Introduction

Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's On Justification, both first published in English in 2006, represent each in their own genre major sociological contributions. This chapter is concerned with appraising their respective input towards a renewal of our understanding of public culture in liberal democracies as well as of the sociological tools for analysing it.

Indeed, these works have many affinities. Both draw on Durkheimian thought or concepts. Both display a common lexis from ‘justice’ to ‘pragmatics’ and ‘compromise’, as well as a common inclination to connect philosophical and sociological issues. Both endeavours have been bestowed auspicious labels: while the setting up of a ‘new American cultural sociology’ (see Smith, 1998) has long been the purpose of the research program of Alexander, the ‘theory of justification’ elaborated by Boltanski and Thévenot has been seen to form part of the ‘new French social sciences’ (Wagner, 1994: 272). Crucially here, both endeavours seek to elucidate how a certain aspiration to justice, solidarity, and universalism produces differentiating social-political effects – a distinctive trait of liberal democracies.

On the basis of a presentation of the key tenets of each approach, a comparison of their use of the notion of ‘public culture’ is attempted here. It is argued that, while Alexander's comprehensive endeavour is impressive and well adapted to the analysis of state-regulated social relations, the proposal made by the two French theorists, although lacking a formal ‘grand-theoretical’ dimension, is more able to capture emerging socio-cultural and socio-political trends.

The Civil Sphere and On Justification: What Makes Them Comparable

A major point of convergence between the approach developed by Boltanski and Thévenot, on the one hand, and the one proposed by Alexander, on the other, is this: both are wary of differentiating their main analytical object from other social structures, forces, or institutions. In The Civil Sphere, Alexander writes, ‘We need a theory […] that is less myopically centred on social structure and power distribution, and more responsive to the ideas that people have in their heads and to what Tocqueville called the habits of their hearts’ (2008: 43).