In the name of contradiction: A response to Jeffrey C. Alexander's ‘The civil sphere in war and peace’

Abstract

In response to Jeffrey C. Alexander's ‘The civil sphere in war and peace’ (2026), this commentary offers a Hegelian reading of the contradictions that remain unacknowledged within Alexander's model. It argues that the civil sphere rests on a moral framework that externalises contradiction as the uncivil, rather than recognising it as constitutive of its own movement. Further, it shows how the grammar of inclusion in the civil sphere depends on translation into a fixed Western moral code that grants legitimacy only by neutralising otherness, especially in its Global South interlocutors. What presents itself as universal civility therefore constitutes a secret investment in a liberal moral sorting that conceals its internal tensions (such as its inherent patriarchy) and remains perpetually haunted by what it excludes.

I have prostate trouble, and as it is I must get up several times during the night. In the dark, Kant's categories no longer apply.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka

Reading Jeffrey C. Alexander's paper ‘The civil sphere in war and peace’ (2026) was intellectually restorative and revived an old faith. As an accidental sociologist who still clings, perhaps naively, to Fernando Pessoa's romantic belief that literature is the end towards which human effort must strive (2003: 30), I found in this text moments when that ideal seemed vindicated. The article reminds us that literature, the original Thick Description generator, can reveal social meaning far better than the graphs my generation's sociologists produce under an almost-neurotic fixation on empirical minutiae. With its steady control of argument, lucid transitions between myth, theory and politics, and carefully chosen examples, the piece achieves a clarity that explains why Alexander's earlier work has supplied indispensable language and a conceptual toolkit widely used in sociology's engagement with social change and democratisation.

It is also interesting to see the expanding career of a concept that began as ‘a world of values and institutions that generates the capacity for social criticism and democratic integration’ (Alexander, 2006: 4) and now extends to a nation's moral identity in explaining war and geopolitical confrontation. Yet my reading moves from admiration to a Hegelian cynicism towards Alexander's totalising logic (anchored in his binary conceptual scaffolding), and his optimism for a universal liberal inclusion that leaves little room for contradiction or reversal within the civil sphere.

It is hardly coincidental that the author opens with Kant, since the ethos of the analysis relies on a Kantian moral logic that pervades the conception of the civil sphere and ‘the other’, almost begging for a distinctly Hegelian response. For clarity, the Hegelian position that I refer to throughout this article is not the caricature Hegel of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (a schematic progression never articulated by Hegel himself) that was an invention of Fichte and popularised through Alexander Kojève's lectures, a distortion repeatedly corrected by later Hegelians, but rather the Hegel of immanent contradiction and negativity as the living substance of reason.

Synthesis is perhaps the term most frequently ascribed to Hegel, and yet the one least faithful to his project. For him, the movement emerging from contradiction is not a synthetic one. The resolution (Auflösung) of contradiction is not its cancellation through some third unity, but reconciliation (Versöhnung) with contradiction, the awareness that contradiction sustains the very movement of being. The ‘legendary’ understanding of synthesis, still the comfort story for liberal theorists, misses Aufhebung, whose movement is progress through preservation rather than erasure (Mueller, 1958; McGowan, 2019). Hegel transforms what for earlier German idealists such as Kant was an essentially epistemological problem, arguing that contradiction possesses an ontological rather than merely epistemological status. This means that contradiction is not a problem to simply overcome but the ground of being and identity itself as every identity is internally divided. Alexander's (2026) Kantian understanding of ‘contradiction’ and ‘the other’ bears the liberal inheritance of synthetic movement that a Hegelian reading would question, and it presents two conceptual problems that I will address briefly below.

The first problem is that Alexander's account of paradox in the civil sphere depends on a consolidated binary between civil and anticivil, with contradiction treated as an external threat rather than something built into the form itself. In the Hegelian sense, this contradiction is constitutive. Civil formations do not preserve themselves by purifying these contradictions away as the static binary lens suggests. The idea that fragility comes from the intrusion of external anti-civility overlooks inherent internal tensions and how they drive development. Without this recognition, the author's argument leans towards a kind of moral sorting that appears analytical but ultimately passes over much of contemporary reality.

