Introduction: The Erosion of Civil Society
My theme is moral turn in contemporary sociological theory. But first let me draw a more general background. What are the social and political conditions in the first decades of the twenty-first century that make the concern of social theorists with moral values particularly relevant? The short answer is that the very foundations of democracy have been undermined across the world. But how, and how come?
There are two understandings of democracy, hard and soft. Hard refers to institutions of the state: elections, parliaments, courts, balance of powers, constitutions, codes of law. This is the common understanding. But there is another, more subtle, soft meaning which runs under the heading of civil society, treated by many authors as a true core of democracy.
But civil society can also be understood in two ways, hard and soft. Commonly, it is taken to refer to the network of associations, grass-roots organizations, social movements, NGOs – filling the gap between the level of the state and the private, everyday life of the citizens. However, there is another, more subtle, soft meaning which refers to the intangibles and imponderables, the moral tissue of society, the rules of good, dignified, just inter-human relations, which together make what I call the ‘moral space’ (Sztompka Reference Sztompka, Kalekin-Fishman and Denis2012), a precondition of a viable society. The most important rules in my view are: trust, loyalty, reciprocity, solidarity, responsibility, respect and justice. They are the core of society, determining its successful operation and development, as well as the well-being of the people. After all, it was a century ago that Georg Simmel, one of the founding fathers of sociology, observed, quite rightly, that society is nothing else but a complex network of inter-human relations (Simmel Reference Simmel and Levine1971). And the quality of such relations decides the fate of society. When the moral space decays, civil society disintegrates and democracy cannot survive.
The person who discovered this moral aspect of democracy in the nineteenth century was Alexis de Tocqueville with his concept of the ‘habits of the heart’, the natural moral impulses of human beings which together create a good society (De Tocqueville Reference De Tocqueville1945 [1835]). He went to America to study the court system, the ‘hard’ aspect of democracy, but he discovered that the secret of American society was to be found in the ‘soft’ area, the robust civil society.
Moral impulses make up part of human nature (Wilson Reference Wilson1993). But these human impulses may be blocked, suppressed, or entirely destroyed by inhuman social conditions. The classical influential terms for such moral decay are ‘Marxian alienation’ (Ollman Reference Ollman1975), and ‘Durkheimian anomie’ (Alexander Reference Alexander1988).
In the twentieth century, the focus on civil society and the moral space, in the footsteps of Tocqueville, was to be found in the US in the communitarian theories and visions of good society by Robert Bellah (Bellah Reference Bellah1985; Bellah et al. Reference Bellah, Madsen, Tipton, Sullivan and Swindler1991) and Amitai Etzioni (Reference Etzioni1996), and in Europe at the border of sociology and political philosophy in the Frankfurt School, with such towering figures as Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno and Jurgen Habermas.
In the twenty-first century, the most extensive analysis of civil society was provided by Jeffrey Alexander, who stands on the shoulders of Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim (Alexander Reference Alexander2006). For him, the moral standards are not external but are immanent in the very nature of society. He claims that underlining all divisions of race, religion, gender, class and party politics, there is the common area of solidarity, where the common moral values and rules, and the central ideas of good or evil are defined. The enemies of solidary civil society are the anti-civil forces: religious hatred and repression, gender misogyny and patriarchy, the political oligarchy, racial and ethnic hatreds of every sort. The civil virtues become distorted or destroyed by them, ‘polluted’, as he likes to say, resulting in a pathological immoral society. But Alexander hopes that civil society always retains some potential for mobilization against immorality and toward civil repair.
We live in the period when civil society in this moral sense is decaying across the world, and with this there is the rising crisis of democracy. The moral backbone of democracy is broken by what the Polish legal scholar Wojciech Sadurski calls ‘the pandemia of populism’ (Sadurski Reference Sadurski2024). In many countries, small and huge, masses of people are electing, supporting or at least grudgingly accepting autocratic, dictatorial leaders. Democracy becomes a ladder for autocrats. Freedom becomes the tool for the enemies of freedom. Putin, Trump, Orban, Kaczynski, Bolsanaro, Maduro, LePen, ultra-right leaders in Austria and the Netherlands, and the believers in the ‘Alternative for Germany’, all of them have their day. But they would not get anywhere without the consent and sometimes enthusiastic support of the people, who are ready to suspend or reject the civil virtues. It sounds paradoxical but it is good news that societies are split by half, and there are still masses of people who are ready to defend moral rules and take up the job of civil repair.
In Search of a Good Society
In this sad esprit de temps, it is no wonder that recent sociological theories are focusing on the moral rules and the visions of a good society. They follow the legacy of moral concerns of the founding fathers of sociology in the nineteenth century, as well as the masters of the golden age of theory in the twentieth century, but they take a new approach. Contemporary sociological theories with the moral concern do not devise and impose codes of ethics, but discover moral principles in the meanings adopted by the people – principles which guide the people’s actions – and the complex mechanisms, configurations of social forces through which societies operate. Images of good, just, dignified society are not brought down from above by ideological or philosophical deliberations, but are shown to arise from below, as rooted in social reality, in the very regularities and mechanisms of human action, inter-human relations and social change.
