UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Wednesday, 4 September 2013 at 5.30 p.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY Dr Andreas Hess, UCD School of Sociology, University College Dublin on 4 September 2013, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on Jeffrey Charles Alexander
President, Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Jeffrey Alexander is one of the leading figures if not the intellectual voice of modern cultural sociology. His many books, most outstanding perhaps The Civil Sphere (Oxford University Press 2006), The Performance of Politics (Oxford University Press 2011) and his studies on cultural trauma such as Remembering the Holocaust (Oxford 2009), are milestones in the field. In contrast to other attempts such as the sociology of culture or cultural studies, the focus is not only on the arts, theatre, music, modern media and so forth but Alexander’s cultural sociology combines the aspirations of classic sociology of a Max Weber or Emile Durkheim with some of the new insights from linguistics, social anthropology, and the philosophy of language and applies these to a wide range of social phenomena.
Alexander’s books and articles have been translated into all important academic languages. He is read in Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and many other languages. His articles belong to the most cited in the social sciences, and as Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor at Yale and in his role as one of the Directors of the Centre for Cultural Sociology at Yale, which he also helped to found, he has turned Yale into a centre of true sociological excellence that attracts scholars from around the world, including scholars from Ireland and UCD.
It was by no means always clear that Alexander would become one of the leading figures in cultural sociology, although there are signs detectable that allow us to see a connection between his early epistemological interests and his most recent work. In the early 1970s, as a young student, he questioned some of the more radical tendencies of the American students and civil rights movements. After Vietnam and Watergate, so he argued, American society was perhaps more ready for social and political reform than some of the more radical activists assumed. With this view of America’s potential capacity to reform herself in mind Alexander wrote his dissertation in Berkeley under the supervision of the renowned sociologists Neil Smelser and Robert Bellah. Alexander wanted to find out whether sociology was theoretically and conceptually speaking ready to receive modern society and address its changes, reform capacities and complex structures. The work, published in four volumes as Theoretical Logic in Sociology (University of California Press, 1983) was an important first step in the development of what would turn out to become a challenging new sociological programme.
Alexander was appointed to Full Professor at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1981. In the early 1980s he would become an important voice in what was then called neo-functionalist sociology. However, other influences came to bear, some from outside the discipline of sociology. Structuralism, semiotics and cultural pragmatics urged sociology and the social sciences that they opened themselves up to a radically changed world and to conceptualise it in different ways. Alexander was ready to incorporate some important insights from these fields into his own sociological programme, an agenda that would become known as the ‘strong programme in cultural sociology’ (as opposed to the above mentioned ‘weak programme’ of the cultural studies type).
In contrast to some of the more fashionable examples and the occasional obscure language of French or British social theory Alexander attempts to provide cultural sociology with a new, more solid conceptual foundation. His essay collections Fin de Siècle Social Theory (Verso, 1995) und The Meanings of Social Life (Oxford UP, 2003) must not only be regarded as attempts to sketch out the contours of this new cultural sociology, they also serve the purpose of taking stock of classical and modern interpretations and to test the viability or applicability of the new conceptualisations.
In his opus magnum The Civil Sphere and in the follow-up study The Performance of Politics Alexander tries to apply cultural sociology to modern civil society and its politics. They are attempts to understand the complex relations and interactions between established institutions and the more flexible or elastic civil sphere in which public opinion is being formed and in which various conceptualisations of justice are discussed and begin to take shape. As Alexander shows convincingly in the case of Obama’s first presidential campaign, the civil sphere is also the place where the open democratic struggle for symbolic representation and meaning takes place − with outcomes that are not always predictable.
The struggle for symbolic representation is full of contradictions, surprises and serendipity patterns. It includes often the attempt at civil repair and tries to appeal and incorporate those groups that have been excluded from full representation. As Alexander shows in the cases of the American civil rights and the women’s movements the complex interaction between the movements and the state and its institutions is not one that can be reduced to one-sided views or political positions or simple interpretations of victimization. Their deeper meaning is often only fully revealed in the late outcome of the struggle between normative aspirations and concrete social practices.
Since taking up his position at Yale Alexander has held many visiting professorships and received a number of academic awards and prizes. Most recently he held the Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress and this year he was invited by Cambridge University to be Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. Alexander lives in New Haven with his wife Morel Morton Alexander who is an artist and psychologist. He has two adult sons, Benjamin and Aaron Alexander-Bloch. The first is an environmental and urban reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the second is a Ph.D. in neuropsychiatry from Cambridge and currently finishing his medical degree at UCLA.
For his considerable contribution to sociology, and in particular cultural sociology, Jeffrey Alexander is awarded by UCD with the honorary title of a Doctor of Letters (DLitt).
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.