In fact, this failure to recognise contradiction manifests symptomatically in Alexander's text, where he glosses over the power politics within the Court of the Areopagus by minimising Athena's decisive divine intervention in establishing the civil sphere and by downplaying the patriarchal bias expressed through, for example, Apollo's advocacy in shaping the new ideal of justice. Alexander's text includes several references to Aeschylus’ text (2013) about the fairness of the trial (but is it really?), yet it remains silent on the passages that ground the verdict in patriarchal reasoning. Consider Apollo's claim that ‘the mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows … a stranger she preserves a stranger's seed’ (658–661). Also consider Athena's declaration when casting the deciding vote: ‘there is no mother anywhere who gave me birth, and, but for marriage, I am always for the male with all my heart, and strongly on my father's side’ (736–738).

This silence is painful, for after some 2500 years the ‘civil sphere’ that descends from this founding moment remains patriarchal and gender-biased (Henderson, 1991; Renzulli, 2023). Furthermore, ignoring the immanent contradictions of the civil sphere means overlooking the limits of civil sphere's meaning-making process and why the modern-day Athena-esque interventions of what Alexander calls its ‘regulatory institutions’ such as the Supreme Court, can so easily reverse the achievements of the civil sphere, as seen in the case of Roe vs. Wade.

For Hegel, ‘the firm principle that formal thinking lays down for itself … is that contradiction cannot be thought. But in fact, the thought of contradiction is the essential moment of the concept. Formal thought does in fact think it, only it at once looks away from it’ (2010: 745). Alexander's formal conceptual language of course acknowledges contradiction through terms such as ‘anticivil’ and ‘uncivil’, yet in Hegel's words, it at once looks away from it. This movement risks drifting towards the very ideological purity (and subsequent closure) the article otherwise tries to avoid.

The second problem concerns Alexander's Kantian treatment of the Other as an object to be epistemologically defeated, so that inclusion becomes a victory for the tried-tested-and-failed liberal model of inclusion, rather than a reciprocal recognition in the Hegelian sense. In Alexander's model, reconciliation is possible only after groups translate themselves into a civil grammar that privileges a Western gaze, which often requires trimming away the very marks of their difference. The result is that this framework leaves no space for engaging the Otherness of the uncivil other, and for confronting the contradictions within the civil sphere that it cannot cancel.

Marcuse (1965) had already exposed this Kantian model as a form of repressive tolerance. I want to ask what this idea of integration means for civil spheres in the Global South that are expected to sanitise their radicalism for acceptance by the Western civil sphere; otherwise, they are denied cultural legitimacy by Western ‘communicative institutions’. An example is the anti-Communist mass killings of 1965 to 1966 in Indonesia. Because the leftist civil sphere refused to conform to liberal standards and declined to declaw itself before the West, it was denied legitimacy and ultimately exterminated (with the help of Western powers), while the communicative institutions of the Western civil sphere hailed the massacre as ‘a gleam of light in Asia’ (Reston, 1966).

Think also of the suppression of the anti-Austerity movements of the 2010s for a more recent Western example. The same liberal philosophy of inclusion mentioned above is visible in Alexander's framing of Ukraine's integration into the Western civil sphere. Ukraine, once the punchline of Western diplomacy, remains a hero only while it conforms to liberal civility and carries out the Free World's dirty work on the ground. To recall the scene just weeks before Russia's brutal invasion, Ukraine was ranked the second most corrupt in Europe after Russia; it fared far worse than even Viktor Orbán's Hungary in the World Press Freedom Index; far-right extremism and homophobia in politics and society was routine; the majority of MPs blocked an anti-discrimination bill; Zelensky and his associates appeared in the Pandora Papers for financial corruption; US diplomatic cables described Ukraine as a ‘kleptocracy’; and it scored lower than Pakistan, Egypt, and Honduras on women's political empowerment, according to the Global Gender Gap Index. It is hard to imagine Alexander, if he was writing before Russia's offensive, holding up Ukraine as a country that ‘managed to sustain an independent, post-Soviet civil sphere’ (Alexander, 2026).

