Cassandra Sever is a social theorist who studies the conditions under which cultures generate, sustain, and lose meaning. Her work develops an account of culture as an incomplete system of meaning, extending twentieth-century insights into the limits of systems to the domain of cultural life. Drawing on an Aristotelian–Augustinian understanding of the human person as oriented toward the Good, she argues that cultures depend on tacit moral horizons they cannot fully ground from within.
Her research explains how modern elites, by denying or mismanaging this structural dependence, generate predictable forms of collective despair—including anti-elite resentment, mental-health and suicide epidemics, antisemitism, and nostalgia for lost moral architectures of coherence.
Her current book project, The Incompleteness of Culture: Meaning, Modernity, and the Rise of Collective Despair (working title), offers a comprehensive framework for understanding why meaning collapses in cultural time and how despair functions as a barometer of a culture’s moral and spiritual health.
Sever holds a PhD in sociology and serves as Managing Editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Email: csever@lumenchristi.org