Presentation

The ‘New American Cultural Sociology’
An Appraisal
By Gregor McLennan

• Gregor McLennan
  He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Marxism, Pluralism and Social Theory, he has recently published a range of articles on the contemporary status and nature of sociological discourse. He is currently investigating the way that ideas and intellectuals operate in ‘knowledge society’ contexts. He has also contributed to several collections in social and political theory and cultural studies.
  
• Jeffrey C. Alexander
  He is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). Jeffrey Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. He is the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology , Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , and The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim . In the field of politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (Oxford, 2006), which includes discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social movements and incorporation.
  
• Cultural sociology
  Interprets social life through cultural analysis.
  Studies cultural impacts on societies and social interactions.
  
• Early theorists
  Karl Marx
  Marx's belief of culture is that the most powerful members of a society are those who live in the ruling class. These members set up the culture of a society in order to provide the best interests to that society. He has also talked about how a society's economic status determines their values and ideologies.
  
  Émile Durkheim
  Durkheim had the belief that culture has many relationships to society which include:
  • Functional- Certain rites and myths create build social order up more by having people create strong beliefs, the more people who believe in these myths will strengthen social order.
  • Historical- Culture had its origins in society, and from those experiences came evolution into things such as classification systems
  • Logical- Power over individuals belongs to certain cultural categories, and beliefs such as god.
  
  
  
• Alexander’s four levels of abstraction:
  1.Post-positivism: the necessary philosophical framing for all social enquiry
  2.The project of cultural sociology
  3.Its application in a series of substantive cultural exploration
  4.Political ideology of civil society and multiculturalism
  
• The project of cultural sociology
  1. Relative autonomy of culture: according to John Thompson it may result in ‘impasse’.
  2.Internal massive feelings rule the world
  3.Fantasy and reality are interwoven and difficult to separate
  
  
• Substantive applications
  “the line dividing the sacred from the profane must be drawn and re-drawn time and time again…through such phenomena as scandals, moral panics, public punishments, and wars, societies provide occasions to re-experience and recrystallize the enemies of the good.”
  
  1.Watergate
  2.Information technology
  3.Holocaust(as an example for the idea of ‘cultural trauma’)
  According to Alexander, attributions of good and evil are not static, they go through adaptations as societies face challenges called cultural trauma.
  
  
• The immanent utopia of civil society and multiculturalism

Utopia:
1.Only a social sphere separate from market and state
2.Democratic public opinion
3.In spite of ‘anti-civil’ forces, it keeps ‘equality, solidarity and respect', these forces push back destructive intrusions and carry out ‘civil repairs’.

• Multiculturalism
  
  1.Different from ‘assimilation’ that is culture blind and just qualities are purified.
  2.Different from ‘hyphenation’ that just persons are purified.
  3.But a society where both persons and qualities are purified.
  
• Conclusion:
  According to Terry Eagleton, Alexander in an anti-foundationalist going for a new foundationalism who privileges culture rather than God or nation (society) and elevated it to a near-sacred moral status.