ABSTRACT
Public and academic debates on who should be categorised as a ‘citizen’ have intensified in a period of heightened fear and moral panic over the so-called Islamisation of Europe and other Western countries. In response to the public fear of the stranger as foreigner, and a backlash to multiculturalism, many have argued that Muslims and new immigrants can be effectively integrated into Western societies if we rethink the idea of multiculturalism. Jeffrey Alexander’s work has made a concerted effort to explore the normative conditions for the integration of strangers in civil society. Through a critical review of his work, I evaluate the relationship between the civil sphere and diversity with particular attention given to the role of the stranger in the composition of civil society. Alexander claims that underlining the constitution of civil society is a binary discourse that constructs some citizens as friends and others as enemies. In the first instance this chapter maps out the contours of Alexander’s cultural sociology and its relevance to his conceptualisation of the civil sphere. This section critically addresses his understanding of the ‘core group’ and how the stranger is constituted. Second, I examine the role that recognition and cross-cultural contact play in articulating Alexander’s multicultural civil sphere and suggest that his argument – that genuine incorporation of marginalised groups depends on the recognition of Otherness – overlooks their material condition. The latter part of the chapter critiques Alexander’s binary discourse of civil society in the context of how the in-between stranger problematises the binary formulation underlying his essentialist categories of ‘core group’, ‘we-ness’ and the ‘Otherness’ of difference. Finally, Alexander’s work needs to be contextualised within the sociological literature on the interconnection between solidarity and difference evident in the work of Zygmunt Bauman and theories of the stranger. Overall, whereas Alexander has made some significant advances on traditional conceptions of civil society, especially through his culturalist approach, his overreliance on binarism as an interpretative scheme creates an ambiguity in his work, especially around his formulation of a multicultural civil sphere.