Hegel's move (1977: 10) is to show that critical analysis exposes every supposed ‘substance’ or self-contained whole as being split in the same way the speaking ‘subject’ is divided. The substantial ‘independent civil sphere’ that Alexander celebrates, because he endeavours to fit Ukraine into his proposed model, did not exist by any observable standard, unless he believes that allegiance to the West itself guarantees automatic entry into that sphere. Alexander mentions the 2014 Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU, but those more familiar with EU politics know that such asymmetric agreements mostly involve securing markets, supply chains, and influence without the hassle of full membership (Rabinovych and Pintsch, 2025). Similar agreements exist with countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Serbia, which are not exactly known for their ‘independent civil sphere(s)’. This only takes me back to my initial Hegelian cynicism about the epistemological Other and the so-called universality of the civil sphere and its communicative institutions. How is it that, for example, solidarity extends to Ukraine and welcomes it into the Western fold almost overnight, but Palestine has waited for that since at least 1948?

Another difficulty worth raising touches the very concern that emancipatory agonists have long levelled at liberal thought, namely its unwavering commitment to consensus, often secured through the preemptive or suppressive elimination of contestation and the moral laundering of coercion in the name of reason (Fossen, 2008).

In his modeling of the civil sphere's integration of the uncivil and ‘the triumph of civil morality over violent revenge’, Alexander (2026) persuasively draws on the Furies, the ancient goddesses of death and the underworld depicted by Aeschylus in The Eumenides, and describes how Athena pacifies them. Yet the text remains silent on the concrete mechanisms of this incorporation, leaving the impression of a calm and peaceful transition. The integration of the Furies occurs through cajoling, promises, displays of power and veiled threats. Alexander's text omits defining lines of the play, such as ‘I have Zeus behind me. Do we need to speak of that? I am the only god who knows the keys to where his thunderbolts are locked’ (826–828). This involves a clear threat of violence by Athena, to compel the Furies to accept her offer of becoming the new guardians of Athens in exchange for submission to the court's ruling.

This is another painful silence for readers from the Global South, who may well ask whether this is not the same logic at work today in how the West seeks to incorporate the uncivil into the civil through non-military (economic sanctions or incentives) and military thunderbolts. Consider, for instance, the Abraham Accords, the Islam debate in Turkey's EU accession process, Iran's nuclear programme, or the condition that post-Assad Syria abandon its claim to the Golan Heights, among other things, so that the Western civil sphere's solidarity can at last extend to Syrians living under crippling sanctions.

From this perspective, Alexander's unironic mention of NATO as an extension of the civil sphere reads less as faith in moral progress and more as a ritual blessing of power and violence as the guarantor of (Western) civility. The framing of WWI and WWII as conflicts initiated by autocrats is not inaccurate, but the implication that democratic states were merely passive victims quietly removes their own imperial histories and geopolitical provocations from view. It tries quietly to slip the civil sphere off the hook. It also overlooks the fact that the dictatorship behind WWII came legally out of the Weimar civil sphere.

I also seek to lift the civil sphere precisely at the point where Alexander lets it sink beneath deterrence. His claim that the absence of great power conflict since 1945 rests on Mutually Assured Destruction overlooks the moral and normative barriers that Nina Tannenwald (2007) documents in her analysis of the ‘nuclear taboo’ in global political culture. Russia's restraint in Ukraine makes the point clear. Despite humiliating battlefield failures, constant calls from hardliners, and a narrowing set of options, Russia has not used nuclear weapons, even in a controlled dose, against a state that possesses no atomic deterrent. Fear of reciprocal annihilation does not explain that abstention. At the same time, the MAD-based argument overlooks the fact that peace among industrial powers depends largely on the market logic of shared economic dependence. As former French President François Hollande pointed out in an interview (DW, 2021), the influential German car industry once pressured Angela Merkel to retract her foreign policy fangs and avoid raising any human rights concerns in German–China agreements to prevent any diplomatic fallout that could disrupt trade flows.

