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Civil Repair
Brief Description
This book challenges the pessimism that has so marked and impoverished social theorising about modern life. Modernity has often been dark and debilitating, but it has also generated hope for a better life and extraordinary reforms and liberations, from the creation of hopeful democracies in the...
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Description
This book challenges the pessimism that has so marked and impoverished social theorising about modern life. Modernity has often been dark and debilitating, but it has also generated hope for a better life and extraordinary reforms and liberations, from the creation of hopeful democracies in the face of dangerous dictatorships to feminist transformations of patriarchy, struggles against imperialism and racial domination, and the stubborn but persistent reconstruction of pivotal institutions.
Jeffrey Alexander theorises these radical reforms as civil repairs – as efforts to make real the utopian promises of the civil sphere. Ideal civil spheres make stirring commitments to social solidarity, equality, and individual autonomy. Real civil spheres are rent by anti-civil hierarchies of class, gender, race, and religion. Contradictions between real and ideal civil spheres generate social movements for justice, which are not only about challenging power but making new and more solidarising meanings. Civil repair is at once symbolic and institutional. It offers a new way to conceptualise progressive social change.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781509506453
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 15 November 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Polity Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 18.0mm
Width: 150.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 340g
Pages: 224
About the Author
Jeffrey C. Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University.
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