Solidarity Justice And Incorporation

Although many contemporary scholars have deepened our understanding of civil society through critiquing the limits of civil society discourse or seeking to offer empirical analyses of existing civil societies, none have attempted anything as bold or original as Jeffrey C. Alexander's 2006 book, The Civil Sphere. While consciously building on a three-centuries-long tradition of thought on the subject, Alexander has broken new ground by articulating a detailed theoretical framework that differs from the two major perspectives which have heretofore shaped civil society discourse. In so doing, he has sought to construct a model of what he calls the civil sphere, which he treats in Durkheimian fashion as a new social fact. In Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation: Thinking through The Civil Sphere, six internationally recognized scholars comment on Alexander's civil sphere thesis. Robert Bellah, Bryan S. Turner, and Axel Honneth consider the work as a whole, while Mario Diani, Chad Alan Goldberg, and Farhad Khosrokhavar offer analyses of specific aspects of the civil sphere. In their substantive introduction, Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino locate the civil sphere thesis in terms of Alexander's larger theoretical arc as it has shifted from neo-functionalism to cultural sociology. Alexander's concluding essay responds to their analyses by clarifying and elaborating on issues in the text while simultaneously addressing recurring misunderstandings of the thesis. Comprehensive and insightful, Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation is an essential companion to The Civil Sphere. This compelling volume is a valuable resource for students and scholars of sociology, political science, and social philosophy.

This title seeks to reengage Jeffrey C. Alexander's 'The Civil Sphere' several years after its initial appearance. It does so at a moment when Alexander has extended and applied his framework to events that have occurred since 2006, specifically the election of Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement.

Finding the phenomenon of solidarity an erratic block in the midst of the moral landscape of the modern age, scientists from philosophy, sociology, history, law, psychology, and biology met in the Autumn of 1994 at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, to ponder the concept, its history, and its significance. Those presentations are here augmented by others to expand the coverage. Among the topics are four uses of solidarity, fraternity and justice, the bonds and bounds of solidarity, theoretical perspectives for empirical research, institutional and social concepts of solidarity in 19th-century western Europe, constitutional law, citizenship, and post-modern perspectives. The labor movement is even mentioned a few times. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Justice as Welfare links equality, justice and welfare at the philosophical level, to propose an egalitarian view of social justice.

The mining industry continues to be at the forefront of colonial dispossession around the world. It controls information about its intrinsic costs and benefits, propagates myths about its contribution to the economy, shapes government policy and regulation, and deals ruthlessly with its opponents. Brimming with case studies, anecdotes, resources, and illustrations, Unearthing Justice exposes the mining process and its externalized impacts on the environment, Indigenous Peoples, communities, workers, and governments. But, most importantly, the book shows how people are fighting back. Whether it is to stop a mine before it starts, to get an abandoned mine cleaned up, to change Laws and policy, or to mount a campaign to influence investors, Unearthing Justice is an essential handbook for anyone trying to protect the places and people they love.

The civil sphere is a distinctively democratic field in modern societies, one that sustains universalizing cultural aspirations and organizational structures and that has tense and uncertain boundaries with other spheres of social life, like the economy, religion, family, and state. Unlike the latter, which are more particularistic and hierarchical in character, the civil sphere defines itself in terms of solidarity – the feeling of being connected with every other person in the collectivity. The utopian ideals of democratic solidarity shape every modern society, even if they are often compromised by the messy realities of social life. This volume uses the theory of the civil sphere to shed new light on Nordic societies, while at the same time drawing on the distinctive experiences of the Nordic nations to reflect on and advance the theory of the civil sphere. Nordic societies have long been admired for creating a distinctive form of social democracy, but this admirable achievement has not been well conceptualized theoretically. Most attempts to explain Nordic social democracy focus on material and organizational factors. This volume, by contrast, emphasizes the cultural foundations and characteristics of social democracy, demonstrating how civil sensibilities are necessary for the creation of an egalitarian and democratic state. Nordic civil spheres, however, are not only pro-civil but also white in color, European in ethnicity, secular in character and gender-equal in a subtly restrictive manner. Such primordialization of state civility is vividly on display in the sometime tense relationships that develop among natives and “foreigners” in Nordic countries, relationships that expose the primordial undersides of the social democratic codes and civil values that constitute the Nordic civil sphere. A major contribution to the theory of the civil sphere and to our understanding of the cultural and normative underpinnings of social and political life, this volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociology and politics.

Even as the specter of populism haunts contemporary societies, scholars have not been able to agree about what it is. Except for one thing: a deviation from democracy, the source, it seems, of the precarious position in which so many societies find themselves today. This volume aims to break the Gordian knot of “populism” by bringing a new social theory to bear and, in so doing so, suggesting that normative judgments about this misunderstood phenomenon need to be reconsidered as well. Populism is not a democratic deviation but a naturally occurring dimension of civil sphere dynamics, fatal to democracy only at the extremes. Because populism is highly polarizing, it has the effect of inducing anxiety that civil solidarity is breaking apart. Left populists feel as if civil solidarity is an illusion, that democratic discourse is a fig leaf for private interests, and that the social and cultural differentiation that vouchsafes the independence of the civil sphere merely reflects the hegemony of narrow professional interests or those of a ruling class. Right populists share the same distrust, even repulsion, for the civil sphere. What seems civil to the center and left, like affirmative action or open immigration, they call out as particularistic; honored civil icons, such as Holocaust memorials, they trash. How can the sense of a vital civil center survive such censure from populism on the left and the right? Populism in the Civil Sphere provides compelling answers to these fundamental questions. Its contributions are both sophisticated theoretical interventions and deeply researched empirical studies, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the most important political developments of our time.

The goods that we pursue in our lives are for us, first and foremost, goods that are particular and personal, and thus goods that are immediate to our attention. Not readily apparent to us are goods necessary for the flourishing of our lives but that can be attained by us only in consort with others and thus realized only through collective action. Such goods are common goods. The wider the good, the more extensive must be the human cooperation to realize the good. A stable, orderly society and a habitable planetary environment are common goods that can be realized only in and through the cooperation of all for the benefit of all. That all contribute to the shared good of the whole is a matter of justice—social justice. Acting for the Common Good undertakes the study of social justice in light of the common good—this from the viewpoint of Catholic social teaching, which draws upon the tradition of the common good that is articulated classically in the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of Thomas Aquinas and in the modern-day social thought and authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church.