What Hegel articulates (1972) as the normative habitation of the negative, or, in other words, the capacity to feel at home with contradiction (both within the self and towards the supposed epistemological Other), has been ‘willfully’ ignored by every post-War project enthralled by the fantasy of liberal universal inclusion (Alexander's civil sphere and its integrative ideal among them), which strives to eliminate or subsume the contradiction that is ontologically built into Being itself. This logic is the very opposite of an emancipatory project, not only because it privileges the Western abstract universal in every encounter with the particular, but also because its historical sense of superiority cannot admit the fact that this mechanism of liberal inclusion always carries an internal repressed remainder (the unrecognised contradiction) that inevitably returns in crisis and reversal, as seen in the cases of radical Islam in Europe or the illiberal turns in Hungary and Poland following Eastern enlargement.

Although, as mentioned before, Alexander's text gestures towards this through its empirical engagements, such gestures do little to preserve the vitality of the concept of the civil sphere. By extending its theoretical boundaries to include idealised cases like Ukraine, the argument reduces the civil sphere to a political floating signifier whose contours are set not by social facts but by the discourse generated by the communicative institutions of a more hegemonic civil sphere. The danger here is that such a framework places any non-Western civil sphere in a compromised position. Given the hegemonic authority of Western communicative institutions, any non-Western civil sphere that refuses to neutralise its difference vis-à-vis the West can never attain the cultural legitimacy required to qualify for the solidarity of the Western civil sphere. This inconsistency seems not to trouble Alexander, who had already conceded years earlier that ‘if we cannot overcome binarism, we can fundamentally change its referents. There will always be two goalposts, but we shift them, even in the middle of the play’ (Alexander, 2006: 551). This is precisely what his Ukraine–Russia model accomplishes, shifting the coordinates of ‘the civil’ and ‘the uncivil’ when convenient. One then wonders whether the moral code of the civil sphere is built on sand, and whether this constant rewriting of its script renders Alexander's framework politically reliable, particularly for emancipatory projects arising from the Global South.

Despite these reservations, Alexander's article is rich in the way it weaves together the frequently overlooked relationship between symbolic meaning, institutional formation and political structure, while maintaining a sense of contemporary relevance. The piece stands as a fine demonstration of what cultural sociology can do. Yet one would hope that invoking The Eumenides as a universal ethical model would also come with some attention to who was enfranchised, who was barred by gender, and who was labouring behind the scenes (the enslaved bodies) while the drama of justice played out, for the same blindspots persist in modern civil spheres. His normative optimism, that humanity continues to civilise its own violence, is reminiscent of Elias's vision of ‘the civilizing process’. Yet it would benefit from engaging more with the self-destructive movements inherent in the civil ideal, or in Eliasian terms, its ‘de-civilizing processes’. This would involve acknowledging more how the civil sphere can regress, harden or weaponise its own moral codes in exclusionary ways and dismantle the institutional scaffolding of civility (Inglis, 2021). To put the point in Hegelian terms, how the civil sphere contains and negotiates its own negation. Whenever the civil sphere claims innocence before violence, we should ask whether that innocence is simply violence forgetting itself.

In closing, it seems only fair to repay the civil sphere in its own coin. If Athena can be summoned to bless the birth of civility, then I reserve the right to call upon Krishna at the moment it collapses. When the bogus liberal universality still clings to its pairs of opposites, such as civil and uncivil, and makes the particular pay the price for the harmony of the universal, a text older than the Oresteia delivers a correction the West has spent centuries not hearing. In the Bhagavad Gita (Prabhupāda, 1972: 2.14, 2.45, 7.27), Lord Krishna instructs Arjuna to transcend these manufactured dualities (dvandvas) in pursuit of peace, clarity and liberation (Hegel's future thesis, minus the jargon), for when one is committed to reacting to a negative by chasing its opposite, one remains trapped within the same plane of existence, a perpetual loop where each depends on the other to survive, and when the other grows scarce, the civil sphere dreams it into existence, as it did in Iraq in 2003 through claims about weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Perhaps that is the final joke of the civil sphere: it cannot existentially survive without what it claims to have transcended.