NARRATING AND NATURALIZING CIVIL-SOCIETY AND CITIZENSHIP THEORY - THEPLACE OF POLITICAL-CULTURE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the ''political cultu re concept'' in the social sciences. Surprisingly Habermas's account o f the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the orig inal political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of politica l culture is used in a way that is neither political nov cultural. Exp laining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this arti cle and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, vo lume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because t he concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of concep tual relationships that combine into Angle-American citizenship theory . The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used t o analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dy namics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in c ultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical find ings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called t he Angle-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a me tanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in politica l sociology.