The Dark Side of Modernity

Research output

Complete citation

Poljarevic, Emin. Review of The Dark Side of Modernity, by Jeffrey C. Alexander. Political Studies Review 12, no. 2 (2014): 248. https://doi.org/10.1111/1478-9302.12053.

Status

Published (2014)

Publication type

Scholarly book review

Overview

This review considers Jeffrey C. Alexander’s account of modernity’s destructive capacities and the cultural processes through which groups construct threatening others. The book challenges narratives that identify modernisation exclusively with emancipation, rationalisation, and institutional progress. Instead, it examines how social actors deploy symbolic classifications, narratives of pollution, and claims to moral purity in ways that can legitimise exclusion and violence. The review highlights Alexander’s cultural-sociological explanation of dehumanisation and antagonism while considering the relationship between symbolic representation and material structures of domination. Its contribution is to clarify why modernity must be analysed as a morally ambivalent formation: the institutions and cultural languages associated with solidarity and universalism can also generate boundaries that place selected populations outside protection, recognition, and civic concern.

Research question or central concern

How effectively does Alexander explain the cultural mechanisms through which modern societies produce exclusion, dehumanisation, and destructive conflict?

Main argument, approach, and contribution

The review evaluates Alexander’s cultural sociology of modernity, emphasising its account of symbolic classification and moral boundary-making. It contributes by relating cultural meanings to the political conditions under which modernity’s emancipatory promises become instruments of exclusion.

Keywords

modernity; cultural sociology; exclusion; dehumanisation; symbolic classification; civil society; violence; moral boundaries