Issue 188, June 2025
Theoretical Logic in Cultural Sociology: Social Theorists Discuss Jeffrey Alexander’s Lifework
Guest Editors: Jean-François Côté and Frédéric Vandenberghe
Introduction
Theoretical logic in cultural sociology: Semiotics, hermeneutics and dialectics in the work of Jeffrey Alexander
Frédéric Vandenberghe and Jean-François Côté
In the Introduction to this issue of Thesis Eleven, we present the general theme that explores the theoretical logic in cultural sociology, by bringing to attention the three main threads of semiotics, hermeneutics and dialectics that seem to frame the analytical project of Jeffrey Alexander’s works in sociology. We first position the term “culture” in its historical and theoretical origins in the nineteenth century, and question its further evolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in order to highlight the background of Alexander’s own attempt at grasping its internal dynamics, as it has been disputed in various traditions of the social sciences. Second, we delineate Alexander’s position of considering the autonomy of culture with respect to both the break and the continuity that he is establishing by choosing to downplay Parson’s functionalism through a reappropriation of Dilthey, Durkheim, and Geertz, together with structuralism and pragmatic performance theory, in his efforts to theorize a true and genuine cultural sociology. While we underscore some lines of tension that run across the threads of semiotics, hermeneutics and dialectics in Alexander’s own synthesis that finally coalesces in the civil sphere theory, where cultural sociology gets its overt political dimension, we open up on questions leading to the contributions of each of the participants in this issue.
Articles
Formal and substantive multidimensionality in Jeffrey Alexander’s work
In the present article, I propose the notion of “multidimensionality” in theory construction as the underlying motive of Jeffrey Alexander’s intellectual development and use this to reconstruct his work in four connected steps. In the first part, I analyze his explorations of the theoretical logic in social sciences and the way the notion of multidimensionality emerges, at the end of this process, as a solution, an evaluative standard, and a driving force in theory construction. In the second part, I analyze how this understanding orients Alexander’s reconstruction of sociology’s history from classics to post-Parsonian sociology and how it leads him to elaborate a kind of new convergence thesis. In the remainder of the article, I try to show how, in the hands of Alexander, these formal considerations on multidimensionality are turned into substantive multidimensional theories. In the third part, I analyze how this transition is done, in the case of neofunctionalism, as an attempt to make Parsonianism more multidimensional through a synthesis between some of its more flexible branches and recent developments in symbolic interactionism. In the fourth part, I explore how this passage toward substantive multidimensionality is carried out in cultural sociology through a fourfold move where culture is inquired in terms of its symbolic patterns (codes and binary oppositions), ordering structures (discourses/narratives), symbolic practices (performances), and surrounding materiality (iconicity).
The differentiation of culture and the complexities of understanding
The concept of culture initially gained prominence in American social science through the diffuse conception of anthropologists for whom culture was everything not biological or psychological in human conduct. Thus, “culture” included all aspects of social relationships and institutions as well as such practices as tool-making. In the 1950s, Talcott Parsons and others proposed a sharp analytical distinction between cultural and social systems, the former viewed as complexes of symbols, the latter as systems of social relationships and the institutions that stabilize them. Jeffrey Alexander has been a prominent advocate of culture in this analytical mode, emphasizing the need for methodical hermeneutics in order to study specific cultural systems and complexes of culture. He has also shown that conceptualizing culture as simply “symbol systems” is an unworkable simplification. However, the analytical aspect of cultural studies should be extended in two additional respects. First, it is important to distinguish among the four subsystems of culture that Parsons distinguished in later writings – constitutive, moral-evaluative, expressive-artistic, and scholarly-scientific – as hermeneutics must be used differently in the four types of culture. Second, one must examine how culture enters into concrete occasions of social action in combination with elements of social relationships, personality patterns, and uses of mind. The present paper explores both of these latter aspects of the study of culture, focusing on norms as elements of moral-evaluative culture.