The heritage of sociological research for over two centuries, as well as the rich historical evidence, provide a key to identify the moral prerequisites of the successful functioning of society and the well-being of the people. We can see which societies have flourished and which collapsed, imploded from within. Gerard Delanty, the editor of the European Journal of Social Theory, makes this point: ‘Normative principles are embedded in society and need to be reconstructed or reinterpreted’ (interviewed by Chernilo and Mascareno Reference Chernilo and Mascareno2023, emphasis added). This is the job of social theorists.
One may raise a doubt: how is it that moral values can be derived from sociological research or historical facts? Doesn’t the methodological axiom assert that values do not follow from facts, and therefore science must be value-free? Yes, the principle of Wertfreiheit is certainly true in the sciences of nature. But people differ radically from the natural world by being the creators and carriers of meanings. And taking actions on the basis of meanings, they turn intangible meanings into tangible social reality, solid social facts. The famous Thomas Theorem says: ‘If people believe something to be true it becomes true due to the consequences of their actions’ (Merton Reference Merton and Sztompka1996 [1948]).
Hence, if we discover what people find unacceptable, outrageous, pathological, we may derive a contrario what they consider moral. There is a huge archive of research on contestation, contentious actions, social movements and revolutions, which allows us to see what people really cherish, as the habits of their hearts, which mobilizes them to action. The focus on values such as emancipation, freedom, justice, equity, community is implied by the study of society, and not imposed a priori as an ideological bias on the study of society. I call it a sociological syllogism. As opposed to a logical syllogism, it allows us to deduce moral values from facts and base visions of good society on the results of social inquiry.
I will illustrate these general claims by a brief sketch of the theories of three eminent European theorists: Ulrich Beck, Alain Caille and Axel Honneth.
Ulrich Beck on Cosmopolitan Society
Ulrich Beck, until his death in 2015 a professor at the Maximilian University at Munich, proposed the theory of cosmopolitan society (Beck Reference Beck2006). It embraces a wide array of moral rules focused on one issue, which became crucial as the result of globalization: namely, the relation toward otherness, difference, diversity. Owing to intense mobility and relocations of large masses of people through migrations, business and educational travel, and tourism, others are within our society, and we are within theirs. There is growing recognition of the differences among people, the variety of their customs, beliefs, creeds, ideologies, aspirations, projects for life, an acknowledgement of the ‘otherness of others’. I propose a scale along which such acknowledgement is aligned, from them, to us. Namely, for the peaceful operation of society, others cannot be treated as enemies to be harmed, strangers to be closed in ghettos, aliens to be avoided and kept behind border walls, but they should be treated as, at least, friendly neighbours, and, at best, as assimilated members of society. And we should expect the same when we find ourselves among others.
This requires a new set of moral rules. Beck defines them as follows. Cosmopolitan empathy is an attempt to understand the point of view of the distant others, their beliefs, values and also their emotions. Cosmopolitan pity is the fellow-feeling for the suffering of others, victims of famines, diseases, wars, natural catastrophes. Cosmopolitan gesture is the act of tangible support for anonymous others; philanthropy, donations to humanitarian organizations. Cosmopolitan tolerance at a minimum level means grudging acceptance of otherness, allowing others to live their lives as long as they are separate and do not encroach on our ways of life. But the ultimate tolerance is the attractiveness of difference, embracing foreign cultures, investing them with positive value, extending one’s cultural horizon by encounters with foreign beliefs, creeds, rules, lifestyles, tastes. The final effect of cosmopolitan moral rules and values is the transformation of our self-concept, from xenophobic, closed, one-dimensional self, toward an open and multi-level identity.
Alain Caille on Reciprocity
The second of the theorists I pick as an example is Alain Caille, professor emeritus at the University of Paris Nanterre. He proposed a theory under the label of a ‘gift paradigm’ (Caille Reference Caille2020). He selected one moral rule as fundamental, the demand for reciprocity.
The idea is not new. Not recognizing this legacy directly, Caille is in fact following the long line of similar thinking, for example by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who described the principle do-ut-des found among the primitive tribes on Trobdriand Islands in the Pacific (Malinowski Reference Malinowski1961 [1922]), or by an American sociologist Alvin Gouldner for whom the norm of reciprocity was a moral foundation of social life, not only in primitive, but also developed, complex society (Gouldner Reference Gouldner1960).
Not referring to Malinowski or Gouldner, Caille chooses another classic author as the source of inspiration. He stands strongly on the shoulders of Marcel Mauss, who in an influential Essai sur le don (Mauss Reference Mauss1967 [1925]) elaborated the concept of ‘the gift’. Mutual gift-giving and gift-receiving are for Caille the opposites of one-sided exploitation. The gift must be unconditional and spontaneous. It should start with one-sided benevolence: giving something for nothing, and not for the expectation of reciprocity. To use a metaphor, one may say that it is a jump into the sea of uncertainty, a gamble on the desired social bond that will be established by reciprocity.
