Abstract
Jeffrey Alexander and Erik Olin Wright are among the leading sociologists of their generation. Each has published his magnum opus in the past several years: The Civil Sphere (Alexander) and Envisioning Real Utopias (Wright). This paper—a dual review essay—lays out the core arguments of each work; situates each within the personal and intellectual contexts of its production; and critically assesses each in terms of its contributions to sociological theory and research. It also argues that the works converge (unexpectedly, given Alexander’s intellectual origins in neo-functionalism and Wright’s in neo-Marxism) upon a common intellectual position, that of Deweyan pragmatism. It tries to make sense of Alexander’s and Wright’s peculiar dual voyage in a Deweyan direction and offers some reflections as to what that journey might tell us about social theory and political thought today.
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Notes
Alexander misses out on a nice opportunity here, however, to explore still other mechanisms that mediate between civil society and the noncivil systems of state and economy, mechanisms that Cohen and Arato (1992) subsume under the rubrics of “political” and “economic society”: e.g., parliamentary deliberation, trade unionism, and collective bargaining.
Bernstein (1991, pp. 337–38) describes an “adversarial response” as a type of argumentation in which a person “relentlessly goes after . . . [the] weakest point” of her adversary’s argument. In a “dialogical response,” a person tries to grasp the strongest point of an argument to “[seek] common ground.”
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A discussion of Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006; and Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, London: Verso, 2010.
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Emirbayer, M., Noble, M. The peculiar convergence of Jeffrey Alexander and Erik Olin Wright. Theor Soc 42, 617–645 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9201-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9201-4