Structural or dialectical hermeneutics? Further epistemological,theoretical and methodological questions in Jeffrey C. Alexander's cultural sociology

Abstract

Jeffrey C. Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology relies on what he calls a structural hermeneutics for interpreting social life. This approach is based on the binary oppositions that organize and codify the underlying references of social discourses and performances in the civil sphere. Yet the relations at stake between these social discourses and performances and their underlying references are considered, through structural hermeneutics, in their static state, contradicting the dynamics of formation and transformation of the civil sphere to which they refer. This article proposes to go back to the epistemological debates that fueled the introduction of hermeneutics in Dilthey's Geisteswissenschaften program, in order to show that what is truly at stake in interpretation is the dialectical, and not only structural, relations constitutive of the civil sphere. Once this is done, the strong program of cultural sociology can be revised to take into account the dialectical hermeneutics according to which the codification and organization of social discourses and performances are produced. Subsequent to this theoretical orientation, examples are introduced on the methodological level, drawing on George Herbert Mead's conceptualization of self and society, highlighting in a different manner the analysis of the civil sphere presented by Alexander.

Cultural sociology, from its very inception to its most recent developments, relied on hermeneutics as an epistemological, theoretical and methodological device for interpreting social life, that is, as a specific practical orientation for sociology. At the beginning of the presentation of what he calls a “postpositivist” position in contemporary epistemological debates, Jeffrey C. Alexander quotes Wilhelm Dilthey's works on the Geisteswissenschaften program that will define his own position in the understanding (and not in the explanation) of human social and historical life (Alexander, 1982a: 16). Even though this early program delineated by Dilthey in the early 1880s will only come later to properly and explicitly recognize hermeneutics as the specific orientation to be followed by human sciences—as opposed to the natural sciences—in his inaugural text of 1900 on the subject (Dilthey, 1996: 235–258), Alexander on his side will continue to develop his own position with respect to a deepening of the implications of a hermeneutical position in sociology, gradually making interpretation a fundamental analytical principle to be applied in sociological analysis. In his important Chapter 1 of the second volume of Theoretical Logic in Sociology, “Prolegomena. General Theoretical Argument as Interpretation,” Alexander makes it clear that his reading of Durkheim and Marx in this volume relies on a method similar to literary studies, in trying to “explain not only the tensions in the work of the original theorist but his school as well and, indeed, the conflicts and divisions in the secondary literature which has sought to explicate both in turn,” adding that he “will strive to construct a hypothetical ‘state of mind’ for the theorist which can account for the tensions discovered in the text” (Alexander, 1982b: 7, 376 note 17). ¹ When Alexander encounters Weber's works, in the third volume of Theoretical Logic in Sociology, this position on interpretation shifts according to Weber's own position on interpreting social action in sociology; hermeneutics will seem to possibly open up, from the interpretation of texts, towards the interpretation of social life itself, making then hermeneutics a double-axed enterprise that allows on the one hand a close reading of texts (from theology to philosophy or history, etc.) and on the other hand a similarly close “reading” of social life—to be considered in its textual aspect, eventually following Paul Ricœur (1986) on this. Weber, in his particular orientation in the development of a Kulturwissenschaften program that parallels Dilthey's works, but does not quite intersect with it, ² provides Alexander and Horgan (2025). Alexander with a rich case in point, since Weber's sociology of religion, together with his sociology of economic life, both rely quite heavily on interpretation of texts applied to historical examples. Alexander, in his critical reading of Weber's works, will benefit from what he perceives as the multidimensional approach analytically developed by Weber, with respect to the variety of possible meanings attached to historical practices by social actors, while rejecting his more pessimistic views about the fate of reason in contemporary society—particularly through an audacious interpretation of Weber's comments on the practice of protestant religion in the United States in the early 20th century. ³ That Weber's sociology of religion (together with Durkheim's) becomes a central reference for the upcoming developments of cultural sociology of the 1980s and 1990s (and beyond) only signals its even stronger attachment to hermeneutics, given the origins of the latter in the discipline of interpreting theology (and law), before entering the world of the human sciences. When coming to terms with Parsons's monumental synthesis of classical sociology, in the fourth and final volume of Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Alexander will pinpoint both his critique of the reductionist views of Parsons and the future anticipated program of cultural sociology in writing:

From an important element in his [Parsons's] multidimensional theory, the pattern-variable scheme has been transformed into cultural hermeneutics. This is not to say, of course, that this hermeneutical strategy is not a major achievement in itself. In their idealist form, the pattern variables provide a systematic classification of cultural tendencies and their sociological implications unparalleled in the history of sociological thought. They allow Parsons to establish law-like statements about cultural life that far surpass the idiographic quality which undermines the general relevance of most cultural studies. Even in this idealist effort, then, Parsons builds upon the achievements of Weber, although he does so in a one-dimensional manner that Weber would not endorse. (Alexander, 1983b: 224) ⁴

