"Close to home": The work of avoiding politics

Theory and Society

Volumn 26, Issue 5, 1997, Pages 605-647

  Eliasoph, Nina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21944440770     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006881913230     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Anchor, 1969 (1831)),
2. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (New York: Penguin, 1979 (1859)),
3. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Denver: Allan Swallow, 1927),
4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),
5. Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989),
6. Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic citizenship and political community," in Chantal Mouffe, editor, Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (New York: Verso, 1992), 74-89.
7. A. P. Simonds, "On being informed," Theory and Society 11 (1982): 587-616, 591-592.
8. Another clear statement of this approach comes from Alan Wolfe's analysis of moral discourse, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 245, in which he defines morality not as any particular political ideology or any list of rules that citizens can memorize, but a practice: "[a sociological approach] seeks to clarify the conditions under which individuals can bring their own capacities as moral agents to bear on the decisions they must make."
9. Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic politics today," in Chantal Mouffe, editor Dimensions of Radical Democracy, 1. As she rightly suggests, maybe "left" never really meant a laundry list, anyway, but always a process.
10. For example: Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985);
11. Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (New York: Penguin, 1984),
12. Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
13. Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community (New York: Touchstone Books, 1993).
14. Jeffrey Alexander, "Analytic debates: Understanding the relative autonomy of culture," in Jeffrey Alexander and Steven Seidman, Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-30;
15. Jeffrey Alexander, Action and its Environments: Toward a New Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988);
16. Nancy Fraser, "What's critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender," in Feminism as Critique',
17. Iris Young, "Impartiality and the civic public," in Feminism as Critique',
18. Seyla Benhabib, "The generalized and the concrete other," in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, editors, Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987).