class is a central component to both the rhetorical argument and empirical justification of the text. Through a new reading of the book’s discussions and references to class, this paper provides the rudiments for a new civil sphere theory of social class. The paper first demonstrates how Alexander uses social class as a rhetorical foil against instrumentalist, class-centric models of civil society. Second, the paper elaborates on the obscured but rich set of references to historical cases of class formation to push civil sphere theory towards attending to the creative discursive and institutional action of class movements in the civil sphere. Third, the paper develops Alexander’s concept of ‘refraction’ and argues that the ways in which class communities create new cultures better explains the relationship between classes and the civil sphere. In the conclusion, the paper offers two directions for a civil sphere theory of class – a realist one which posits social classes are products of the economy and then become meaningfully civil as they approach the civil sphere; and an interpretivist one which posits that classes are already-meaningful structures in both the economy and the civil sphere, leading to an open-ended transformation of both.

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

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate that the civil spheres of Latin America remain in force, even when under threat, and to expand the method of theorizing democracy, understanding it not only as a state form, but also as a way of life. Moreover, the task of the authors goes beyond the purely application of the theory of the civil sphere in order to emphasize the relevance not only in practice, but also in the theory of democratic culture and institutions of Latin America. This task requires decolonizing the arrogant attitude of North theorists towards democratic processes outside the United States and Europe. The peculiarities of civil spheres in Latin America are emphasized. It is argued that over the course of the nineteenth century the non-civil institutions and value spheres that surrounded civil spheres deeply compromised them. The problems of development that pockmarked Latin America — lagging economies, racial and ethnic and class stratification, religious strife — were invariably filtered through the cultural aspirations and institutional patterns of civil spheres. The appeal of the theory of the civil sphere to the experience of Latin America reveals the ambitious nature of civil society and democracy on new and stronger foundations. Civil spheres had extended significantly as citizens confronted uncomfortable facts, collectively searched for solutions, and envisioned new courses of collective action. However when populism and authoritarianism advance, civil understandings of legitimacy come under pressure from alternative, anti-democratic conceptions of motives, social relations, and political institutions. In these times, a fine-grained understanding of the competitive dynamics between civil, non-civil, and anti-civil becomes particularly critical. Such a vision is constructively applied not only to the realities of Latin America, but also in a wider global context. The authors argue that in order to understand the realities and the limits of populism and polarization, civil sphere scholars need to dive straight into the everyday life of civil communities, setting the civil sphere theory (CST) in a more ethnographic, “anthropological” mode.

The article is devoted to the study and analysis of precedent names of three cultural spheres ("Bible", "Literature", "Mythology") in newspaper headlines. The subject of the study is a typology of precedent names in newspaper headlines. The object of it is newspaper headlines of modern English-language periodicals. The purpose of this work is to study the precedent names and analyze features of their functioning in the newspaper headlines. The study material includes Questia Online Library, where the newspaper headlines with precedent names extracted from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy were investigated (350 precedent names that were used in 12189 newspaper headlines). In order to achieve the purpose of the work a comparative analysis of precedent names was conducted within three cultural spheres ("Bible", "Literature", "Mythology") and discourses in American and British periodicals (37 American and 27 British newspapers). A descriptive method, a comparative method and a method of quantitative calculations were used. Having substantiated the concept of precedent names and studying their features and functions, it was proved that they are known mainly to representatives of a certain linguocultural community, and some background knowledge is needed to understand them. In order to study precedent names, their quantitative distributions by cultural spheres, years and discourses were made. The study found that the group "Literature" is one of the most productive sources of precedent names. It was proved that in the headlines for 2015-2019 the most common precedent names are the names of the cultural sphere "Literature", and the least common - "Mythology". In addition, it was determined what precedent names are the most popular in English newspaper headlines and which ones are not often used.

In many western nations, sport is an institutional component of civil society that may be considered from quite different outlooks. From the critical theorists’ viewpoint, sport reproduces social hierarchies through competition and then colonises our democratic life worlds. Scholars of civil society argue that sport actors manoeuvre civic relations and fend off anti-civil pressures to allow integration, belonging and collective decision-making. This article positions sport actors and audiences at the interstice between hierarchies and solidarity, amid competition and friendship. Using Civil Sphere Theory, I present a cultural sociology of performance that highlights how sport actors interpret the democratic character (or lack thereof) of their own and others’ sport actions. Drawing on eight months of participant field observations in Norwegian youth sport, I recreate an ethnographic tale of how coaches, players and spectators activate the civil sphere’s symbolic and affective codes for this purpose. This dramatic sequence of events, played out over the course of the season, shows how sport itself can be shaped by actors who bring the civil sphere to bear and make sport a facilitating input to the discourse of the Nordic civil sphere. This process, I conclude, is contingent on performances of the civil sphere that make sport a stage on which to display performative feelings for others. When sport actors challenge the divisive, hierarchal character of organised competition and carry out a civil repair of sport, they expand the limits of civil inclusion and momentarily create a sporting civil society.

Muslims across Europe have been labeled as uncivil since the migration waves of postcolonial and guestworker migrants in the mid-20th century. In this paper, I bring the Muslim experience in the German capital into conversation with Civil Sphere Theory (CST), which analyzes how senses of cultural boundedness are supported, shaped, and contested through the interrelations between the institutions of civil society and social movements aimed at expanding civic inclusion. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in a Berlin mosque, I move from Muslim associations with incivility to the actions these associations provoke in relation to the civil sphere: exploring how those deemed uncivil exert agency in response to, and also in spite of a civil/uncivil divide. Through the voices and experiences of my interlocutors, I show that Muslims are not simply a victimized out-group excluded from the German civil sphere, but are also agents of change who actively seek to gain full inclusion within it. Specifically, I trace how my German Muslim interlocutors contend with their negative social status by drawing on narratives, and enlivening connections that link them to the German Jewish experience: seeking incorporation in the civil sphere through identifications with another “Other,” and through this other, also mainstream society.