That cultural sociology will indeed proceed in going beyond this limitation of Parsons's theoretical and analytical production by getting rid of these reductionist views on the typification of social action through a different kind of cultural hermeneutics, specifying how it will do so and to what extent its own proposed structural hermeneutics will achieve that, is the object of the present paper. This whole enterprise will be announced in a chapter with the very appropriate title “Cultural Sociology (1): The Hermeneutic Challenge” in Alexander's book Twenty Lectures. Sociological Theory Since World War II (Alexander, 1987: 281–301). ⁵ Noting in this chapter how Dilthey, George Herbert Mead and Clifford Geertz come as close as they can from adhering to the idea of an objective mind offered to sociological analysis while examining the subjective minds of social actors—in a quite Hegelian manner—Alexander also adds Paul Ricœur, who insisted in considering the objective form of subjective expressions and actions as a locus of cultural analysis. Not only cultural sociology must pay attention to the way subjective expressions and actions are part of the bigger whole of the cultural system to which they belong, but the act of interpretation itself must actively engage in reconstructing this whole—as a reflexive addition that counters the strictly “objectivistic” stance of a Parsonian-like analysis, guaranteed by a faulted theoretical model:

But the objective dimension that a collective reference provides does not mean that hermeneutics can escape subjectivity altogether. Far from it. The “parts” of a meaningful structure are, indeed, really there. Acts, words, gestures, and events provide visible, objective components of a cultural text whose real existence cannot be questioned. What whole these parts finally add up to, however, is another question. Wholes—the meaningful themes, the common symbol systems—take their shape, for the actor and the analyst alike, only as the result of generalizing thought. For the observer, these wholes must be constructed from an interpretive reservoir of previously sensible themes, from his or her own intuitive experience about how things “fit together” in cultural life. (Alexander, 1987: 297, italics in the original)

My long introduction that comes here to a close only intended to show that cultural sociology, when it will eventually become formalized in terms of a “strong program,” with the article bearing that title that Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith published in 1998, had already had a long, consistent and thoughtful frequentation with hermeneutics; ⁶ the choice made to characterize this hermeneutics as “structural,” though, raises epistemological, theoretical, and methodological questions that project my own interrogation both below and beyond this specific positioning of cultural sociology, and will then fill the remaining of the present paper. To do so, I will first proceed by going back to the epistemological debates that provided the occasion for hermeneutics to surface in the program of the human sciences, before providing a conceptual critique of structural hermeneutics from the point of view of what can be called a dialectical hermeneutics. I will then present an example of how such dialectical hermeneutics can offer some alternative positioning about historical and cultural views in sociology, by providing some theoretical and analytical developments that situate this alternative position. In a way, this alternative positioning could be seen as arguing for a stronger dialectical hermeneutics in cultural sociology—or again, for a hermeneutical sociology that would engage in conversation with cultural sociology. ⁷

Epistemological debates between Neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism

There are numerous reasons to be interested in the epistemological debates that raged in German universities at the end of the 19th century, but for the sake of brevity, we will simply restrict our examination to the respective positions of Weber and Dilthey in the context of a larger Methodenstreit that reflected deeper philosophical oppositions between Hegelianism and Neo-Kantianism. The main reason for maintaining a distance between the natural sciences and human sciences that portrayed the oppositions in those debates was that it seemed impossible to envision the identification of laws governing human history, in the same way that the positivistic stance of the natural sciences could do so with natural phenomena. ⁸ Kant's critical philosophy expressed in his Critique of Pure Reason had already established that such division was inherent to the Cartesian division of the subject–object relation; one can hope to reach the laws governing natural phenomena (as objects of thought), to the extent that individuals’ internal intuition makes possible the contact between the pre-existing objective forms of those laws (or concepts) and the sensations provided by the external subjective sensitive experience of those natural phenomena. ⁹ The limits to this critical philosophy of the subject is that time and space, as the a priori forms of sensibility that make any experience possible at all, together with the “thing-in-itself,” remain forever unknowable. On the side of the subject, expressed in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, the limitations are even stronger and narrower, since there is no possibility of knowledge gained through concepts, but only maxims that can pass for universal principles (and not quite laws) that can be thought to become (or present themselves as if they would be, or become) universal. ¹⁰

Hegelian philosophy will turn things upside down, in replacing those Kantian developments within the first and basic science that provides the only foundational knowledge possible: logic. In standing at the basis of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, logic indeed provides in itself the principle of a self-autonomous and self-developing knowledge that does not encounter at any point “external” limitations to itself; this is why knowledge is presented as “absolute”—that is to say, as an unlimited possible development. Limitations to the development of knowledge appear through knowledge itself: through the determinate judgment that marks the finite knowledge of something lies the infinite possibility of going beyond that, in a further elaboration of knowledge content. Logic is here, at its roots, dialectic: it moves from one finite determination to another, until logic has completely determined itself as such, that is, as “absolute knowledge.” Science (the equivalent term to philosophy for Hegel) represents the form of this knowledge in its complete expression, which is infinite in its possible further developments, once its logical process has been exposed. ¹¹ There is still, in this philosophical system, a distinction between a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of mind, but those are simply the outcome of the development of logic (nature being the “immediate Idea,” and mind being the “self-mediated Idea”); ¹² hence, concepts have to be part of both the natural and the human sciences, given that they are the result of a dialectical development that pretends to achieve their possible infinite developments in simply exposing the contents of their respective objects. For Hegel, this overall achievement is represented by the concept of freedom itself, geared to dialectical logic, which gives its entire philosophical system its fundamental motivations and ultimate autonomous developments—together with its objective content in the constitutional modern state, which becomes the incarnation of its universal realized possibility, by giving individual subjects (considered as legal persons) their respective sphere of freedom and autonomy. ¹³

