Liberal democracies are divided—and increasingly so. Yet precisely what divides them remains a matter of ongoing dispute. According to Hunter’s classic “Culture War” thesis, the core cleavage is that between secular modernists and religious traditionalists. Norris and Inglehart, by contrast, stress the split between highly educated, younger post-materialists and less educated, older cultural conservatives. While Goodhart frames the conflict as pitting “Anywhere” cosmopolitans and “Somewhere” communitarians. In this presentation I offer a cultural sociological account of the cultural-cum-moral landscape, which integrates and builds upon the insights of these accounts, while at the same time departing from them. I argue the “Culture War” that characterizes liberal democracies in the twenty-first century, far from being dualistic, is best conceived as triadic in nature. What is more, many of today’s most heated cultural conflicts derive less from the clash of incommensurable moral visions, than from a clash of distinct iterations of the selfsame cultural-cum-moral tradition—romantic expressivism. Specifically, I maintain that the fault lines track the differences between a liberal romanticism, a left-wing radical romanticism, and a right-wing reactionary romanticism. Leveraging the tools of cultural sociology, this article seeks to bring to light the remarkable extent to which romantic expressivism suffuses the cultural imaginary of twenty-first century liberal democracies.

About the speaker:

Galen Watts is Assistant Professor in the sociology and legal studies department at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on cultural and institutional change in liberal democracies since the 1960s—with a focus on the spheres of religion, morality, work, and politics. His first book, The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity, published in 2022 with Oxford University Press, won the 2023 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Distinguished Book Award, as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity. In 2026, he won the Canadian Sociological Association’s Early Investigator Award. You can find out more about him and his work at his website: www.galenwatts.ca.

📅 Date: 22 October 2026 (Thursday)

🕑 Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

📍 Venue: Room 9.29, 9/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

🗣️ Language: English

🔗 Register here: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109454