Jeffrey Alexander is one of the leading sociologists in the world. There are many reasons for this. 25 books, and as many edited collections; and thereby hangs a tale, to which I shall return. A long and productive career, mentoring and encouraging at UCLA, and then at Yale. Foundational work: a manifesto; an institute; and a journal. It is a similar strategy to that followed by the Frankfurt School, as Wiggershaus observed. Max and Teddy were also institution builders, or culture builders. But they counselled despair, by repute, where Alexander argues for repair. Repair is in need of carriers; and so there is an Alexander School. Now read on.

With an achievement of these Mt Rushmore dimensions, there can also be something paradoxical about the Alexander Effect. Sociologists admire the work, and take it for granted. Similar effects are observable with other prominent intellectuals I have worked with, such as Bernard Smith and Zygmunt Bauman. We think we know them, as we have grown up in their presence and under their influence. The books and papers continue to cascade on, and we take the results of the edifice that remains for granted, placing them somewhere in our own mental maps, maybe under the carpet, when it comes to the everyday life of our professional practice. As someone once said of Simmel, we hardly know him; yet his influence is everywhere. Ditto, perhaps, with a project like that of Alexander.

So the greatest post–Parsons has only just now attracted the honour of a book length study, here ably delivered by Jean-Francois Cote. It is a fine book, discernibly French in inflexion, fully deserving of its subject, and a credit to its author. It will be an indispensable reference point, both for those who think they know Alexander, and for those who are just now arriving at the party.

It is a map, a GPS to some central claims and ideas in Alexander’s s work. Cote begins with the Strong Program of Cultural Sociology. It’s a good opening frame, the right place to start. Next comes Durkheim, whose thinking supplants that of Parsons for Alexander, and seriously helps to move cultural sociology forward, partly by registering the richness of Durkheim’s legacy, which gives us so much more than Parsons by way of going forward. The critique of Marx, Cultural Studies and Bourdieu follows; for while Alexander’s cultural sociology never looks back from its formative encounter with Marx, the symbolic and creative loom larger than the domination and exploitation which they invariably rest upon. Next comes civil religion: Bellah, but the return also to Weber; and the civil sphere, enabled in Alexander’s thinking by the time he spent with the French – not Bourdieu, of course, but Touraine, Dubet and Wieviorka. So class recedes, or is registered, taken for granted, but it is social movements that step up as empirical and symbolic actors, those who may seek to change the world or at least to repair it by giving voice. This is where trauma fits. The book closes with attention to representation and performance, the symbolic and iconic, and with final and fascinating conclusions referring to transnational comparisons and the impulse to the best in journalism.

This is a valuable introduction, but it may also be suggestive of the Iceberg Effect. The tale, or tail to the central corpus may include the comparative work in Latin America, Italy, India, the Nordic countries, Canada and Australia, conducted together and with juniors and seniors alike across these cases and experiences. This is where the 25 edited volumes come into play. Coming at the work sideways, they tell us as much as the big books might, for here we see The Civil Sphere at work. The central dynamic of Alexander’s work is the combination of clear-headed theory building with practical intentions, with the kind of reactive capacity to read the smaller details of the world at the same time. The results are generative.

Cote has chosen the only sensible approach to his subject. He necessarily focusses on the core work. The result is the map. What is lost, or missed out? The byways. We necessarily see the results, rather than the conditions of their creation. For we can also see for example in Alexander the journalist. He offers intelligent, theoretically informed responses to being in this world, these worlds. Simmel? Alexander could have been the greatest American rock journalist, though there might also be other hypothetical candidates for that job, like Craig Calhoun, who riffed so sweetly on the Byrds, ‘My Back Pages’. Alexander, for his part, was the cub journalist for the Harvard Crimson who interviewed Jim Morrison, Grace Slick, Crosby Stills and Nash; and then applied the same kind of phenomenology to interpreting Watergate, Nixon, Obama and Trump. Jim Morrison may have planted the seeds of this thinking about performance, which then spreads across the entire stage of Alexander’s work.

My own conclusion is unsurprising, as the curtains close. Read this book, and read Alexander. Remember the soundtrack of the sixties. Don’t give up on the possibility of repair, or the hope of solidarity. Durkheim was many things, but he was a socialist too. The French had a few good ideas, after all.