We know well how Hegel's philosophy was treated in the 19th century, especially by Marx, who wanted to turn Hegel upside down, “on his feet” as he had it, in order to have a natural sciences that will be able to find the laws of history. Historical materialism, in pretending to find dialectical developments in nature itself, and in human history alike, will present an overall picture of a highly positivistic kind—strangely standing on the denunciation of any other representations of idealist kind that do not correspond to this materialist tenet. ¹⁴ It is those Hegelian and Marxian developments that Neo-Kantianism will react to, in asking for a return to Kant, and to the Kantian vision of a definite separation between the natural sciences and the human sciences. In Max Weber, this Neo-Kantian position will play out heavily on his epistemology and method; refusing to accept that, in the present state of knowledge at least, historical sciences can pretend to establish or recognize any law of development, Weber will even refuse the idea that they develop concepts, as the natural sciences are able to do, and will be opting instead for the (temporary) solution of the ideal-types. ¹⁵ The idea of the Kulturwissenschaften, as Weber presents them, will then paradoxically lack the possibility of equating the natural sciences in their own scientific endeavors, since they will never be able to pretend to achieve a conceptual view of things, lacking the universal validity of the laws and the plausibility of concepts that they simply cannot produce. In the language of Heinrich Rickert (1997), the Kulturwissenschaften will be dedicated to an idiographic form of knowledge (aiming at the particularity of the meaning attached to specific cultural forms as “individuals”), ¹⁶ whereas the natural sciences can achieve a nomothetic form of knowledge (attached to the generality of the laws governing natural forms). Dilthey, on his side, will face the same kind of problems: his whole program in the Geisteswissenschaften will be developed with this idea that a specific type of knowledge belonging to the human sciences is different from the knowledge produced by the natural sciences. Putting emphasis on the subjective mind in its relation to its objective social world, Dilthey will introduce a way of understanding the specificity of the particular contribution that an individual makes in a specific socio-historical context, seeing within this individual context the reflection of his/her sociohistorical context—the two being irreducible to each other. ¹⁷ Nevertheless, his choice of calling his own program of research the Geisteswissenschaften, instead of the Kulturwissenschaften, reveals two interesting things: on the one hand, he thought that the term “Kultur” still bore, in the German context of his times, the connotation of “high” or “bourgeois” culture (as Bildung), and on the other hand, he thought that Geist, as “mind,” would better fit the possible encounter of the subjectivity of individual actors and the objectivity of the social world. ¹⁸ This choice, even though if it did not signal an Makkreel (1992) overthrowing of Dilthey's Neo-Kantian position, suggests nevertheless a closer proximity to Hegelian philosophy (as he devoted also a study to the thought and life of Hegel and his era; Dilthey, 2002). As for his dedication to bringing hermeneutics as a late addition to the program of the Geisteswissenschaften, as a “the theory of the rules of interpreting written monuments” (Dilthey, 1996: 238), Dilthey remained certain that it was a surer way of getting to the synthesis between the subjective and objective mind that he envisioned, as it could be applied as much to poetry, literature, and wider cultural productions, such as economics and law, as well as history, as objective forms revealing their subjective anchoring.

A final thing can be added to those developments on the debates between Neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism in their German context, which will have an impact on our own reflection about hermeneutics. It is the decisive contribution of Ernst Cassirer, who proposed, in his monumental Philosophy of the Symbolic Forms (published in the 1920s in three volumes), an overcoming of the limitations of the Kulturwissenschaften; indeed, by emphasizing the universality of the symbolic forms as inherent to human historical development, Cassirer overcame the idea that the human sciences should limit themselves to the study of particular or individual entities only, and opened up the possibility of producing general studies of universal validity. In Cassirer's systematic works, symbolic forms are analyzed and categorized as the universal forms into which human expressions take shape, at any time and any place; for this reason, those symbolic forms can always be understood and interpreted as the original production of the “symbolic animal” that humans represent in any society. Already with his book Substance und Function in 1910 (Cassirer, 1953), which addressed the general problem of the conceptualization in sciences, and up to the publication of his book Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften in 1942 (Cassirer, 2000), Cassirer operated a breakthrough for the recognition of an analytical power of the cultural sciences that did not only equate the analytical power of the natural sciences, but even went beyond it, in showing how the natural sciences themselves were possibly brought under the scrutiny of such analysis, since they were inevitably expressing themselves in, by and through a very specific form of symbolic expression—namely, science. By doing so, Cassirer got as close as he could to Hegel's philosophy, even though he appeared to refrain from embracing it totally, because of a persistent adhesion to Neo-Kantianism (Cassirer, 1995). ¹⁹ Yet Cassirer appears to be an invaluable help in the hermeneutical enterprise of any kind, even though he did not seem to have been, by himself, attracted to this orientation. ²⁰ Another case in point would be Charles Sanders Peirce, who started in the 1870s and up to the 1910s to reflect about semiotics, or the theory of signs, as the inescapable way of thinking about logic and the theory of knowledge, or epistemology; but his own system, also thwarted in its development between Neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism, remained relatively incomplete in its incapacity to present the entire renewal of epistemology that he envisioned. ²¹

To what extent are those debates related to the development of Alexander's cultural sociology, as it has been stated in the introduction? Let us say that they are informative on the background according to which the discussion about hermeneutics can be laid out: on the one hand, those debates certainly cling to fundamental orientations in the logic that is being used in cultural sociology, and more particularly on the ability of the latter to move from particularistic to universalistic interests in its various analyses, as we will see below; ²² on the other hand—and this follows from the first remark—should not dialectics be at the center of the hermeneutics developed by cultural sociology in its very analytical program, instead of the orientation towards a structural hermeneutics that provides Alexander's own type of analytical program? By adopting the principle of dialectical logic, could cultural sociology get a more reflexive take on its analytical endeavor? This is what will constitute our next interrogation.

