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The civil sphere - by Jeffrey C. Alexander

Article  in  Journal of Communication · September 2007

DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00359_3.x

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Book reviews Book reviews

The civil sphere

Jeffrey C. Alexander
Oxford University Press, New York, 2006 $35 (hard),
pp. 816

Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere is nothing

less than an attempt to create a new theory
of civil society for the 21st century through
an almost equally ambitious attempt to
reground the discipline of sociology in what
he calls ‘‘the civil sphere.’’ Alexander places
communication at the very center of the gen-
eration of the civil sphere, and for this reason
alone, his work deserves the attention of com-
munication scholars.
Alexander posits three ideal types of
civil society. Civil Society I, that of Locke,
Ferguson, Smith, Rousseau, Hegel, and Toc-
queville, is a ‘‘rather diffuse, umbrella-like
concept, referring to a plethora of institutions
outside the state,’’ especially the capitalist
market, voluntary institutions, public and
private religion, and ‘‘virtually every form of
relationship that created bonds of trust’’ (p.
25). Civil Society II is primarily the narrowed,
instrumental version of Marx, a legal and
political superstructure atop the capitalist
market system. Here, the ideals of civil society
only survive in the solidarity of the proletariat
or the instrumentalism of Gramsci’s ‘‘war of
position.’’
Alexander’s own contribution, Civil Soci-
ety III, in contrast, is a ‘‘solidary sphere, in
which a certain kind of community comes
to be culturally defined and to some degree
institutionally enforced’’ (p. 31). This civil
community is sustained by public opinion,
deep cultural codes, and distinctive legal,
journalistic, and associational organizations.
But at its center, the civil sphere is both a the-
ory of and an empirical–analytic model of the
production of solidarity and commonality,
a model of democratic societies that ‘‘pays
more attention to shared feelings and

604 Journal of Communication 57 (2007) 599–612 ª 2007 International Communication Association

Book reviews
symbolic commitments, to what and how
people speak, think, and feel about politics
and, more generally, about democratic social
life’’ (p. 43), in other words, to Toqueville’s
habits of the heart.
The production of solidarity grows from
binary cultural codes deeply rooted in social
life of complex, differentiated societies: ‘‘Civil
society is regulated by an internally complex
discourse that allows us to understand the
paradox by which its universalistic ideals have
been institutionalized in particularistic and
anticivil ways’’ (p. 48). Alexander posits two
master discourses of liberty and repression
which are mediated by the binary codes of
‘‘pure and impure into which every member,
or potential member, of civil society is made
to fit’’ (pp. 54–55). Motives, relationships,
and institutions are all governed by this
binary logic, which maps along familiar lines:
active/passive, autonomous/dependent, and
rational/irrational. Those groups that are seen
as impure are ‘‘polluted’’ by the discourse of
repression, which, along with the discourse of
liberty, is at the heart of democratic societies.
Much of the book concerns the processes
and institutions through which this deep logic
works its way out in the history of the strug-
gles for civic incorporation of excluded
groups and the attempts to exclude them
through narrowing the sphere of the civil. In
this way, Alexander stresses that civil society
has both an empirical and a normative
dimension and that its norms are not external
or ideal but immanent in society itself.
At the center of this struggle are the ‘‘com-
municative institutions’’ of public opinion,
the mass media, polls, and associations (chap-
ter 5). Alexander places these institutions and
processes at the very heart of his account of
how the civil sphere is produced and repro-
duced. Indeed, the central function of com-
municative institutions is the production of
the solidarity necessary for civil society to
exist. While most of his account of specific
processes will not be new to communication
scholars in these areas, Alexander’s greatest
contribution is the central argument that the
Journal of Communication 57 (2007) 599–612 ª 2007 International Communication Association
Book reviews
media produce social solidarity. Although
this position can be found in Parsons and
Habermas, it is all but lost in current discus-
sions and debates in communication, where
solidarity has largely operationalized as
empirical measures of trust. For communica-
tion scholars who cannot tackle the entire
book, this chapter is a valuable introduction
to field-specific concerns.
In four chapters on the civil rights move-
ment, Alexander demonstrates his theory of
how boundaries between the civil sphere and
other noncivil institutions (politics, econom-
ics, the private sphere) are maintained; the
destructive intrusion that inputs from these
systems sometimes entail; and his central con-
cept of ‘‘civil repair’’ which is effected through
communication. Civil repair is effected
through ‘‘duality,’’ the notion that every
social actor simultaneously occupies posi-
tions in many vertical hierarchies and is
a member of ‘‘the horizontal community of
civil life’’ (p. 266). Chapter 12, which demon-
strates how the civil rights movement gener-
ated communicative solidarity through both
its internal communication and its relations
with the mass media of the North and South
will be particularly interesting to communi-
cation scholars.
Alexander’s civil sphere evokes Habermas’s
concept of the public sphere, but the bound-
aries between them are not always clear.
For Habermas, the public sphere is the realm
where private persons come together as
a public, a definition that Alexander invokes
approvingly in describing the civil sphere
(p. 44). But Habermas’s recent public sphere
theory in Between Facts and Norms carefully
lays out the differences and relations among
the state, the formal public and informal pub-
lic spheres, and the lifeworld. The latter cate-
gory, for Habermas, operates at times like
a catchall. There is an overlap between the
lifeworld and many of the relationships
that Alexander includes in the civil sphere—
particularly associational life, but also solid-
ary group relationships. Alexander’s theory
of the relationship of the civil sphere to
605
 Book reviews Book reviews

the lifeworld rightly emphasizes the cultural

generation of solidarity, and this may be the
book’s greatest single contribution, particu-
larly in contrast to Habermas’s undertheori-
zation of this problem. But, oddly, by the end
of The Civil Sphere, the concept of the civil
seems less differentiated from the core catego-
ries of social life that surround it than before.
The civil sphere comes to stand for society as
a whole. Its boundary relations with politics,
economics, and the noncivic lifeworld become
too expansive. By arguing that the civil pene-
trates into every corner of social life, Alexan-
der at times denatures the concept itself,
blurring its theoretical and empirical bound-
aries. By the end of the Civil Sphere, it is hard
to disentangle the civil from the public, and in
particular from those elements of social struc-
ture that determine and shape social action,
including cultural action, in the civil sphere.
By predominantly stressing the cultural
dimension of civic life, the Civil Sphere oddly
de-emphasizes real structural problems and
constraints as well as emerging opportunities
for contemporary civic restoration in the
United States. A rich body of scholarship
exists on movements for civic renewal across
the United States that utilize new forms of
relational, collaborative, pragmatic, and deli-
berative organizing, and innovative public–
private partnerships. Much of this most inter-
esting, actually existing work of civil repair
simply drops from view.
Still, The Civil Sphere is a major achievement
and should be read by all communication
scholars concerned with civic and public life.
Lewis A. Friedland
University of Wisconsin—Madison

606 Journal of Communication 57 (2007) 599–612 ª 2007 International Communication Association

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