Jeffrey Alexander - The Power of Symbols

"Society needs symbols, myths, narratives...and modernity cannot just be rationalization", explains Jeffrey Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology and Co-Director, Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. "We need to understand the power, the energy and the glue that keeps civil society together and motivates people", from Occupy to Tahrir Square, says Alexander, by trying to redefine the cultural in social theory. Myths, narratives and iconic symbols have disappeared in the course of modernization... But how can cultural sociology bring these important ideas back to the theory of democracy? Reset-Dialogues has interviewed Jeffrey Alexander during the Istanbul Seminars 2012.
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Interview by Nina zu Fürstenberg
Filmmaker: Anna Fanuele
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The Istanbul Seminars are an annual highly academic early summer seminar organized in Istanbul (with Bilgi University, which also hosts the event) by ResetDoC where cultural and scientific thinkers in social sciences, philosophy, political theory, sociology, legal studies and religion discuss our common future. The seminars tackled the following topics. Postsecularism (2008), Religion, Human Rights and Multicultural Jurisdictions (2009), Realigning liberalism: pluralism, integration, identities (2010), Overcoming the trap of resentment (2011), The promise of democracy in troubled times (2012), The Sources of Political Legitimacy. From the Erosion of the Nation-State to the Rise of Political Islam (2013), The Sources of Pluralism - Metaphysics, Epistemology, Law and Politics (2014).
More information on www.resetdoc.org

[@yeonwoochoi6109]

His social theory is really fascinating and convincing!

[@WmABeetstra]

Were he to submit his discourse to a committee of analytical philosophers, it would be dismissed as little better than effusive journalism, made worse by verbosity and the sheer vapidity of his notions of such entities as symbols. That happened to his patron, Robert Bellah, when he was nominated to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. It happened to another mentor of his, Leo Loewenthal, whose Frankfurt School generalities removed Marx from any domain of social action and made it an academic exercise. It happened to the works of Neil Smelser and before, him, to Talcott Parsons, whose functionalism was dismissed by Carl Hempel as obviously no more than teleological argumentation. He added a touch of symbolic interaction and a tad of conflict theory and a somewhat refreshed collection of words to their work, but in the nature of things obviously could do no more than preach his idiosyncratic doctrines. Don't worry about not understanding him. There's not much there than our contemporary critical philosophers would even bother trying to understand.
Hilary Putnam, a most remarkable modern philosopher, once joked, "Sociology is only a science in the sociology department."

[@itstuxedosam]

what the fuck can you please translate to english please for us common folk

[@resetdoc]

The video is actually in English.

[@foreverskeptical1]

lol spent a semester trying to understand him. Spoiler Alert - still dont understand anything haha