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The prominence of the work of Jeffrey C. Alexander in contemporary sociology, given its abundance, interest and scope, makes attempting to grasp its significance for the contemporary evolution of the discipline a simultaneously unavoidable and difficult task for anyone1. It is only through careful attention to the works themselves that their full impact on sociological thought can be appreciated, together with what they contribute to our capacity to analyze contemporary society in its most recent forms and transformations. It is with this consideration in mind that I shall focus here, more specifically, on Alexander’s recent book The Drama of Social Life (Alexander, 2017). One of the reasons for concentrating on this book is that it exposes not only the full problematics that Alexander has developed in his works over the last decade on performance in politics, but also his wider project in cultural sociology, if not his entire endeavor to reform functionalist sociology, and sociology at large, in the global interpretation of modernity and contemporary society. Another good reason is to explore the specific position of Alexander’s analytical perspective in relation to earlier attempts to describe and analyze social life in terms of its inherent theatricality – from Goffman to Raymond Williams, and beyond.2 It seems logical to have these authors in mind when seeking to determine his analytical position with respect to them, since they all address the bigger context of analyzing social life in terms of theatricality, even though there is still more to say about the relation between theatre and sociology in their (at least) im-

JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER ON THE THEATRICALITY OF SOCIAL LIFE: DEEPENING THE HERMENEUTICS OF CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY