Abstract:This article traces the concept of 'civil power' in Jeffrey Alexander's book The Civil Sphere. Doing so leads to an interpretation of the work as operating in the space between the different theories and definitions of power in the work of Max Weber and Hannah Arendt. Read in this way, The Civil Sphere becomes not only a Durkheimian argument about solidarity, but also an argument about the consequential ways in which acting together and not acting together constitute a space of variation in the degree to which… Show more
How does one thank a writer whose understanding of one's own book runs deep, whose perspicacity is undeniable, and whose disagreements are of such consequence? Only by engaging in debate, I think. Werner Binder grasps what is at stake in Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies, and he has issued a challenge that rests on two pillars: a Hegelian political philosophy of recognition and reason in modernity, and a Durkheimian account of egalitarian (or proto-egalitarian) bonds of solidarity. Atop these two pillars Binder artfully entablatures, as both a counterpoint to and re-articulation of the theory of power I am developing, an account of impersonal egalitarianism as not simply a modern possibility, but rather modernity's essential dynamic or even telos. Binder's careful reply operates in both an analytic and a normative register, and as such articulates in its criticisms one of the central enthusiastic pretensions of Power in Modernity. Throughout the book, and especially in its last chapter, I consider a set of intellectual problems and projects that are held in common by sociological theory and political philosophy-though not without tension and ambivalence. These complexities perhaps explain why his review can be both a sympathetic reconstruction of my book-notable in its hermeneutic charity-and yet also an outline for a social and political theory that is quite different from my own. Binder accepts the theoretical terms of art developed in part I-rector, actor, other, and project. He also finds convincing my rendering of chains of power and their representation in seventeenth-and eighteenth
How does one thank a writer whose understanding of one's own book runs deep, whose perspicacity is undeniable, and whose disagreements are of such consequence? Only by engaging in debate, I think. Werner Binder grasps what is at stake in Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies, and he has issued a challenge that rests on two pillars: a Hegelian political philosophy of recognition and reason in modernity, and a Durkheimian account of egalitarian (or proto-egalitarian) bonds of solidarity. Atop these two pillars Binder artfully entablatures, as both a counterpoint to and re-articulation of the theory of power I am developing, an account of impersonal egalitarianism as not simply a modern possibility, but rather modernity's essential dynamic or even telos. Binder's careful reply operates in both an analytic and a normative register, and as such articulates in its criticisms one of the central enthusiastic pretensions of Power in Modernity. Throughout the book, and especially in its last chapter, I consider a set of intellectual problems and projects that are held in common by sociological theory and political philosophy-though not without tension and ambivalence. These complexities perhaps explain why his review can be both a sympathetic reconstruction of my book-notable in its hermeneutic charity-and yet also an outline for a social and political theory that is quite different from my own. Binder accepts the theoretical terms of art developed in part I-rector, actor, other, and project. He also finds convincing my rendering of chains of power and their representation in seventeenth-and eighteenth
This article analyzes how, at a very early stage, Mexican cultural sociologists explained meaning-making processes using a set of factors external to the cultural sphere and how, more recently, they have emphasized that such meaning-making processes have analytical autonomy. Mexican cultural sociology is marked by a dominant model based on the works of Gramsci, Bourdieu, and the Birmingham School that was built in the late 1970s; this model was derived from the analysis of cultural consumption and reached the peak of its development in the 1990s with the concept of cultural hybridization and efforts to introduce semiotics into cultural interpretation. At the beginning of the 21st century, decolonial theory and the ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology opened new avenues of reflection in Mexican cultural sociology.
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