The civil sphere is a real social force, but it is also an idealized community, one that is imagined as being composed of individuals who are autonomous yet mutually obligated, who experience solidarity even as they respect one another’s independence (Alexander 2006, Kivisto and Sciortino 2015, Alexander and Tognato 2018, Alexander, Stack, and Khoshrokovar 2019, Alexander, Palmer, Park, and Ku 2019, Alexander, Lund, and Voyer 2019). In cultural terms, the civil sphere is organized around a discourse that sacralizes the motives, relations, and institutions necessary to sustain democratic forms of self-regulation and social solidarity. This involves qualities such as honesty, rationality, openness, independence, cooperation, participation, and equality (Jacobs 1996, 2000, Mast 2006, 2012, Smith 1991, 2005, Kivisto and Sciortino 2015). The discourse of civil society is binary: it also identifies and pollutes qualities that endanger democracy, such as deceit, hysteria, dependence, secrecy, aggression, hierarchy, and inequality.¹ The civil sphere, moreover, is not only discursive. It possesses a powerful materiality. Communicative institutions such as factual and fictional mass media, public opinion polls, and civil associations provide the organizational capacity to specify broad discursive categories in time and place. They purify some events, institutions, and groups as civil and good, rewarding them with recognition; they pollute others as dangerously anti-civil, humiliating them as evil. The civil sphere sustains powerful regulative institutions as well: the complex apparatuses of law, office, and elections apply sanctions that are backed through state coercion and make cultural evaluations stick. Those who are deemed civil are rewarded not only with prestige but with political power; those constructed as anti-civil are not simply disrespected but threatened, arrested, rendered bankrupt, and sometimes made to suffer physical harm.

Vis-à-vis other, non-civil institutional-cum-cultural fields, the civil sphere is at once oppositional and aspirational, which means that interinstitutional boundaries are never settled, never set in concrete. Because civil institutions project communicative interpretations and apply regulative sanctions in real time and space, nothing about the location and traction of civil boundaries is certain; they cannot be ascertained in the abstract (Ku 1998). What is deemed to be civil? What is deemed not to be? These questions have been answered in remarkably disparate ways over the course of historical time, the answers determining where boundaries between the civil sphere and other, non-civil spheres of social life are laid. Should gender hierarchy be considered a family affair, handled by the domestic sphere’s patriarchal elites, or should it be seen as violating broader, more civil norms, such that intrafamily domination and violence become scandalous to society at large (Alexander 2001, Luengo 2018)? Should what goes on inside churches stay within these houses of worship, as a matter between believers and their god, or should the dispensation of God’s grace be subject to civil scrutiny? Should a productive but also exploitative and unstable capitalist economy be left alone, to work its markets for better and for worse, or should more solidaristic and civil considerations intervene (Lee 2018, Ngai and Ng 2019, Olave 2018)? Should news reporters be free to roam for information as they may, intruding when, where, and how they see fit, or should they be subject to legal and moral constraints? Modern civil spheres have continually legitimated what later, down the line, came to be seen as egregiously anti-civil practices (Alexander 1988). A practice that seems acceptable at one point can become deeply offensive at another. Forms of religion, sexuality, politics, and economic life that once appeared to facilitate civil society are later reconstructed as dangerously destructive intrusions whose very existence undermines civil motives and relations.

Blumer (1971: 302) once observed that “the pages of history are replete with dire conditions unnoticed and unattended to.” Yet, while real existing civil spheres are deeply compromised, they are also endemically restless, creating fertile opportunities for calling out the very injustices they legitimate. It is because the utopian promises of civil spheres are never fully institutionalized that these promises continuously trigger radical criticism, social movement struggles, social crises, and institutional reform.

My aim is to conceptualize the relative, labile, shifting status of social problems, not in historical or interactional but in analytic terms – as a systemic, macro-sociological process. One might imagine, at time T₁, a hypothetical “steady state” of boundary relations between civil and non-civil spheres, in which there appears to be empirical stability and there is imagined to be reciprocity between spheres. In a putatively steady state of this sort, most members of the civil sphere do not experience the operations of other spheres as destructive intrusions and do not abrogate existing institutional boundaries to mount antagonistic efforts at repairing the insides of another sphere.² There is no doubt, of course, that every social sphere experiences continuous, often severe strains. In the economy, there are irresponsible decisions and underserved losses, bankruptcies and thefts, inflations and recessions. The religious world experiences continual financial corruption, wrenching disciplinary and recruiting failures, and polarizing theological disputes. In the world of journalism, the boundaries of privacy and publicity are continuously challenged, professional norms are cast aside, plagiarism is frequent, and media elites often conflate financial self-interest with professional responsibility. The intimate sphere of sexual relations is rife with frustration, misunderstanding, bruised feelings, and worse – and these do not cease when they enter the occupational domain.