In this article, we explore the intersection of migration, membership, and inclusion through Civil Sphere Theory (CST), the most powerful theory currently available for explaining social solidarity in modern, differentiated societies. While CST has amply proven its worth by deepening our understanding of social solidarity and civil repair within established polities, it has insufficiently addressed the boundaries that define inclusion and exclusion in the context of migration. We open the article by reconceptualizing immigration as the crossing of geographical, political, and symbolic boundaries. This perspective shifts the focus from linear processes of inclusion to the dynamic interplay between national membership, citizenship, and the civil sphere. Drawing on CST?s nuanced approach to cultural and social boundaries, the paper makes explicit how in the contemporary world, national and civil memberships are tightly coupled. Concerning migration, the civil sphere must consequently mediate between the formal inclusivity of liberal-democratic ideals and the bounded character of national belonging. We further advance a critique of CST?s limited attention to citizenship, emphasizing how citizenship remains a key conduit for universalizing national membership. To conclude, we identify the engine of potential membership change in the tension between social and symbolic boundaries embedded in differentiated societies. This approach bridges migration studies and cultural sociology, providing some preliminary insights into the mechanisms involved in civil incorporation.

Between cultural confidence and ideological insecurity: China’s soft power strategy for the cultural industries

Jeffrey C. Alexander’s civil sphere theory makes a significant contribution to understanding how people, especially social movements, relate to society’s various institutions. Radicalism challenges the long-term stability of the civil sphere and pushes it to be more open. While capitalism and the state are considered to be uncivil institutions, the civil sphere typically tolerates their existence and negotiates with them. But, what of radical, non-state and antiauthoritarian movements that seek the abolition of all hierarchies— can they join the existing civil sphere or replace it with their own vision? This paper uses three cases studies—the Haymarket Affair, the Spanish Revolution, and Seattle’s anti-World Trade Organization protests—to interrogate non-state, anti-authoritarian, and anarchist interpretations of civil society. These cases suggest compatibilities and divergences with civil sphere theory, complicating its interpretation of violence and militancy, civil order breaching, nonstate or extra-state scope, and internationalism. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

As a form of communication that can inspire solidarity through appeals to democratic ideals, literary journalism can play a constitutive role in social and political struggles for justice and freedom in democratic societies. In 1963, at a pivotal moment in the US Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time helped many Americans, including those in the highest offices of the federal government, understand the moral good of the goals of the African American freedom struggle and the democratic imperative to enact and protect the civil rights of all Americans. In this way, Baldwin’s work, along with other key historical forces, helped to expand the civil sphere and build a more just and democratic society in the United States. Civil sphere theory helps explain the role of such communication in social struggles for democracy.

The early 1960s in Spain saw the beginnings of a cycle of protest against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco that would end by rendering its continuity unviable after the dictator’s death in 1975. The process of building democracy was undertaken bidirectionally, both from ‘above’ and from ‘below’, and it involved multiple actors. This article pays special attention to those ‘democratizing agents’ in civil society who acted in the cultural and educational spheres, as teachers, students, protest singers or members of the cultural centres and neighbourhood associations that emerged at that time, especially in rural Andalusia. It argues that through day-to-day micro-conflicts and micro-mobilizations, those actors acquired and transmitted civic–democratic guidelines and values.

Photographs of migrants can evoke powerful reactions. Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015–16, politicians, media, and the public have all expressed strong opinions about people who cross borders. Within the civil spheres of Western democracies, debates about who belongs as a ‘good citizen’, and who should be excluded as an ‘anticivil’ outsider, result in consequences for migrants and locals alike. In this article, we engage in a visual intervention into theories of the civil sphere and symbolic boundaries. Through a cultural sociological analysis of 80 interviews conducted amongst Czech residents, we examine the boundary work surrounding two photographs of people crossing borders. The Czech context represents a compelling case through which to do so; Czechia is neither a primary transit or destination country, yet migration issues figure prominently in its civil sphere. Our findings are based on thematic and reflexive questions that organise the different grounds for boundary work amongst the RPs: ‘What are we looking at’? ‘Who are they?’ and ‘Should “we” help “them”’? The broader implications of our findings concern the role of visuality in conceptions of democratic civil spheres and the presence of boundary work that delineates who belongs and who does not.

With eSports and video games rapidly gaining popularity, we are witnessing a rise of semi-autonomous gaming communities. I propose using Alexander’s civil sphere theory and my concept of the gaming sphere to understand the dynamics of the meaning-making processes herein. I ask: why did the Blitzchung controversy spark such outrage? I explore the hidden meanings behind the controversy where the professional Hearthstone eSports player Ng Wai Chung was punished for expressing his opinion during post-game interview by calling to “Liberate Hong Kong,” losing $4000—all happening in the ostensibly apolitical gaming sphere. I first build the gaming sphere from the civil sphere, establishing the constitutive and communicative institutions of gaming as well as identifying the sacred and profane binary oppositions within the gaming sphere. Second, I provide a thick description and interpretation of the Blitzchung controversy using my concept of the gaming sphere. Lastly, I conclude that despite winning fairly, Blitzchung’s punishment for being “political” was not removed entirely. However, as the civil sphere was invited into the gaming sphere, the controversy shifted toward Hong Kong protests. The gaming sphere was partially restored as apolitical, even supporting a noble cause, but the Blitzchung controversy never achieved full societalization.