WHATS POLITICAL OR CULTURAL ABOUT POLITICAL-CULTURE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE - TOWARD AN HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF CONCEPT-FORMATION

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with a recent trend toward the revival of the ''political culture concept'' in the social sciences. Surprisingl y, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither poli tical nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and one to follow I hypothesize that this i s the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically c onstituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a stru ctured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-America n citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is introduced to analyze historically and empirically the i nternal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The metho d draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studie s, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research y ields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrativ e structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this na rrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and thes e elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empi rical research in political sociology.