Jürgen Habermas, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and the Struggle over Civil Society
Democracy is not just a matter of periodic elections. It is a way of life—normatively grounded, culturally expressed, and constantly contested. This book explores the idea of democratic life through a comparative and critical engagement with two distinct disciplinary approaches to democratic life: Jürgen Habermas’s critical philosophy of deliberative democracy and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural sociology of the civil sphere. While both aim to theorize social integration and democratic legitimacy, they do so through fundamentally different vocabularies and methods. Although emerging from different disciplinary traditions—moral philosophy and cultural sociology—both theorists address the fundamental question of how democratic societies create legitimacy, foster solidarity, and integrate individuals into shared normative orders.
This inquiry is guided by three central concerns:
Civil Sphere Theory and Deliberative Democracy in Critical Perspective
Firstly, I contend that Alexander’s Civil Sphere Theory, while presented as an alternative to Habermas’s philosophy, in fact relies, often implicitly, on its normative infrastructure. Their relationship is asymmetrical: Alexander’s framework depends—often implicitly—on the normative and procedural foundations that Habermas develops explicitly. The civil sphere’s symbolic codes, dramas of inclusion, and rituals of solidarity presuppose a vision of moral universality and procedural legitimacy that Habermas systematically developed. Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy is not merely a moral theory among others. It is a regulative foundation that sustains the ideals Alexander’s sociology performs. Without it, Civil Sphere Theory risks devolving into cultural idealism without critical force.
Writing Democracy: the Question of Authorship
Secondly, the book approaches both theorists not just as systems of thought, but as rhetorical projects written in specific societal, political, and institutional contexts. Authorship here functions as a materialist method: I read Habermas and Alexander as thinkers whose styles, strategic positions, and disciplinary investments shape their theories’ scope and reception. Habermas, writing in postwar Germany, constructs a theory of rational legitimacy as a philosophical response to the legacy of fascism and moral collapse. Alexander, emerging from Parsonian American sociology, recasts democratic life as a liberal cultural performance rooted in civil ideals, yet often obscures the philosophical scaffolding on which his claims rest. By placing both figures in dialogue, I show that theory itself is a terrain of symbolic and material power.
Civil Society between Cultural Symbolism and Critical Materialism
Thirdly, by engagement with these two theorists, this book intervenes in debates on civil society—not by offering a fully new model, but by tentatively contributing to a theory of democratic society that is both cultural and materialist. This book is a sustained comparative interpretation that uses authorship as a method to historicize and reconstruct theoretical concepts. It proceeds not from within political sociology, but from the vantage point of cultural sociology and critical theory. By placing Habermas and Alexander in deliberate and unequal dialogue, I do not seek to harmonize their work, but to examine what each can and cannot account for when confronted with the other—and how their authorial positions shape those limits. The Idea of a Democratic Life ultimately invites a rethinking of how normative and cultural theories of democracy can be brought into productive, if uneasy, relation—without collapsing one into the other.
This is an ongoing project that started at Yale during my work at the Center for Cultural Sociology. The aim is a book publication, but this will take its time. I’m happy for critical reflections on my ideas and arguments at: marcel.knoechelmann[at]yale.edu
As of: May 2025