Structural or dialectical hermeneutics in cultural sociology?

Cultural sociology has explicitly proposed, as Alexander and Smith (1993, 2006) advocated, a “structural hermeneutics” for its analytical program of social life. This touches upon the second axis that puts into contact texts belonging to a cultural tradition with the social text; the latter has to be interpreted with respect to the former, giving hermeneutics its raison d’être in being able to articulate those two levels of expressions—that is, in realizing an adequate interpretation of social life according to its cultural background. The structural emphasis added to this hermeneutics means that it recognizes the binaries that constitute the opposite meanings presented both in social life (as narratives or events) and in texts belonging to a cultural tradition. Based on the Durkheimian division between the sacred and the profane, this structural hermeneutics evolved through a general frame for analyzing the political discourse in the civil sphere (Alexander, 1988, 2000, 2003, 2006; Alexander and Smith, 1993). It is then based on a series of oppositions that constitute the discursive structures of social actors, social relations, and institutional framings, along the lines of the opposition between democratic and undemocratic practices and values, which translates the opposition between sacred and profane—particularly in the United States, yet this model will also be more widely applied to the civil sphere in an international context (Alexander and Horgan, 2025; Alexander and Tognato, 2018; Alexander et al., 2019a, 2019b). What is important here is that the dynamics between those oppositions are seen as the formal properties of codification. It is through this process of codification that the oppositions are constituted, first, but also that the shifting between those oppositions can happen, and further on, that the re-establishment in their former opposition can be done. For Alexander and Smith,

Positive codes, indeed, can be understood only in relation to negative ones. The conflict between good and bad functions inside a culture as an internal dynamic. Conflict and negation are coded and expected; repression, exclusion and domination are part of the very core of the evaluation system itself. It is for this reason that pollution, transgression, and purification are key ritual processes in social life. (Alexander and Smith, 1993: 158)

Seen from this perspective, there are two things to be said: on the one hand, there is a certain form of stability that is assumed from the point of view of the cultural system—the codes, in other words, and in spite of the conflicts and shiftings that they undergo through various events and discourses in social life, are thought to be relatively stable, such as to allow the purification of pollution to be operated in restoring the initial coded cultural order. On the other hand, the codification that takes place seems to be operating in a way that makes its internal transformations difficult, if not impossible (due to the stability of the cultural system, but more likely due to the oppositions that cannot be overcome, dialectically let us say, to produce either new codes or new modes of codification). I will return to the question of stability of the cultural system later, after discussing this second aspect of this theoretical question of codification.

Codification is understood in its structural dimension here mainly because Saussurian linguistics has taught us that language functions fundamentally through a system of double oppositions: the first opposition is between the signifier and the signified, and the second one is between the signs themselves. This conception of language is important at many levels, but also tricky, since it touches upon language in its synchronic dimension, and not language as it is taken in discourses per se (something that Saussure himself recognized, in drawing the distinction between “langue” (language) and “parole” (speech), adding that linguistics must attach itself to the study of the former only). In other words, discourse is the active or dynamic element that puts language in a diachronic situation of possible changes, where the relation between signifier and signified can shift (as shown in the simple example of a metaphor, where the signified shifts within the same signifier), and where the relation between the signs themselves can be no longer of simple oppositions, but of gradual fusion—and even possible confusion (as shown in the example of metonymy). At some point Alexander will come to acknowledge this movement, but will nevertheless insist on the persistence or the permanence of the coded relations that sustain the structural components of the civil sphere; as he writes:

It is my central contention that the language of civil society, the content and the structure of its binary discourse, is relatively unchanging. The signifiers of civil society do not shift. What changes is the signifieds, the social entities conceived as embodying the pure and impure symbolic representations. To put this in a slightly enigmatic manner, what we have here is “stable signifiers, shifting signifieds.”

It is for this reason that I have insisted that symbolic and social boundaries are never the same. The binary language of civil society has no particular or inherent social referents. At its most flagrant, this “arbitrary” plasticity suggests an extraordinary relativism of the signifier-signified relation, and this can seem highly dubious to normative theory. (Alexander, 2007: 28, italics in the original) ²³

