Jeffrey C Alexander Bücher

This volume brings together the major statements by the leading contemporary scholars of cultural analysis on the relation between culture and society. Part One surveys the range of current analytical debate over culture, focusing on the relationship of culture to social structure and power. While individual contributions differ in defining the nature of culture and its relation to society, they are in agreement in assessing the relative autonomy of culture and the centrality of symbolic analysis. Part Two turns to substantive debates, including those over the role of religion, secular ideology, and mass culture and brings to light disputes about the meaning of modernity. The book testifies to the remarkable development in the past two decades of a cultural paradigm for social and political analysis.

In recent social and political theory the term civil society' has achieved renewed currency. Traditionally used in a normative or ideal-type' sense, the term describes a form of social organization - that is simply neither economic nor political - where democracy, liberty and widespread solidarity are essential regulatory concepts. Written from an empirical social-science perspective by some of the world's most important social theorists, this volume is a critical examination of the normative sense of civil society'. It includes analyses of civil society and democracy, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and post-communism.