Structural or dialectical hermeneutics? Further epistemological, theoretical and methodological questions in Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural sociology
Jeffrey C. Alexander’s strong program in cultural sociology relies on what he calls a structural hermeneutics for interpreting social life. This approach is based on the binary oppositions that organize and codify the underlying references of social discourses and performances in the civil sphere. Yet the relations at stake between these social discourses and performances and their underlying references are considered, through structural hermeneutics, in their static state, contradicting the dynamics of formation and transformation of the civil sphere to which they refer. This article proposes to go back to the epistemological debates that fueled the introduction of hermeneutics in Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften program, in order to show that what is truly at stake in interpretation is the dialectical, and not only structural, relations constitutive of the civil sphere. Once this is done, the strong program of cultural sociology can be revised to take into account the dialectical hermeneutics according to which the codification and organization of social discourses and performances are produced. Subsequent to this theoretical orientation, examples are introduced on the methodological level, drawing on George Herbert Mead’s conceptualization of self and society, highlighting in a different manner the analysis of the civil sphere presented by Alexander.
Structural hermeneutics, dialectical hermeneutics: Is a synthesis possible?
Cultural sociology is committed to developing a structural hermeneutics that interprets social action as texts structured based on scripts. Through semiology, it is possible to understand the cultural forms of action based on the binary nature of their meaning. This makes it possible to define a deep structure in time based on opposition inherited from Durkheim’s analysis of the sacred and the profane. However, structural hermeneutics has been questioned for its supposedly static character. The need for dialectical hermeneutics has been raised to allow us to examine how oppositions are absorbed over time into a new category that reduces the old oppositions to nothing. The discussion reproduces, in a way, the idea that there is a hermeneutics that sustains the existence of apparently motionless codes, in contrast to another that underlines how cultural codes are transformed, showing the finite character of symbolic structures. This article suggests that it is possible to simultaneously hold both the structural and the dialectical character of culture by taking up Foucault’s proposal in the Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. In these lessons, Foucault stresses the importance of the binary systems of religious and political classification in ancient and modern societies, distinguishing between the pure and impure actions of social actors. However, Foucault suggests that the innocent/guilty binary classification system introduced something different into the political and religious classification system: the idea of truth. “Truth” is created to distinguish who is innocent or not in the legal system, and this requires constructing a fact as true. This article explores how the construction of “truth” brings deep cultural structures into play while allowing the creation of new classification categories. In this sense, it is a way to understand the processes of stability and change in cultural structures.
Culture and social order: Three critical remarks on Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology
Jeffrey Alexander’s revaluation of the role of culture in the study of society is grounded on the Durkheimian theory that a society can only be built on the shared acceptance of a symbolic system that guarantees social order. To explain how this shared acceptance is produced, Alexander proposes the concept of the civil sphere, defined as an “analytically independent” and “empirically differentiated” sphere of society devoted to the production and elaboration of shared symbolic patterns. In this text I put forward three main critiques of this theory: first, Alexander does not succeed in analytically separating the civil sphere from other spheres of society; second, he postulates and does not demonstrate the unitary nature of the civil sphere; third, he does not clearly explain how consensus is formed in the context of the civil sphere and, more importantly, how an established consensus may be observed as such.
Rethinking embodiment and historicity in cultural sociology: A critical view on Alexander’s aesthetics of iconicity
Csaba Szaló
This paper explores the potential for enriching Jeffery Alexander’s ‘aesthetics of iconicity’ within cultural sociology by further developing its engagement with embodiment and historicity. Cultural sociology, concerned with the meanings inherent in social life, distinguishes itself from approaches focused solely on functional unity or linguistic signification, emphasising instead the hermeneutical dimensions of understanding and the lived experiences of those who comprehend meanings. Alexander’s description of the perceiving subject’s immersion in the object of experience suggests a conception of the subject as a living being, possessing and being a living body. This paper proposes that a more nuanced understanding of iconic experience can be achieved by integrating a deeper exploration of how this embodied subject engages with icons within specific historical contexts. By attending to the lived dimensions of embodiment, we can further illuminate the complex interplay between iconic meaning and the human experience of social life.
Review Essay
Towards cultural sociology of literature: The case of science fiction
Jan Váňa
What a refreshing read in the sociology of literature! Literary works are not just products of social forces, symbolic struggles and accumulated capitals. They have a power of their own – the power to capture and convey the essence and meaning of changing eras. Literature expresses the paradoxes of modern humanity differently than other textual accounts, moving and inspiring readers through its aesthetic form. This book is for social sciences and humanities scholars whose interest in literature goes beyond analysis to an appreciation of its artistry.
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thesis eleven 