The culture of peace: Reflections on Jeffrey C. Alexander's war essay

Abstract

In his war essay, Jeffrey C. Alexander ties cultural sociology and civil sphere theory together in a tragic account of violence and war throughout the ages. The application of the precepts of cultural sociology, most notably the binary code, leads him to a rather Hobbesian vision of anarchy in internal relations. Drawing on Johan Galtung's peace research, the article enjoins Alexander to shift the analysis from a culture of war to a culture of peace.

Introduction

If there ever was a ‘total social fact’, it's war. It pits whole societies against each other. Whereas before, the lines of division were relatively fluid, they now become affectively polarised in two opposing camps. To cope with the threat of the enemy, all institutions are reorganised around the armed forces and a process of functional de-differentiation sets in. Command of the political subsystem becomes concentrated in a war cabinet. The economy, science, technology, education and the mass media are coordinated through central planning. All sectors become subservient to the war effort. The war economy, for instance, reorganises the industries to ensure the countries production capacity is reconfigured to aid the war effort. A significant chunk of the GDP is spent on armament. Even when conscription has been abolished and professional armies wage war, whole populations are mobilised in a collective effort to defeat the enemy. The separation between military personnel and citizens holds in theory, but in practice, every citizen is potentially affected by the violence unleashed by war. Family members, friends, neighbours, colleagues and fellow citizens who are designated as enemies are taunted, insulted, polluted, attacked, abducted, tortured, maimed or killed. Whether one wants it or not, one is caught up in the spiral of violence as an observer, a perpetrator or a victim of armed conflict. War can mean different things to different people. It may be a frenzy of collective effervescence, as well as a theatre of sacrifice and heroism. Most often, though, it means destruction, devastation, violence and death on a large scale.

War is now back in Europe. Following 75 years of peace on the continent, the invasion of Ukraine on 24 September 2022 has led to an ‘epochal tectonic shift’ – a Zeitenwende to invoke the term the former German chancellor Olaf Scholz used in a famous speech at the Bundestag 3 days after the Russian tanks had crossed the border. In a slightly modified version, pitched to a global audience, Scholz (2023) announced changes in Germany's relations with Russia, support for Ukraine in the form of military equipment and most importantly, a shift in German defense policy. The shift involves a change in strategic culture – away from anti-militarism towards military preparedness in case of conflict. If the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, the war in Gaza is a war of extermination. Following the terrorist attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have used brute force to destroy not only the tunnels underneath of Gaza, but most of the infrastructure, public buildings, hospitals and houses in the Strip. Moreover, they have also submitted Gaza to a siege and cut off the territory from water, medicine and food. The politics of starvation have been condemned by public opinion as a form of genocide, urbicide, domicide or omnicide. Both the war of aggression in Ukraine and the war of extermination in Gaza evidence the collapse of the rule-based global order that had been set up after the Second World War and consolidated after the civil war in Yugoslavia.

The culture of war

It is against this background that Jeffrey Alexander's (2026) newest essay, on ‘The civil sphere in war and peace’, has to be understood. Once again, like in an early comment on Randall Collins’ interactionist approach to disasters, violence and war, he uses the perspective of cultural sociology to disclose the ‘textured symbolic structure of war’ (Alexander, 1988). Now, however, he inserts the cultural analysis of war within the political framework of Civil Sphere Theory to present a Hobbesian vision of international relations as a lawless, unruly, violent area of ‘warre’. Already early on, at the very beginning of the ‘cultural turn within neo-functionalism’, he had opposed Randall Collins’ take on violence, which combines a micro-Durkheimian analysis of interaction rituals with a more Weberian macro-perspective on the military and the state. Replacing Collins’ bottom-up approach with the top-down approach of semiotics, he explains war in terms of culture structures, discourses and narratives. The renewal of neo-Durkheimian sociology he advocates combines the ‘functionalist ritualism’ of Edward Shils and the ‘code-seeking program’ of French structuralism to explain both the heightened solidarity within the in-group and the violence against the out-group.

