Civil Society IV: Democratic Solidarity and the Non-Civil Scaffolding of the Civil Sphere
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2501011W%20Keywords:
Civil sphere theory, civil society, democratic solidarity, cultural sociology, civic actionAbstract
A defining feature of what Alexander calls Civil Society (CS) III is its separation—analytic and empirical—from the putatively non-civil spheres of the family, schools, and associational forms which lack public communicative intent and comprise CS I. While critical to the progress of CST as a research program, with this separation and delimited conception, civil sphere theorists may miss a key insight of CS I regarding the mutual interdependence of spheres. Although civil codes, institutions, and interactional practices may have their “natural” home in the civil sphere, their emotional and normative force, and their survival over time, depend upon their ancillary institutionalization in non-civil spheres. Families are key to democratic socialization. Schools cultivate democratic dispositions through citizen-formation, inducting students into their nation’s democratic traditions. And through civic action and civic interaction orders prejudices are challenged, and citizens become open to new forms of incorporation. Using the case of contemporary American democratic culture, we survey scholarship on political polarization and social capital’s decline in the US, and argue that the discord characteristic of contemporary America’s civil sphere arises, in part, from these non-civil spheres. That is, the erosion of democratic solidarity and basic norms of civility originate in democratic deficits in those non-civil spheres that scaffold the civil sphere.
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