These remarks and critiques of the Saussurian static definition of language as opposed to its dynamic definition in discourse have been proposed a long time ago by Valentin Voloshinov (1986) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1982, 1986), and also by Émile Benveniste (1966), among others, who came with different views on the living use of language in discourses. The linguist Roman Jakobson (1963), who insisted even more than anyone on the analysis of codification in language, has not only shown that codes are inherent in the use of any language system (decoupling the apparent unity of the discursive expression between the “message” and the “code” it inevitably conveys simultaneously), but that shifting between codes is also something common—when the relation between message and code is understood as involving an interrogation of the code through the message (which happens through the reference to its use in contexts that put its very structure at play). ²⁴ These different manners of seeing how the relations between messages and codes can be expanded—for example, when one considers the complexity, plasticity, flexibility and versality of human communication compared to animal communication (Benveniste, 1966: 56–62), or again, in seeing how stylistics appears in discourses using different “speech genres,” in order to situate an aesthetic and moral evaluation through the participation to social life (Bakhtin, 1986) and according to different ideologies (Voloshinov, 1986), or even different historical eras (through the chronotopes as they are thematized by Bakhtin with respect to literature; Bakhtin, 1982). All these analytical developments in linguistics, stylistics and poetics point to the recognition of the multiple possibilities of structuring, destructuring and restructuring not only social discourses, but cultural discourses and texts (or codes) as well; in other words, they show how the structures of symbolic forms are immensely malleable, and this because of their inherent dialectical nature (Cassirer, 2000: 20–33, 49–55). I will add to this a simple but fundamental aspect of things that can be summarized by a mere observation: symbols always both unite and separate at the same time, and this dialectical unity proves that this basic structure can be arranged and rearranged (we could also say, with George Herbert Mead's pragmatism in mind, reconstructed) according to any situation figuring and reconfiguring the structure of meaning itself.

The problem now of course becomes how can you consider the stability of such a cultural system in its structural components, if the dialectical nature of its social discourses, codifications and texts are in such a constant move? Cultural sociology has a strong argument here, with its emphasis on the relation of the cultural system to the structures of social life. You cannot think that the symbolic structures of a given culture, even though they are malleable, will give way to any kind of expressions that will lead to any kind of social action, since meaning has to be part of a collective life that makes sense for all—at least at the level of a general coherence. As Alexander and Smith put it,

From the phenomenological perspective, cultural codes are elastic because individuals can ad hoc from event to code and from code to event. Codes are extended through time and space because new data and experience are taken as analogues for what has preceded. There is not inconsistency, then, between speaking of cultural structures and of the contingency of action. Accountability and symbolic classification are different theoretical levels—emergent properties—of the same empirical process; they are concepts that explain the reciprocal interaction of structure and action. Culture, in our understanding, is one of the internal environments of action.

This nonreductionist approach to the relationship between symbolic patterns and action is obviously related to the equally significant question of the connection between symbols and social structure. Put simply, does a strong understanding of the analytic autonomy and internal complexity of culture imply idealism in the conventional causal sense? We would argue that it certainly does not. It is one thing to lay out the internal structure of cultural order and quite another to say what role this culture plays in the unfolding of real historical events or in the creation or destruction of empirical institutions. (Alexander and Smith, 1993: 158–159)

Cultural sociology at this point reaches a highly convincing argument for the understanding, explanation, and interpretation of the requirements of the linking of the cultural system to the social structures of social life. In fact, this is an argument that connects quite well with Hans-Georg Gadamer's argument made against Jürgen Habermas, in their famous debate about hermeneutics in the 1960s–1970s. Against the abstract claim for emancipation made by Habermas on the side of a critical theory that would be able to get rid of the straight-jacket of cultural traditions, Gadamer replied that, on the historical level, this emancipation freed of any constraint by tradition was simply not only a pure futuristic utopia, but that it never existed anywhere and at any time in any society in the world (Gadamer, 1982: 123–143, 147–174). This is not to say that the cultural system, or tradition, as Gadamer would have it, is immutable, but rather that and quite on the contrary, as an historical continuum, it is marked by ruptures, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the meanings that it conveys. Reconstructing tradition, which becomes the contemporary definition of hermeneutics and its task in both Gadamer and Ricœur (although in a different way for each), means being able to acknowledge first, that tradition has become foreign to us, estranged from us, something at the same time other and even alien, and second, that in order to make possible the connection with it, we have to try to mediate it through our own analysis of the social world to understand its becoming, through the overcoming of our own present prejudice against its own past (Gadamer, 1989: 164–168). A dialectical hermeneutics, that is, would acknowledge those historical changes within the restructurations of the cultural system, in order to be able to understand, explain, and interpret the social world according to the transformations of its symbolic structures. As pointed out earlier, the position of such dialectical hermeneutics still has to meet its sociological content, and cultural sociology shows the way, up until this questioning of how dialectics enters the picture of cultural system through the various social discourses. ²⁵ The latter are inherently dialectical, something that is at least implicitly recognized by Alexander, in his views on the contribution that hermeneutics can add to the normative constitution of the theorization of “the good society”; but then his views stop short on the irony of this dialectical situation:

This points to the fact that the social application of polarizing symbolic identifications must also been understood in terms of the internal structure of the discourse itself. Rational, individualistic, and self-critical societies are vulnerable because these very qualities make them open and trusting and if “the other side” is posited as devoid of redeeming social qualities then trust will be abused in the most merciless terms. The potential for dependent and irrational behavior, moreover, can even be found in good citizens themselves, for deceptive information can be provided that might lead them, on what would seem to be rational grounds, to turn away from the structures or processes of democratic society itself. In other words, the very qualities that allow civil societies to be internally democratic—qualities which include the symbolic oppositions that allow liberty to be defined in any meaningful way—mean that the members of civil society do not feel confident that they can deal effectively with their opponents, either from within or without. The discourse of repression is inherent in the discourse of liberty. This is the irony at the heart of the discourse of civil society. (Alexander, 2000: 307–308)