The paradigmatic ‘hard core’, to speak like Imre Lakatos, of the so-called ‘strong program in cultural sociology’ of the Yale School, is constituted by three tightly intertwined ropes: analytic independence of culture, binary codes and dramatic narratives. Together, they give a cultural account of war, as it has been successfully implemented in Philip Smith's (2005) explanatory study of the theoretical logic of war and civil discourse in the Middle East. First comes the principle of the analytic independence of culture, according to which culture is constitutive of, not just regulative, of the social practices that constitute society. Every attempt to explain war without recourse to culture is fated to end in reductionism. Second, culture is analysed as a semiotic system. On the paradigmatic axis, we find the Durkheimian binary between the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted (M. Douglas), God and the Devil himself (Bataille). The ‘code-seeking program’ of the Durkheimian School is now enhanced, radicalised and energised with an infusion of Carl Schmitt's political agonism. From this polemological perspective, the opposition between the sacred and the profane is translated into a political program that distinguishes the ‘good human’ (the friend) from the ‘inhuman’ (the enemy). In Carl Schmitt, the essential enemy (echtros) is designated by a charismatic leader. In the extreme case, through a sovereign decision, he calls for their rightful extermination. On the syntagmatic axis, we find the narration of the social with its hermeneutic plots, its narratives and its discursive genres. The dramatisation of political life that leads to a highly polarised society is driven forward by powerful narratives and genres. Following Northrop Frye's archetypal analysis of fictional modes, Alexander gives primacy to the mythopoetic genres (mythology, tragedy and romance) in which Gods, heroes and humans seek to transform their environment and impose their vision of the world.

In his article, Alexander wraps his cultural analysis of war in the theory of the civil sphere (Alexander, 2006). The civil sphere, a contraction of the public sphere and civil society, is a realm of ideal and idealised self-representations of the ‘societal community’. By means of edifying discourses, it associates the community and its members with the ideals of civic republicanism (fraternity, equality and freedom) and promises recognition, inclusion and equality. Counterfactually, the civil sphere includes all citizens, while factually it distinguishes good citizens from bad ones, justifying their exclusion from the polity or their relegation to second-class citizens. Alexander contends that through self-correction and repair, the civil sphere is able to retain factions, restrain violence, and contain the war. Thanks to the rule of law, elections, the office, the media, and so on, it is capable of mitigating the spiral of enmity and violence that is built into the agonism of the binary. The problem, however, is that ‘the civil sphere stop[s] at the border of one's own collectivity’ (Alexander, 2026). Revisiting 2500 years of politics, with a special attention to the tragedies of war in ancient Greece and Rome, Alexander paints with a broad brush a realist philosophy of history in which peoples, nations and states go to war with each other without civil restrictions. Not only is there no civil order at the international level, but it turns out that the whole discourse of democracy and civility is itself highly polemogenic. The civil sphere, because of the binary structure that cleaves it, breeds war, and war is never civil. It ruins lives, it kills dreams, it murders innocents, it wrecks civility, it poisons hearts; it makes conviviality impossible and reconciliation difficult.

As a cultural sociologist, Alexander knows that war and violence are not natural. Human nature is itself highly cultural. Aggression and violence are not just natural drives that are spontaneously released if nothing restrains them. And yet, his essay suggests that violence and war are part of the human condition. It is thus no wonder that his essay opens with Hobbes and his mechanistic vision of humans as billiard balls that violently collide with each other. While he has an edifying vision of the civil sphere as a social form that can mitigate, channel and control aggression, his vision of the anthropos remains dark. Like the homo duplex of Freud and Durkheim, the human animal is a dangerous creature that cannot be trusted. And as it cannot be trusted, it has to be dominated, domesticated and civilised either by brute force or by cultural forms.

This is what the civil sphere does – and it also constitutes its utopian appeal: it institutionalises norms and values (cultural system) that make conviviality possible (social system) and contributes to the internalisation of conscience (personal system). This integration of culture, society and the person in a well-ordered society is only possible, however, within the bounds of a societal community. In modern terms, it does not really transcend the nation-state. If the problem of social order is solved within society, it is not solved in the relations between societies. The Hobbesian vision of the human finds, therefore, its extension in the anarchistic view of the international order (Lechner, 2022).

In the absence of a world society that controls the violent impulses of the states, in the absence of a common superior that imposes an order on dangerous states in competition and conflict with each other, the state of nature reappears at the international level. The idea that a society of states is a contradiction in terms and that states behave like individuals in a state of nature is known as the ‘domestic analogy’ in international relations. Notwithstanding the utopian appeal of the civil sphere, Alexander seems to share the Hobbesian vision of the realist school that law and order exist inside the realm of the state, whereas outside it, in the international realm, chaos, violence and lawlessness prevail.

The culture of peace

There is a strange tension in Alexander's work between the realism of his cultural sociology and the idealism of his civil sphere theory. The tension can be overcome if one adapts the philosophical anthropology and shifts from a culture of war to a culture of peace. Both conceptual moves presuppose that one breaks away from Hobbes’ desolate vision of Man and Schmitt's polemic concept of culture to envision the emergence of a global civil sphere that can regulate the international society of states.

