Alexander, Jeffrey

Jeffrey C. Alexander (b. 1947) is one of America's most prominent social theorists. Throughout his career, Alexander has waged an aggressive campaign in defense of general theory. Steering a middle course between radical relativism (especially in its postmodern form) and traditional positivism, Alexander's postpositivist epistemology, elaborated in the first volume of Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982–1983) and Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory (1995), presents a nuanced case in support of decentered reason and the universalizing thrust of social theory, while reproving the reduction of theory to fact. The remaining three volumes of Theoretical Logic join postpositivism to an ecumenical impulse that aims at transcending the interminable debates between warring schools. Multi-dimensionality is the most sophisticated expression of this synthesizing ambition. Alexander depicts social science as a continuum stretching from the abstract to the concrete. Presuppositions are this continuum's most general and decisive element, and action and order are the key presuppositions. Historically, sociologists have addressed action by selecting either rational approaches that portray action as an instrumental adaptation to material conditions or non-rational perspectives that highlight how internal dispositions mediate the relationship between actors and their (external) environments. Order has been addressed by either individualist theories that portray it as the product of individual negotiations or choice, or collectivist paradigms that explain it in terms of the emergent properties of social organization itself. These one-sided depictions of action and order have produced more heat than light, and Alexander offers multidimensionality as a presuppositional synthesis that breaks through this analytic impasse. Multidimensionality actually involves two distinct syntheses, the first (and stronger) of which holds that action is shaped both by rational adaptations to external conditions and actors' subjective commitments. The weaker synthesis recommends a collectivistic stance to order while acknowledging that individualistic theories, with their elucidation of the contingent dimensions of action, supply useful empirical insights into how social structures are (re)produced and transformed.

Multidimensionality's primary purpose is evaluative and prescriptive. Postpositivism holds that social science is a two-tiered process, propelled as much by theoretical logic as by empirical evidence. Consequently, sociological theory and research should be assessed not only by reference to facts but also in terms of their presuppositions. In Theoretical Logic, Twenty Lectures (1987) and innumerable other critical readings, Alexander demonstrates how classic and contemporary formulations falling short of multidimensionality are rent by internal inconsistencies, residual categories, conflated levels of analysis, and empirical anomalies. These weaknesses prompt ad hoc revisions, but so long as the framework's presuppositions fall short of multidimensionality, there are fundamental debilities that no amount of tinkering and fine-tuning can remedy. Ultimately, there is only one viable solution to these theoretical dilemmas and empirical shortcomings: Sociological theory and research must be reconstructed along multidimensional lines.

Alexander's middle-range contributions to the study of social change, culture, and civil society complement his general theorizing. Differentiation and Social Change (1990) reconstructs Durkheim's and Parsons's neoevolutionary explanations of modernity, arguing that accounts depicting structural differentiation as an adaptation to environmental exigencies should be supplemented with in-depth, historical investigations that examine how institutional entrepreneurs, research mobilization, coalition formation, and group competition and conflict affect the course of differentiation. He also presents a more inclusive conception of the consequences of differentiation, noting that in addition to increased efficiency and reintegration, highly differentiated societies spawn considerable anxiety, various pathologies, and new forms of conflict within and between differentiated institutions.

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