Dialogues in Sociology

This essay explores the tragic paradox that haunts ‘actually existing’ civil spheres. The civil sphere represents history's most creative and ambitious effort to replace violence with peaceful comity and domination with democracy. Yet, the very effort to define a space of nonviolent democracy is based on a binary discourse: the motives, relations, and institutions of civil spheres can be defined only in relation to antagonistic anti-civil qualities that encourage violence and oppression. Caught inside this paradox, members of the civil sphere experience their civil communities as fragile, as continuously threatened by putatively anti-civil forces outside them. It is for this reason that actually existing civil spheres have so frequently encouraged violent wars against city states, nations, and empires outside their boundaries and repression against excluded insiders as well. After laying these contradictions out conceptually, they are explored empirically via an interpretation of The Oresteia, Aeschylus’ tragic drama that cut to the heart of Athenian democracy. After this aesthetic investigation, the essay turns to the regional and global wars of the last 100 years, examining how the debilitating national boundaries of civil spheres have, not only allowed, but encouraged destructive paroxysms of violence right up to the present day.

In ‘The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv’, offers a meditation framed by civil sphere theory to explore what is necessary for effectively combatting interstate war and related forms of violence, doing so by discussing both the historical origins of civil society and the matter of boundaries in limiting the exercise of civic power beyond a state's borders. Agreeing with Alexander's assessment, this reflection stresses the agonistic character of the perpetual struggle between peacemakers and warmakers and the increased dangers to humanity resulting from the new weapons of war made possible by the Military-Industrial Complex. It concludes by highlighting the centrality of law if civil power is to trump warrior culture, and if democracy is to offer a path to a more peaceful world.

In his war essay, Jeffrey C. Alexander ties cultural sociology and civil sphere theory together in a tragic account of violence and war throughout the ages. The application of the precepts of cultural sociology, most notably the binary code, leads him to a rather Hobbesian vision of anarchy in internal relations. Drawing on Johan Galtung's peace research, the article enjoins Alexander to shift the analysis from a culture of war to a culture of peace.

This article revisits Jeffrey C. Alexander's Civil Sphere Theory to explore the enduring paradox of civility and the fragile pursuit of cosmopolitan peace in an era marked by renewed warfare and deepening global divisions. Building on Giambattista Vico's claim that civil society is a human creation and David Held's assertion that history remains with us and can still be made, this article argues that the aspiration toward a global civil sphere – though yet unrealized – endures as a persistent moral and sociological horizon. The analysis positions Alexander's recent reflections in dialogue with Bauman's notion of deterritorialized ‘reconnaissance wars’ and Mann's contemporary sociological analysis of warfare. Together, these perspectives reveal how globalization – within which current wars are increasingly situated – was once envisioned as a framework for extending democratic solidarity beyond nation states but has instead reinforced nationalist boundaries, geopolitical rivalries, and the militarization of international order. At the same time, contemporary struggles for justice, alongside the communicative and affective capacities of twenty-first-century media, are generating new forms of transnational empathy and moral imagination that may reconfigure the civil sphere. The paper concludes that peace, inseparable from the civil sphere itself, remains – though fragile – the most profound and enduring achievement of global civil life.

Can we imagine a world without wars, violence and domination? What does it take to build such a society? I pose the above questions as an attempt to dialogue with Jeffrey Alexander's analysis of the paradoxical nature of the modern ‘civil sphere’ in a time of local and global turmoil. In this dialogue, I restate some of the key claims from Alexander's analysis and offer possible ways of conceptualising and re-imagining a more humanistic, responsive and ethical civil sphere. Contrary to Alexander, I argue that at the centre of the crisis of the civil sphere is not how its conceptions are always informed by an unproductive and antagonistic binarism. But the root problem has got to do with how the civil sphere has tolerated or become invaded by private class interests. As a result, the greatest undoing of the modern civil sphere lies in its furtherance of a distinctive class/economic position. To understand or unravel the ‘paradox’ that Alexander discusses in his piece, I suggest the need to focus more on broader socio-economic dynamics. As I will show, these broader socio-economic processes are central not only in shaping the nature of the civil sphere, but also in the re-production of endless violence, wars and human domination.

Can civil spheres extend beyond the nation state? This question lies behind the essay written by Jeffrey C. Alexander that reconstructs ‘The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv’. This article argues that the twenty-first century and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine teach us that freedom and democracy, but also war and trauma, are intricately entangled with both nation-bound and transnational civil spheres in wartime Europe. Uncivil events such as war and trauma can give rise to civil spheres, which remain fragile and vulnerable if not safeguarded by institutions. Ukraine's defence, resilience and solidarity, however, show that civil spheres can extend beyond the nation state – and that civil sphere theory could be at the nucleus of a contemporary sociology of international relations and transnational complexity.