First, one needs to send Hobbes back to the bushes. His vision of the human being as a wolf in sheep clothes is the wrong starting point. In social, political and cultural theory, all positions are ultimately determined by one's philosophical anthropology (Vandenberghe, 2009: 290–303). The human being is not necessarily good by nature, but if one assumes from the start that the human being is vile and violent, one cannot construct a well-ordered decent society. Against Hobbes, with the Scottish Enlightenment, Marcel Mauss and Jürgen Habermas, I therefore opt for a vision of Man as a ‘sympathetic animal’ (Revue du MAUSS, 2008) that is open to the others, concerned about their well-being and able to overcome strife and conflict in a working consensus. The vision of the human being as homo homini lupus needs to be revised. Ethological studies have shown that wolves are no wolves to each other. They care for each other and demonstrate solidarity.

Alexander's concept of culture is polemogenic. By anchoring the Schmittian distinction between friends and foes in the sempiternal division between the sacred and the profane, it mythologises the binary structure of war cultures. Looking at the ‘root of the root’ of violence and war, we find the code of ‘cultural violence’ as a ‘deep structure’ buried in the very core of social life. Although it may not be Alexander's intention, his binary conception of culture can be used to justify or legitimate structural and even direct violence. ‘Stars, crosses and crescents; flags, anthems and military parades; the ubiquitous portrait of the Leader; inflammatory speeches and posters – all these come to mind’ (Galtung, 1990: 291).

To avoid any possible collusion between cultural sociology, cultural violence and violent cultures, the deconstruction of the binary and the successive transformation of the enemy into an adversary and a possible ally is only a first step. One needs to go further and explicitly make a transition from a culture of war to a culture of peace. This presupposes a redefinition of peace – away from a ‘negative conception’ of peace as the absence of war, to a ‘positive conception’ of peace as the absence of structural, cultural and personal violence (Galtung, 1969). Positively defined, the absence of violence involves (i) an active absenting of structural violence in a struggle for global justice; (ii) an active promotion of a culture of peace, cooperation and conflict resolution and (iii) a personal commitment to peace and non-violent resistance to all forms of violence. The promotion of peace is compatible with cultural sociology, provided it aligns itself with the norms, values and attitudes of peace studies and the peace movement (Graf and Wintersteiner, 2016).

To show its compatibility, one needs first to visualise Johan Galtung's ‘violence triangle’ of structural, cultural and personal violence: ‘When the triangle is stood on its “direct” and “structural violence” feet, the image invoked is cultural violence as the legitimizer of both. Standing the triangle on its “direct violence” = head yields the image of structural and cultural sources of direct violence’ (Galtung, 1990: 294). And then, in a second moment, one needs to move from cultural violence to a culture of peace that transforms the negative synergies of the ‘triangle of violence’ into a positive system of peace. The culture of peace opens up the way to a principled critique of the culture of violence that invokes a Zeitenwende, legitimates cultural violence and prepares for war. When the critique of structural and cultural violence is coupled to peace studies, peace movements and non-violent resistance, the critique becomes reconstructive and transformative. It lines up with the aspirations of the civil sphere and explores possibilities to construct a societal community beyond the nation-state.

In The Invention of Peace and the Reinvention of War, the renowned British historian Michael Howards (2001) reconstructs the history of cosmopolitan philosophies of history that have dreamed up projects of ‘Eternal Peace’. Acknowledging that the historical record indicates that war, organised conflict between organised political groups, has been the universal norm of history, he argues that peace is a modern construction. While peace has been a common aspiration for visionaries throughout history, it is only with the Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century (Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Kant, Saint Simon, etc.) that the institutionalisation of a culture of peace and the consequent construction of an ‘international society of states’ has become a possibility.

Like the global civil sphere, the international society of states, bound by shared norms, values and institutions, is an idea. It evolves and adapts to new situations that challenge its idealism. Yet it does not completely disappear. The creation of an order that preserves and promotes peace takes generations to build. It may be destroyed within a few decades or, as we seem to be witnessing now, in a few years. In any case, the active promotion of a cosmopolitan culture of peace, the constitution of a civil sphere beyond the nation-state and the preservation of the international liberal order or, at least, of what remains of it, are a precondition to overcome the anarchy in international relations.

I therefore conclude this comment on Alexander's war essay with an appeal to dedramatise cultural sociology and to shift the cursor from war to peace, from Hobbes to Kant, and from Hamas to Habermas. Given its normative investment in global justice, apart from the binary, there's nothing that precludes cultural sociology from doing action research on peace and civility.