As opposed to stating the irony of such a condition of democratic societies, a dialectical hermeneutics would rather emphasize the transformations that can occur in the situations of reforms affecting the symbolic structures underlying social discourses, and thus the codes and codifications, that are mobilized in political reforms achieving their goals in a historical perspective. ²⁶ A good point of departure for doing so appears in the works of George Herbert Mead, who defined the pragmatist position on social change in terms of reconstruction—a reconstruction both of the self and of the social situation simultaneously, through a rearticulation of meaning. Mead, of course, even though his influence has been felt in different areas in human sciences (be it in Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism, or in Anselm Strauss's social psychology), did not quite get the proper place he deserved in sociology. Alexander has underlined this partial legacy (Alexander, 1987: 195–214), whereas I proposed a return to Mead's dialectical conception of society (and self) in order to rediscover its true sociological relevance (Côté, 2015). Indeed, it seems to me that Mead's theoretical views of reconstruction, as much as his commitment to the understanding and practices of social reforms, involve as much a concern for social and cultural transformations expressed at the symbolic level. In the space that remains, I will provide examples of how he does so, and how those views can be included in a dialectical hermeneutics.

Mead's pragmatism and dialectical hermeneutics: Concepts and examples

While connecting Mead with hermeneutics might seem strange at first glance, one has to bear in mind that he had been the student of Wilhelm Dilthey in Berlin in 1890–91— even requesting Dilthey as the advisor of a PhD dissertation that Mead never completed (Cook, 1993: 22–25; Joas, 1985: 4–11, 15–63; Shalin, 2011: 1–36), even though Dilthey had not yet by then announced clearly his own hermeneutical orientation, which would only come explicit, as mentioned earlier, in his programmatic text of 1900 by retaining elements from Schleiermacher, and adding some new ones of his own. ²⁷ Besides, this connection with hermeneutics could amount to sheer suspicion when one considers that “culture” has never really been a topic of interest to Mead (and of pragmatism in general, in its classical definition). The latter remark, however, rather points to a terminological issue, since in fact it is mind that would be the central concern of Mead's works—and in this, one can think that the connection with Dilthey's works that we referred to earlier is definitely closer than expected, particularly if one considers the Hegelian legacy in this respect with the reference to Geist. ²⁸ For Mead, mind indeed represents, more than anything else, in its subjective and objective contents, the relation between self and society, and thus has an ontogenetic and phylogenetic components, especially because it is constituted by the significant symbols that fill communication (Mead, 1934). The more interesting part of those conceptions for our present purposes, however, is located in what Mead considered to be the very source of reflection, linking meaning to action: when an individual faces a problem, the usual or habitual course of action of this individual is interrupted and must be reconstructed, and it is habits that come to the fore in the possibility of changing those habits. Habits are an interesting concept in Mead because, like mind, they have both an ontogenetic and phylogenetic character; institutions, for him, represent collective habits, as they represent the individual's patterns of action. So when either an individual or a society faces a problem in the course of habitual action, it is habits that have to be changed—that is to say, institutional and/or personal structures—and this happens through the new significant symbols that are produced on such occasions. The dialectical nature of those changes in the meaningful symbolic structures of individual and collective habits appears to be at the center of Mead's social psychology and political reformism—both converging towards the type of sociology that Mead envisioned, which brings the individual mind of selves in constant actual symbolic relations to the collective mind (of which the “Generalized other,” or institutions, are representative figures, as is society), in their dynamic and even dialectical relation. This is what Mead calls a “constitutional revolution,” characterizing it as follows: “when you set up a constitution and one of the articles in it is that the constitution may be changed, then you have, in a certain sense, incorporated the very process of revolution into the order of society,” adding:

This is the problem of society, is it not? How can you present order and structure in society and yet bring about the changes that need to take place, are taking place? How can you bring those changes about in orderly fashion and yet preserve order? To bring about change is seemingly to destroy the given order, and yet society does and must change. That is the problem, to incorporate the methods of change into the order of society itself. (Mead, 1936: 361–362)

That Mead did not develop those views into thorough sociological analyses, and that his official legacy in sociology mostly ignored them, belong largely to circumstances that still have to be elucidated. ²⁹ Nevertheless, this situation did not prevent Mead's influence to be notable in many respects, and first and foremost, for our own present purposes here, in the works of his PhD student Jessie Taft, who conducted in her dissertation an analysis of the Feminist Movement within a Meadian perspective, emphasizing the development of women's self-consciousness as a requisite for the feminist revolution that transfigured society, in the wake of mass democracy (Taft, 1915, 1993). Showing how self-consciousness in women grew according to the gradual realization of their fuller participation in social organization, Taft was writing on the brink of the moment when women finally won the constitutional right to vote (with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920). Taft's sociological analysis was a timely recognition that the first wave of the feminists' revolution, which took place through the suffragist social movement of the last decades of the 19th century, was to be institutionalized and created in return a crucial step for the enlargement of citizenship within mass democracy. As this historical shift continues to be part of our own society, with the second and third feminist waves of the 1960s and 1990s, it has also brought to our attention, retrospectively, the very beginning of the expression of a feminist perspective in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft—and especially her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in 1792, in the midst of the French Revolution. In this book, Wollstonecraft rearticulated the significance of the French Revolution and its famous Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme of 1789 by insisting that it should apply to women too. This book, with its considerable breath that inspired as much Wollstonecraft's own reformist ideas and actions in women’s education as the suffragist social movement to come later in the 19th century, should be considered a major work in reforming the symbolic structures of society, and its classical status today bears witness to its importance in that respect. What has to be considered here is precisely the reformulation and restructuration of underlying symbolic structures that happen through Wollstonecraft's writings and influence in the Feminist Movement writ large, together of course with the suffragist social movement and the constitutional revolution that the latter eventually created. When political reforms reach the stage of constitutional transformations, as was the case with the 19th Amendment, I think we can all agree that a shift in the codes underlying social life has officially happened, and will have lasting effects. From an hermeneutical point of view, the innumerable consequences of that have not yet reached their completion—as we can realize today with the questioning of the even deeper symbolic structures of patriarchy that still need to be dug out and reformed, in order to make equality between men and women possibly realized beyond mere voting rights, according to the formal tenet of equality promoted in mass democracy. For this to happen, a lot of habits—of aesthetic, moral, and cognitive orders—will still have to be reconstructed.

