Sociology Responds to Fascism by Dirk Kasler Stephen Turner

Author:Dirk Kasler, Stephen Turner [Dirk Kasler, Stephen Turner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780415040860
Google: o1a0IVeMQRgC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1992-01-15T04:39:34+00:00

THE EMIGRATION OF GERMAN SOCIOLOGISTS

AND ‘REICHSSOZIOLOGIE’

The exile of many German sociologists can only cursorily be dealt with here, though it is central to the myth of the disappearance of sociology under National Socialism. After the Nazi seizure of power, laws were enacted and administrative measures taken to dismiss Jewish as well as politically undesirable civil servants. These actions affected Jewish sociologists and the few sociologists who fell into the category of political undesirables.1

The Frankfurt School has been widely used to reinforce the argument that only the best in the tradition of German sociology was expelled. But the members of this school did not regard themselves as ‘sociologists’, and, on the contrary, campaigned against the idea of a purely ‘disciplinary’ sociology. Their relation to sociology has varied with the rhetorical purposes of commentators. In the postwar years René König expressly excluded them from the community of sociologists, treating them as tendentious and speculative philosophers of society.2 As late as 1960, König also attacked Karl Mannheim and Siegfried Landshut (emigrants, like himself), considering them to be among the social-scientific gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Twenty years later, he exalted them as the men on whom Weimar sociology had pinned its hopes and who in their capacity as sociologists had been removed by the Nazis (Klingemann 1985:369–371). This is grossly misleading. Sociologists were not driven away because they were part of a discipline detested by the Nazis.3 The phrase ‘Jewish sociology’, it may be noted, was applied less by National Socialist officials than by the ambitious anti-Semites of the discipline itself, such as Richard Thurnwald.

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