Single cycles may be combined in a more complicated sequence of gift-giving and gift-receiving, when seemingly one-sided gifts, not reciprocated immediately, become reciprocated in the long run after a chain of exchanges, not necessarily in the same ‘currency’, and not necessarily by the same partners. This is a secret of harmony and peace among the people. Participation in such networks of gifts creates a climate of trust and cooperation benefiting everyone. One may say that a gift produces a kind of ‘added value’ beyond what is received in return, namely by creating preconditions for peaceful coexistence and harmonious, cooperative relations, what Calle calls ‘convivialism’ (Caille and Vandenberghe Reference Caille and Vandenberghe2016).
Axel Honneth on Recognition
The third of the heroes of my story is Axel Honneth, the successor to Jürgen Habermas as chair at Frankfurt University, and the current leader of the so-called critical school. He focuses his theory on yet another moral rule, that of recognition, and its opposite disrespect (Honneth Reference Honneth1995, Reference Honneth2007, Reference Honneth2021). This theory fits into the long theoretical tradition of those sociologists who considered human self and identity as the product of relations with others, the reflection in the ‘social mirror’, ‘taking the roles of the others’, or performing on the stage of the ‘social drama’. I have in mind particularly the American scholars of the beginning and middle of the twentieth century: Charles Horton Cooley (Cooley Reference Cooley1962 [1909]), symbolic interactionism by George Herbert Mead (Mead Reference Mead1962 [1934]), and dramaturgical theory by Erving Goffman (Goffman Reference Goffman1967, Reference Goffman1969, Reference Goffman1971).
Honneth goes beyond this legacy. Not satisfied with the factual account of the mechanism through which the self is socially produced, he strives to evaluate this process morally as good or bad, beneficial, or harmful. He considers as his goal linking the explanatory and normative aspects of social life. The methodological strategy to discover the content of moral expectations is to investigate the life of those groups that are denied recognition, the victims of disrespect. The struggles for recognition they undertake are seen as the main motivations of social contestations, movements and revolution. In the ‘intuitive notions of justice’ and the struggles inspired by their violation, one finds the key to the moral fabric of society. Individuality, autonomy and freedom are a result of recognition by others and recognizing others, appearing mutually as a recognizer and recognized. And a good society is one in which norms and practices of recognition have been institutionalized, i.e. observed and enforced.
There are three effects of recognition: self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem. The shaping of self-confidence proceeds through the recognition of the humanity and dignity of a person. It occurs in the milieu of small groups pervaded by strong, intimate and emotional bonds, such as the family or the friendship group. It requires the conditions of stable, emotional support from trusted others, with the strongest form being love. Misrecognition means the violation of personal integrity by physical or mental aggression, violence, abuse, rape, torture, and the complete neglect of human dignity, at the extreme, de-humanization in genocide.
Shaping self-respect proceeds through the recognition of rights granted to members of a legal community. It occurs within the purview of the state. Rights are the depersonalized symbols of social respect. They endow the person with legal status, as the bearer of freedoms recognized by other members of a political community and its institutions. Selective refusal of due rights to individuals because of racial, ethnic, religious or gender identity is the violation of recognition, which is destructive for self-respect. The extreme form is legal ostracism, exclusion from any legal standing whatsoever: Jews in the ghettos, apartheid, prisoners in the gulag, victims in concentration camps.
Shaping self-esteem proceeds by the recognition of individual achievements measured by the contribution to society, mainly via labour. In sociology, this rule is known as distributive justice, or the principle of meritocracy. The main guiding idea in this kind of recognition is proportionality. Esteem must be assigned proportionally to accomplishments. And these are estimated by the accepted scales of values, current social expectations and aspirations. They must be appropriate, i.e., relative to the social status and role of the individual. The differential allocation of esteem leads to non-egalitarian differentiation of society, but if it follows the principles of proportionality and appropriateness it is treated as justified. On the other hand, withholding or denying esteem evokes the individual emotions of outrage, anger, resentment, frustration. The refusal of justified esteem to oneself and awareness of unearned privileges and unjustified esteem enjoyed by others is the triggering factor of the mobilization of social movements and street politics.
Struggles for recognition indicate the direction of human and social progress. As in the other two theories, the ethical vision for the future is not imposed from above by ideological or philosophical reflections, but arises from below, through the study of aspirations, cravings, and fights of the people.
The Moral Calling of Social Scientists
We, the social scientists, are the powerless elite. Our strength is not power but reason. As the emblem of my university says in Latin ‘Plus ratio quam vis’. Armed with the wisdom of over two centuries of social theorizing, it is our duty to reawaken the moral awareness of the people and indicate the road toward robust civil society and renewed democracy. This is our role as public intellectuals. The moral turn in sociological theory is the current fulfilment of this role and this duty.
Acknowledgement
This article is based on the book: Piotr Sztompka (2025) Critical Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory; Main Theories and Theorists of the XXIst Century. New York: Routledge.
About the Author
Piotr Sztompka is a Polish sociologist known for his work on the theory of social trust. He is Professor of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and has also frequently served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Columbia University in New York City. From 2002 to 2006 he was the 15th President of the International Sociological Association. He is a member of Academia Europaea.
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