How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world? Jeffrey Alexander's masterful work, ""The Civil Sphere"", addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others - the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest - are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. A grand and sweeping statement, ""The Civil Sphere"" is a major contribution to our thinking about the real, but ideal world in which we all reside