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1My long friendship with Peter Beilharz, intellectual and otherwiseThesis Eleven 179 (1): 197-199. 2023.
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10The Dark Side of ModernityPolity Press. 2013.Social theory between progress and apocalypse -- Autonomy and domination: Weber's cage -- Barbarism and modernity: Eisenstadt's regret -- Integration and justice: Parsons' utopia -- Despising others: Simmel's stranger -- Meaning evil -- De-civilizing the civil sphere -- Psychotherapy as central institution -- The frictions of modernity and their possible repair.
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5The double-whammy trauma: Narrative and counter-narrative during COVID–FloydThesis Eleven 177 (1): 64-70. 2023.Written in the early months of the COVID pandemic, and in the midst of the second wave of Black Lives Matters protest, this article suggests that Americans experienced these shocking social events as a double-whammy cultural trauma, as deeply troubling to their collective identity as nation. How the trauma played out would determine the near-term future of American politics. Were the poor and non-white the principal victims of the double whammy, or were white Americans and the ‘hard-working midd…Read more
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178Marxism and the Spirit of Socialism: Cultural Origins of Anti-Capitalism (1982)Thesis Eleven 100 (1): 84-105. 2010.
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7The prescience and paradox of Erich Fromm: A note on the performative contradictions of critical theoryThesis Eleven 165 (1): 3-9. 2021.As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be sick…Read more
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220The discourse of American civil society: a new proposal for cultural studiesTheory and Society 22 (2): 151-207. 1993.
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193The arc of civil liberation: Obama–Tahrir–OccupyPhilosophy and Social Criticism 39 (4-5): 341-347. 2013.Despite anxieties about the growing power of neo-liberalism, the crisis of the EU and the upsurge of right-wing political movements, it is important to recognize that utopian movements on the left have also in recent years been symbolically revitalized and organizationally sustained. This article analyses three recent social upheavals as utopian civil society movements, placing the 2008 US presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement in th…Read more
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31Progress and disillusion: Civil repair and its discontentsThesis Eleven 137 (1): 72-82. 2016.Civil Sphere Theory provides a more dynamic, cultural, and democratically oriented model of contemporary society than either conflict or modernization theory. Civil spheres expand and contract in contradictory ways. Utopian periods of utopian repair trigger defensive efforts that primordialize and exclude. Late 20th century civil repair generated new relations of economic production and more multicultural modes of integration. Early 21rst century reactions have highlighted dangers, demanding mor…Read more
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11The crisis of journalism reconsidered: democratic culture, professional codes, digital future (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2016.This collection of original essays brings a dramatically different perspective to bear on the contemporary "crisis of journalism." Rather than seeing technological and economic change as the primary causes of current anxieties, The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered draws attention to the role played by the cultural commitments of journalism itself. Linking these professional ethics to the democratic aspirations of the broader societies in which journalists ply their craft, it examines how the ne…Read more
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53Theoretical logic in sociology: positivism, presuppositions, and current controversiesTaylor & Francis. 1982.
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1Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott ParsonsTheoretical Logic in Sociology. 2016.In this volume the author maintains that sociology must learn to combine the insights of both Durkheim and Marx and that it can only do so on the presuppositional ground that Weber set forth. Alexander maintains that the idealist and materialist traditions must be transformed into analytic dimensions of multidimensional and synthetic theory. This volume focusses on the writing of Talcott Parsons, the only modern thinker who can be considered a true peer of the classical founders, and examines hi…Read more
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1In this volume the author maintains that sociology must learn to combine the insights of both Durkheim and Marx and that it can only do so on the presuppositional ground that Weber set forth. Alexander maintains that the idealist and materialist traditions must be transformed into analytic dimensions of multidimensional and synthetic theory. This volume focusses on the writing of Talcott Parsons, the only modern thinker who can be considered a true peer of the classical founders, and examines hi…Read more
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5The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Theoretical Logic in Sociology)Theoretical Logic in Sociology. 2017.This volume challenges prevailing understanding of the two great founders of sociological thought. In a detailed and systematic way the author demonstrates how Marx and Durkheim gradually developed the fundamental frameworks for sociological materialism and idealism. While most recent interpreters of Marx have placed alienation and subjectivity at the centre of his work, Professor Alexander suggests that it was the later Marx¿s very emphasis on alienation that allowed him to avoid conceptualizin…Read more
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18Looking for Theory: "Facts" and "Values" as the Intellectual Legacy of the 1970sTheory and Society 10 (2): 279. 1981.
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60Max Weber on churches and sects in north America: An alternative path toward rationalizationSociological Theory 3 (1): 1-6. 1985.
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15Why Cultural Sociology Is Not ‘Idealist’Theory, Culture and Society 22 (6): 19-29. 2005.I make use of this reply to McLennan to offer an overall perspective on the development of my work, normatively, empirically and theoretically, and in its earlier neofunctionalist and later cultural-sociological phase. I argue that, despite periodic suggestions that my cultural sociology seeks to push sociology towards an absolute subjectivity, the social-epistemological framework of ‘multidimensionality’ around which I organized my first work, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, still holds. Cultur…Read more
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218The social requisites for altruism and voluntarism: Some notes on what makes a sector independentSociological Theory 5 (2): 165-171. 1987.
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283Three models of culture and society relations: Toward an analysis of watergateSociological Theory 2 290-314. 1984.One of the most important contributions of the Parsonian tradition has been its conceptualization of the relative autonomy and mutual interpenetration of culture and social systems. The first part of this chapter defines three ideal types of empirical relationships between culture and society: specification, refraction, and columnization. Each is related to different configurations of social structure and culture and, in turn, to different degrees of social conflict. The second part of the chapt…Read more
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252Must we choose between criticism and faith? Reflections on the later work of Bernard BarberSociological Theory 9 (1): 124-128. 1991.
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15The Fate of the Dramatic in Modern Society: Social Theory and the Theatrical Avant-GardeTheory, Culture and Society 31 (1): 3-24. 2014.Avant-garde theatre is often invoked as the bellwether for a society that has become postdramatic – fragmented, alienated, and critical of efforts to create collectively shared meanings. A theatre whose sequenced actions have no narrative (so the story goes) mirrors a social world where the most conflictual situations no longer appear as drama but merely as spectacle: a society where audiences look on without any feeling or connection. Because only half right, these theses about postdramatic the…Read more
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286Sociological theory and the claim to reason: Why the end is not in sightSociological Theory 9 (2): 147-153. 1991.
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18Recovering the primitive in the modern: The cultural turn and the origins of cultural sociologyThesis Eleven 165 (1): 10-19. 2021.This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a p…Read more
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13On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The `Holocaust' from War Crime to Trauma DramaEuropean Journal of Social Theory 5 (1): 5-85. 2002.The following is simultaneously an essay in sociological theory, in cultural sociology, and in the empirical reconstruction of postwar Western history. Per theory, it introduces and specifies a model of cultural trauma - a model that combines a strong cultural program with concern for institutional and power effects - and applies it to large-scale collectivities over extended periods of time. Per cultural sociology, the essay demonstrates that even the most calamitous and biological of social fa…Read more