The Civil Sphere and Social Class

Abstract

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.