In conditions of steady state, however, such strains are institutionally insulated; because they remain intrasphere, they do not generate significant attention outside. Failing to arouse the concern of extrainstitutional outsiders, strains are addressed in non-civil ways. Indeed, subject to intrasphere logics (Friedland and Alford 1991), strains often bolster rather than challenge organizational authority. Rather than degrading civil sphere ideals, strains in the steady state may actually appear to confirm institutional and cultural pluralism.

But steady state breaks down with societalization, transforming a heretofore routinely accepted practice into a new social fact (Durkheim 1966 [1895]), one that seems evil and symbolically profane. A practice that once aroused little interest outside a particular institution now appears threatening to “society” itself. What was once normal comes to be viewed as pathological, as morally polluted and socially disruptive. It becomes what Mary Douglas (1966) called “matter out of place”: something dirty and polluted in response to which strenuous efforts at purification must be made (Cottle 2004, 2011).

Societalization begins at time T₂, when a semiotic code (see Tavory and Swidler 2009) is triggered, moving public attention space (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988) from institutional part to civil whole. When social language switches in such a manner, critical and emancipatory narratives arise and vast material resources can be brought into play. When journalism interprets intrainstitutional strains as violations of the civil sphere, ordinary occurrences can be converted into events (Mast 2006, 2012, Sewell 1996, Wagner-Pacifici 2010, 2017). Event-ness announces the breakdown of steady state. Outrage arouses the “conscience of society,” confidence and trust give way to fear and alarm. Harsh regulatory interventions often follow (time T₃), for civil communicative and regulatory institutions are intertwined. However, in response to such new cultural judgments and regulatory interventions, backlash builds up (time T₄). Thrown on the defensive, the targeted institutions and elites attack the newly intrusive civil sphere and its carrier groups. Intersphere boundaries – where to draw the lines between spheres – now become objects of intense and bitter struggle. There is a war between spheres. It is such a situation of standoff, as much as the achievement of civil repair, that creates the almost inevitable pathway back to steady state (time T₅).

Social strains are real; they have material consequences, and sometimes, as in economic crisis or war, such consequences can be very harsh indeed. Nonetheless, it is not the substance of strain that causes societalization, but rather how such strains are understood. This is a matter for societal interpretation – namely of what a strain is, why it happened, who was responsible for creating it, and whom it hurts. Answering these questions determines how strains are perceived and what can be done to keep them from happening again (Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, and Smelser 2004).

When semiotic shifts push social problems beyond steady state, the moral and institutional foundations of society itself seem endangered, and there are fears that the center will not hold (Shils 1975). These broad anxieties typically become focused on the civil institution of office, a key regulative institution of the civil sphere (Alexander 2006: 132–50). Office translates idealizing discourse about moral solidarity into the institutional requirement that leadership should be responsible and other-oriented, demanding that power eschew nepotism and self-dealing. At the heart of a democratic society is the fervent belief – the conceit, a cynic might say – that power not only should, but can, be exercised in a manner that will serve the public good and that the civil institution of office should, and can, be occupied by goodwilled human beings. To the degree that civil spheres have teeth, those who possess power are bound by a vocation, a calling in Weber’s sense, to the ethics of office (Weber 1927 [1904–5]). When semiotic shifts define a strain as endangering the civil center, institutional authorities are accused of having abrogated their official responsibilities; they are attacked as unworthy and unfit; strenuous efforts are made to remove them from office; and significant repairs can be made to institutional norms and structures.

At T₁, the communicative and regulative institutions of the civil sphere defer to the mores and interests of intrainstitutional elites. At T₂, such civil hands-off-ness is reinterpreted, retroactively, as a dereliction of civil responsibility, as a cover-up that has prevented polluted practices from being subject to the moral commitments of the civil sphere. At T₃, those who possess civil power respond to this dereliction in a material manner, issuing threats and sanctions. At T₄, the challenged institutional elites fight back. A war between the spheres ensues, one that eventually compels carrier groups that represent the civil sphere to abandon their avenging quest. The separation between spheres is reconstructed, and with it an ambivalent, ambiguous, and contested return to steady state (T₅). Once an overwhelming social crisis, the initial trigger is now seen in the rearview mirror through societalization. It becomes an historic “episode,” narrated in legend and myth, remembered in anniversaries, and performatively inscribed in cinema and television.³ Yet the strains that had once energized it do not entirely disappear. Instead they are recontextualized, becoming, once again, matters of primarily intrainstitutional concern. While abuses occasionally are publicly noted as worrisome occurrences that violate contemporary norms, they are not constructed as earthshaking events. Fears for the center are no longer triggered, and there is a reassuring recognition that, after societalization, new organizational structures are in place. That these repairs may not entirely blunt old strains and that, even if they do, new strains reflecting boundary tension are bound to emerge – these are not worries in the steady state.