Cultural sociology has certainly gone in this direction, with very interesting analyses of some aspects of feminism (Alexander, 2000: 289–294; 2006: 235–263). ³⁰ Showing how the dynamics of the civil sphere and the social movement of civil repair can be conceived as an adequate and even better analytical tool to interpret feminism than the analyses provided by critical theory, cultural sociology has promoted an hermeneutics which is very attentive to the connection of symbols to social movements and social structures. But again, cultural sociology has done so with the structural hermeneutics background that insists on positioning the stability of democratic codes against undemocratic codes, and the question then becomes: how does feminism stand, and stood historically, within those binary oppositions? Were not the feminists of the 19th century considered, in their discursive structure of social motives, “irrational, hysterical, excitable, passionate, unrealistic, mad” (all qualificatives associated with the counter-democratic code) against the standards of the bourgeois democratic order, which stood on its side for “reasonable, rational, calm, self-controlled, realistic, and sane” (all qualificatives associated with the democratic code; Alexander, 2000: 299)? Cannot the same be said about the discursive structure of social relationship, where feminism has often been associated with “suspiciousness, self-interestedness, deceitfulness, conspirational, or even inimical,” or with the discursive structure of institutions (prior of course to the constitutional reforms) as “arbitrary, exclusive, factional” (Alexander, 2000: 300–301)? In his theory of the civil sphere, Alexander has a clear answer to those questions, considered to be part of the dynamics of the civil sphere itself:

The categorical divisions of the civil sphere have been stable for centuries, but the signifieds of these civil and anticivil signifiers certainly have not. In one historical period, differences of gender, class, race, religion and sexuality are taken to be primordial differences and criticized or sentimentalized as anticivil by the groups that organize and represent the civil core. At a later historical time, such supposedly natural qualities are seen merely as “constructed,” as are the once invisibly primordial qualities that had, up until that time, defined the distinctiveness of civil society's core groups. Reflexivity is not about changing the categories that define the civil sphere; it is about learning how they can be instantiated in new ways. (Alexander, 2006: 263)

It seems to me that in order to be seen in this perspective, civil sphere itself has to be considered through the historical definition that it has come to have (or even is struggling to have, both theoretically and practically); in other words, the civil sphere's definition given here, as a concept, has the characteristics of an historical period (our own) into which it can be allowed to have those qualities—and more, in the direction of being able to change the codes that constitute its own symbolic structures, through the restructuration of its categories (together with the social discourses and actions that go with them). The issue that is raised here points in fact to the very dialectical nature of the matter—that is to say, to the passage from a particular to a universal within the range of the symbolic structures at stake. Of course, the analytical path followed by cultural sociology emphasizes the shifting that takes place within the discourses along the lines of the crisis and their resolutions though a social agonistic process, but does it not have to do so by taking into account the historical dialectics that reconstruct codes as well in the process? While I totally agree that the agonistic phase of “purification” (or catharsis, for that matter) has to go through a process of generalization that is often spurred by social movements or public opinion, its initial stages often remain within the realm of the “work of the negative”—to use Hegelian vocabulary—and ask for some form of “transgression”—to use a Bataillean expression—that reach the deeper symbolic structures to which they cling. ³¹ And this deeper dialectics is accompanied by a restructuring of the cultural codes—and not only of the social discourses; indeed, the cultural codes of modern bourgeois democracy, which did not fully acknowledge the citizenship and full autonomy for women, cannot apply to the cultural codes of (postmodern) mass democracy, even though the two regimes have to be considered through the historical movements of the enlargement of citizenship that they respectively promoted (but by historical, here, we have to acknowledge the ruptures, destruction, and reconstruction of the cultural codes that are involved in each of those regimes, sequences that myths tend to neutralize, or to erase and to forget in their search for more simple forms of narratives). Myths—that is, social narratives that portray symbolic action without accurate historical figuration—cannot be simply equated with history, even though their elaboration would certainly be meant to do that, because in doing so, myths often act as a cover-up of history and add an appearance of permanency to what is rather a circumstantial situation. ³² To go back to our discussion, and to the extent that this enlargement of citizenship promoted by feminism is of interest to cultural sociology, especially with the analytical visions of the civil sphere, I think that a dialectical hermeneutics is of some help too in understanding the internal dynamics of this specific location for the contact and entwinement between deep cultural codes embedded in fundamental texts and social life in its more versatile textual (or better, textural) expressions (Côté, 2021b). A constitutional reform, such as the 19th Amendment of 1920, definitely has a restructuring effect that has deep, wide, and persistent echoes in the historical evolution of society, and thus in social discourses and practices as well.