In response to Jeffrey C. Alexander's ‘The civil sphere in war and peace’ (2026), this commentary offers a Hegelian reading of the contradictions that remain unacknowledged within Alexander's model. It argues that the civil sphere rests on a moral framework that externalises contradiction as the uncivil, rather than recognising it as constitutive of its own movement. Further, it shows how the grammar of inclusion in the civil sphere depends on translation into a fixed Western moral code that grants legitimacy only by neutralising otherness, especially in its Global South interlocutors. What presents itself as universal civility therefore constitutes a secret investment in a liberal moral sorting that conceals its internal tensions (such as its inherent patriarchy) and remains perpetually haunted by what it excludes.

Jeffrey C. Alexander's (2026) recent contribution to the comprehension of how warfare relates to what he conceptualises as ‘civil spheres’ rather strikingly and unexpectedly puts centre-stage The Eumenides, the final play of ancient Athenian tragedian Aeschylus’ Oristeia trilogy. What Alexander might construe as the Athenian civil sphere was at its symbolic foundation made dramatically and rhetorically compatible by Aeschylus with potentially vicious and violent relations with other polities. The problem here may go beyond the making compatible of apparent incompatibles: civility as it occurs within the polity and possibly radical incivility between polities. It may also be that the former is dependent upon the latter as a condition of its possibility. If there is a dark side to modernity, there is also a dark side to Greek antiquity's possible imaginings of what civility is, even in what we might take as its most apparently democratic dimensions. This paper situates Alexander's treatment of Aeschylus within the history of interpretations of the Oristeia, to encourage the author and others to take analysis of Aeschylean themes further for Civil Sphere and other kinds of social theory. The contingent rather than necessary dependence of civil spheres on warfare is emphasised.

While domestic civil spheres extend Lockean ties of mutual understanding, they often legitimate a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ among nations outside their national boundaries. As cultural trauma theory suggests, however, there is a sociological pathway for extending civil solidarity beyond the nation state, such that war between nations is prevented. The European Union underwent just such a process in the wake of the Second World War. Even as Civil Sphere Theory develops an empirical understanding of Kant's universalizing moral claims, the frustration of these claims in ‘actually existing’ civil spheres is conceptualized in a Hegelian manner – as generated by the fundamental contradictions of space, time, and function. These contradictions generate extraordinary strains inside and outside of nationally bounded civil spheres, triggering social movements for peace and justice.

Combining the personal and academic ‘voice’, this article reflects on the value of serendipitous associations and unplanned images in doing sociological work. One of the central research artefacts discussed is an image generated during an evening of sociability of an urban stairway made from a regionally specific rock known as Sydney sandstone. The accidental nature of the image is used to reflect on a series of issues: to what extent is research planned and unplanned? Why do images serve to illuminate social life? The article proposes that alongside Mills' famed sociological imagination, we need an imaginative sociology, and considers whether Mills may have meant as much when he referred to sociology as a craft. The latter might embrace playfulness and reverie, and employ ‘visual hapticity’ and ‘peripheral perception’ to broaden the sociological ‘gaze’. I conclude by observing that developing a feel for one's craft, like life itself, is an ongoing process.

Are we at war? While this question was once answered through declarations, troop movements, or kinetic violence, it has become increasingly difficult to resolve. Drawing on Hasselbladh's (2025) concept of the shadow of war, this essay examines how contemporary conflicts are deliberately organized below the threshold of armed violence and how this transformation reshapes sociological understandings of war and peace. It argues that military institutional specificity lies not in visible practices but in a latent potential that structures meaning, authority, and legitimacy even in the absence of war. Extending this logic beyond the military, the essay suggests that many contemporary conflicts are structured to never fully materialize, but instead operate through influence, disruption, and ambiguity, relying on signals rather than events and anticipation rather than resolution. As a result, the question ‘are we at war?’ becomes structurally irresolvable, uncertainty emerges as an organizing principle, and peace appears not as the stable opposite of war but as a fragile and contested achievement.

This article offers some comments on Hiro Saito's paper concerning the possibility of ‘spiritual sociology’. It considers: the extent to which spirituality and the study thereof are traditional or modern, and therefore compatible with sociology; how it may be possible to include spiritual sociology within sociology syllabi; and how spiritual sociology might build bridges between micro-sociology and macro-sociology.