The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology

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Oxford University Press, 18 sept 2003 - 312 páginas
In The Meanings of Social Life , Jeffrey Alexander presents a new approach to how culture works in contemporary societies. Exposing our everyday myths and narratives in a series of empirical studies that range from Watergate to the Holocaust, he shows how these unseen yet potent cultural structures translate into concrete actions and institutions. Only when these deep patterns of meaning are revealed, Alexander argues, can we understand the stubborn staying power of violence and degradation, but also the steady persistence of hope. By understanding the darker structures that restrict our imagination, we can seek to transform them. By recognizing the culture structures that sustain hope, we can allow our idealistic imaginations to gain more traction in the world. A work that will transform the way that sociologists think about culture and the social world, this book confirms Jeffrey Alexander's reputation as one of the major social theorists of our day.

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The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics with Philip Smith
11
On the Social Construction of Moral Universals The Holocaust from War Crime to Trauma Drama
27
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
85
A Cultural Sociology of Evil
109
The Discourse of American Civil Society
121
Watergate as Democratic Ritual
155
The Sacred and Profane Information Machine
179
Modern Anti Post and Neo How Intellectuals Explain Our Time
193
Notes
229
References
271
Index
293
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Página 27 - Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.
Página 140 - The right of the people of a single State to absolve themselves at will, and without the consent of the other States, from their most solemn obligations, and hazard the liberties and happiness of the millions composing this Union, cannot be acknowledged. Such authority is believed to be utterly repugnant both to the principles upon which the General Government is constituted, and to the objects which it is expressly formed to attain.
Página 36 - The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States.
Página 134 - If we must have a bank with private stockholders, every consideration of sound policy and every impulse of American feeling admonishes that it should be purely American. Its stockholders should be composed exclusively of our...
Página 90 - trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature — the way it was precisely not known in the first instance — returns to haunt the survivor later on
Página 139 - ... not produced or manufactured in the United States, to afford a pretext for imposing higher and excessive duties on articles similar to those intended to be protected, hath exceeded its just powers under the constitution, which confers on it no authority to afford such protection, and hath violated the true meaning and intent of the constitution, which provides for equality in imposing the burdens of taxation upon the several States...
Página 111 - right' has the same meaning, namely what is for the interest of the party established in power, and that is the strongest. So the sound conclusion is that what is 'right' is the same everywhere: the interest of the stronger party.
Página 140 - ... to the remedy of amendment; for without waiting to learn whether the other States will consent to a convention, or if they do will construe or amend the Constitution to suit her views, she has of her own authority altered the import of that instrument and given immediate effect to the change. In fine, she has set her own will and authority above the laws, has made herself arbiter in her own...
Página 139 - Whereas the Congress of the United States by various acts, purporting to be acts laying duties and imposts on foreign imports, but in reality intended for the protection of domestic manufactures, and the giving of bounties to classes and individuals engaged in particular employments, at the expense and to the injury and oppression of other classes and individuals...
Página 134 - Government what it ought to be, we can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in our code of laws and system of political economy.

Sobre el autor (2003)

Jeffrey C. Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, and co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology.

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