While Mead pointed out the general theoretical model according to which this happens, it is left to sociological analysis to bring the evidence of this dialectical process into full sight—and according to its multiple and diverse historical realizations. Postmodern mass democracy is still a movement that carries us through the revision of modern bourgeois democracy (as a positive achievement, as an immanent critique, and as its Aufhebung), and the ramifications of such a political symbolic transformations are innumerable, ranging from the very definition of the individual subject itself to the passage of (modern) reason to (postmodern) communication. ³³ The complexity of those transformations is everywhere to be deciphered, and can offer brilliant examples of the repercussions of the capacity of social expressions to reflect deeply on the symbolic structures that make us who we are today—the substitution of the normative ideal of equality in postmodern mass democracy to the former normative ideal of liberty of the modern bourgeois democracy being another salient case in point. Starting with Mead himself, this requires us to go deeper in his own restructuring of knowledge, through an interpretation of its development from the Renaissance on (Mead, 1936), a process that leads him to redefine the relation of the Cartesian subject–object, which for Descartes' Fifth Meditation (Descartes, 2018) necessarily involved the presence of their respective but common creator (God), whereas Mead only acknowledges the presence of language or significant symbols as the producer of subject and object (Alexander, 1987: 195–214; Mead, 1934). In that respect, the genealogy of the individual subject as a person, with respect to its Greek, Roman, and Christian elaborations, needs to be put in perspective both in its participation in the contemporary public sphere (Alexander, 2006: 31–32), and also in its series of restructurations that were involved up to the late 18th century (Mauss, 1950) and beyond, with the crucial impact of romanticism—and Hegelian philosophy particularly—and its aftermath in pragmatism (Mead, 1936), since we cannot understand, explain or interpret the significance of the structuration and restructuration of the individual subject's persona without an elaborate hermeneutics of those reconstructed structures. The subject of communication is not the same as the subject of reason, even though both embody respectively the historical representations of universality that they aim to in their different sociohistorical settings, through their subjective, objective, and even absolute limits. That this subject of communication is often hermetic in its expression is the best argument for hermeneutics to develop, especially because we are enthralled in its dialectics, in the realm of aesthetics, for example (Côté, 2003). It is then through such a dialectical hermeneutics, as spontaneous as it can be in synthetic social discourses (and as difficult to achieve in the sociological analysis of the latter), that puts into contact in such an “immediate” fashion the capacity of social discourses to remix the coded mediations that make and remake “sense” throughout those intense dialectical processes.

A case in point used as another example of such processes would be the use that has been made of Gertrude Stein's cubist play The Mother of Us All (1946), based on the suffragist Susan B. Anthony's struggles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by the Canadian-based Indigenous playwright Monique Mojica, in her own radio play Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea (1991), in order to express the figure of the Indigenous woman persona (and political agency) through a decolonial vision (Côté, 2017a: 55–97). The symbolic transformations that occur on that occasion are manifold: this theatrical expression displays indeed the affirmation of a new Indigenous political actor that presents herself as a feminist able to deconstruct and reconstruct the defamatory stereotypes that inhabited the vision of the “Indian,” and “Indian woman,” in usual historical views; it does so in such a way as to define a new subject (the feminist Indigenous woman of the 20th century—that is, the playwright Mojica herself, who wrote and performed her play) that realizes its autonomous (re)creation through a theatre play; it transforms the theatrical stage by bringing to it an unheard-of expression of Indigenous reality that turns habitual representations upside down. All those dialectical twists, changing positive representations into negative ones, and conversely, negative ones into positive representations, shift the codes underlying the presence of Indigenous within the civil sphere, and consequently participate actively in the transformations of the symbolic structures that are mobilized in their theatrical possibilities: opening the way to the new expressions offered at large to Indigenous political subjects, showing how avant-garde theatre contributes to a larger movement of cultural transformations that affect the civil sphere (Côté and Cyr, 2018). Such a theatrical vision that portrays the Indigenous persona reflecting critically and ironically on the various historical representations of Indigenous people could not have been expressed in another symbolic context than ours. It seems to me that only a dialectical hermeneutics can disentangle the complex symbolic reconstruction that is at stake there. I will conclude very briefly on this.

Conclusion

Cultural sociology, particularly as it is found in Alexander's works, has done a lot in order to bring and develop a hermeneutical perspective in sociology. The structural hermeneutics that it has promoted in doing so, however, raises some questions that highlight the role that dialectics, or dialectical logic, could or should play in sociological analyses, in order to account for the transformations of the symbolic structures that are mobilized in social discourses and practices. Reflexively, Alexander's cultural sociology has reconstructed the sociological tradition by proposing new concepts and analytical methods, and by incorporating hermeneutics in its course, which represents a considerable achievement—especially seen in the light of the dialectical implications that they entail, and that must be emphasized, as well as integrated into a practical version of hermeneutics. Interrogating the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological dimensions of such sociological practices along those lines seems to me to be of the utmost importance in the present state of our discipline.