Civil sphere theory shows that the risk of left- and right-wing populism is how quickly institutions are reformed to generate civil reparation in the people's name. Sometimes, the populist leader cannot finish reforms because democratic rules block them from staying in power. When this happens, the leader leaves the political project to an heir. This requires manufacturing the heir's charisma through objects and ideological programs that make the heir seem charismatic…

Military acquisitions are typically handled within institutional boundaries, yet the 2012–2023 German public debate on the acquisition of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) illustrates how the drone-as-icon breached these boundaries and was invested with contested meaning. Embedded in Civil Sphere Theory (CST), the study uncovers a full icon-centred ‘societalization’ lifecycle and identifies mechanisms through which contestation unfolded, drawing on culturalist discourse analysis of media, peace movement, and institutional texts. Two mechanisms sustained an extended standoff…

Sociology, at its best, has always been an inquiry conducted in the shadow of crisis. Each generation of sociologists has confronted moments when the symbolic foundations of order seemed to tremble – wars, depressions, revolutions, pandemics – and has sought to find within these fractures not only explanations but also horizons of renewal. To practice sociology is, in this sense, to practice hope: to insist that meaning, order, and solidarity remain thinkable…

Civil society is seen as the space of social emancipation and is therefore described in purely positiveterms. It is opposed to the state and the market, understood as autonomous and distinct spheres. Thiscontraposition has the effect of creating a binary narrative between what is positive and what is not.Thus, a great misunderstanding is generated: the belief that the answer to the question 'how to defeatthe populist and radical right' is civil society itself…

For past few decades, India has witnessed a dialectical struggle between two competing visions of national solidarity. On one side stands Hindutva, which seeks to construct Hinduism as a civil religion—a public, political faith that unites Hindus across caste lines while creating discursive Others: Muslims, Christians, and secularists. On the other side stands the…

Are members of the public still committed to democracy? Existing studies often ask whether members of the public sanction political actors who break institutional or procedural norms. In contrast, we study a shared cultural horizon, which grounds democracy as a way of living. Drawing on Civil Sphere Theory and the sociology of culture and cognition…

First published in 2006, Jeffrey C. Alexander’s The Civil Sphere (TCS) quickly established itself as one of the classic works of post-classical sociology. In this interview, occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the publication of TCS, Christopher Thorpe, one of the current editors of Cultural Sociology, spoke with Jeffrey Alexander…

While domestic civil spheres extend Lockean ties of mutual understanding, they often legitimate a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ among nations outside their national boundaries. As cultural trauma theory suggests, however…