What Makes a Social Crisis?

The Societalization of Social Problems

Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509538256, 9781509538249
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 berepresented as perpetrators and the civil sphere becomes legally and organizationally intrusive, demanding repairs in the name of civil purification. Resisting suchrepair, 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.

1
What Is Societalization and How Does It Happen?

The civil sphere is a real social force, but it is also an idealized community, one that is imagined as being composed of individuals who are autonomous yet mutually obligated, who experience solidarity even as they respect one another’s independence (Alexander 2006, Kivisto and Sciortino 2015, Alexander and Tognato 2018, Alexander, Stack, and Khoshrokovar 2019, Alexander, Palmer, Park, and Ku 2019, Alexander, Lund, and Voyer 2019). In cultural terms, the civil sphere is organized around a discourse that sacralizes the motives, relations, and institutions necessary to sustain democratic forms of self-regulation and social solidarity. This involves qualities such as honesty, rationality, openness, independence, cooperation, participation, and equality (Jacobs 1996, 2000, Mast 2006, 2012, Smith 1991, 2005, Kivisto and Sciortino 2015). The discourse of civil society is binary: it also identifies and pollutes qualities that endanger democracy, such as deceit, hysteria, dependence, secrecy, aggression, hierarchy, and inequality.¹ The civil sphere, moreover, is not only discursive. It possesses a powerful materiality. Communicative institutions such as factual and fictional mass media, public opinion polls, and civil associations provide the organizational capacity to specify broad discursive categories in time and place. They purify some events, institutions, and groups as civil and good, rewarding them with recognition; they pollute others as dangerously anti-civil, humiliating them as evil. The civil sphere sustains powerful regulative institutions as well: the complex apparatuses of law, office, and elections apply sanctions that are backed through state coercion and make cultural evaluations stick. Those who are deemed civil are rewarded not only with prestige but with political power; those constructed as anti-civil are not simply disrespected but threatened, arrested, rendered bankrupt, and sometimes made to suffer physical harm.

Vis-à-vis other, non-civil institutional-cum-cultural fields, the civil sphere is at once oppositional and aspirational, which means that interinstitutional boundaries are never settled, never set in concrete. Because civil institutions project communicative interpretations and apply regulative sanctions in real time and space, nothing about the location and traction of civil boundaries is certain; they cannot be ascertained in the abstract (Ku 1998). What is deemed to be civil? What is deemed not to be? These questions have been answered in remarkably disparate ways over the course of historical time, the answers determining where boundaries between the civil sphere and other, non-civil spheres of social life are laid. Should gender hierarchy be considered a family affair, handled by the domestic sphere’s patriarchal elites, or should it be seen as violating broader, more civil norms, such that intrafamily domination and violence become scandalous to society at large (Alexander 2001, Luengo 2018)? Should what goes on inside churches stay within these houses of worship, as a matter between believers and their god, or should the dispensation of God’s grace be subject to civil scrutiny? Should a productive but also exploitative and unstable capitalist economy be left alone, to work its markets for better and for worse, or should more solidaristic and civil considerations intervene (Lee 2018, Ngai and Ng 2019, Olave 2018)? Should news reporters be free to roam for information as they may, intruding when, where, and how they see fit, or should they be subject to legal and moral constraints? Modern civil spheres have continually legitimated what later, down the line, came to be seen as egregiously anti-civil practices (Alexander 1988). A practice that seems acceptable at one point can become deeply offensive at another. Forms of religion, sexuality, politics, and economic life that once appeared to facilitate civil society are later reconstructed as dangerously destructive intrusions whose very existence undermines civil motives and relations.

Blumer (1971: 302) once observed that “the pages of history are replete with dire conditions unnoticed and unattended to.” Yet, while real existing civil spheres are deeply compromised, they are also endemically restless, creating fertile opportunities for calling out the very injustices they legitimate. It is because the utopian promises of civil spheres are never fully institutionalized that these promises continuously trigger radical criticism, social movement struggles, social crises, and institutional reform.

My aim is to conceptualize the relative, labile, shifting status of social problems, not in historical or interactional but in analytic terms – as a systemic, macro-sociological process. One might imagine, at time T₁, a hypothetical “steady state” of boundary relations between civil and non-civil spheres, in which there appears to be empirical stability and there is imagined to be reciprocity between spheres. In a putatively steady state of this sort, most members of the civil sphere do not experience the operations of other spheres as destructive intrusions and do not abrogate existing institutional boundaries to mount antagonistic efforts at repairing the insides of another sphere.² There is no doubt, of course, that every social sphere experiences continuous, often severe strains. In the economy, there are irresponsible decisions and underserved losses, bankruptcies and thefts, inflations and recessions. The religious world experiences continual fin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Societalization in Society
• 1 What Is Societalization and How Does It Happen?
• 2 Who Are the Agents of Societalization?
• 3 Why Does Societalization NOT Happen?
• 4 Church Pedophilia
• 5 Financial Crisis
• 6 Phone Hacking
• 7 #MeToo
• Conclusion: Societalization in Theory
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement