Kitabı oku: «The Social Science of the Citizen Society»

Introduction: The “Globalization” and “De-colonization” of the Social Sciences1

Around 50 years after end of World War II, the social sciences next to creating their theories began another round to reflect on themselves. The discourses that the social sciences then conducted around the end of the 20th century across all disciplines and equally worldwide under the title of a “globalization” of the social sciences, countered by a discourse on their “de-colonization” that was as worldwide as it was across disciplines, could not be more paradoxical, if one considers alone the fact that it takes 50 years after the end of the war to discover that the world had become a world of nation states after the colonized part of the world had adapted the very society model of capitalism of the old colonialists and then the alternative society model, called real socialism, had declared to be finished in a very unspectacular way and had also put their societies back to the regime of capitalism.

With these discourses about “globalization” and “de-colonization”, discourses on what their essential tasks and challenges are in a world of capitalist societies, especially when these discourses are discussed in the social sciences around the world and across all social science disciplines, these sciences, thanks to all the paradoxes of these discourses and their theories, provide insights into what makes social science thinking around the world today concerned.

Globalization

Social sciences call this world of states and market economies “globalization” and at the latest at the beginning of the new century, this discovery of a “globalization” leads to a comprehensive self-critique and social science thinking makes, if one follows the worldwide debates of the social sciences, a discovery and accuses itself of having so far been a “zombie science” in its previous history, because it has closed itself to thinking about the “globalized” social and as a consequence of this self-critique propagates, as social sciences would call it, a “paradigm shift” of its thinking, so to speak a complete revolution of its theory creation. Globalization’ is the keyword that signals the overthrow also in the social science theory production and this ‘globalization’ is—according to the view of the social sciences—not only the hitherto wrongly ignored, all-shaping characteristic of the social, but also the reason for the necessity to fundamentally transform social science thinking itself and to ‘globalize’ the social sciences themselves in order to finally produce theories about the world instead of their previous “Zombi-science.”2

This self-critical judgment of the social sciences and the “paradigmatic” transformation it heralds raises a few questions about this program of transformation, even before one takes a closer look at this project of a globalized science, because it contains at least two errors of thought and a meaningful confession—bought with a discreet lie—a confession that allows a few insights into the nature of thinking in the social sciences.

To start with the latter: The fact that the social sciences are currently highly busy arguing about the necessity of a “globalization” of thinking is as strange as it is informative, because it confesses that thinking about everything social beyond state-constructed societies does not constitute for social scientific thinking an object of social scientific thinking, i.e., for social scientific thinking all state-constructed societies and the social are identical. For this self-critical confession cannot be without the mistake that today’s discovery of a “globalization” claims that the social was not globally, i.e., worldwide, constructed before the observed “globalization”. Just as if there had not been a “global” social in the period preceding “globalization”—colonialism—the discovery of a “globalized” social only makes sense from the point of view of a thinking, if this thinking equates all state-constructed societies with the nature of society, a discovery because it is beyond state-constructed societies, with which the social sciences obviously deal quasi naturally, for this thinking obviously only with the de-colonization, i.e. only with the worldwide establishment of state-constituted societies, a worldwide social exists, with which to have to deal theoretically social scientific thinking as a new task of the social sciences only discovers when the world is a world of state societies.

Obviously, therefore, the model of state societies had to be implemented worldwide in order for social science thinking to discover the existence of a social world at all. A social world that is not a world of nation-state societies, one must conclude from the current discovery of societies alongside one’s own national society, is not a “global” world for the social sciences. As strange as it may sound, it is only the postcolonial transformation of the world into a world of nation-states that allows social science thinking to discover that there is a world beyond its own national society, so for social science thinking, everything social begins with state societies.

And this, the abstruse insight that sociality should only exist after the world has become a world of nation states, contains on top of it a small, equally paradoxical lie of the social sciences about itself: the social sciences knew and know very well a social world beyond nation-state societies before the de-colonization, i.e., before the transformation of the colonies into the very state societies of the colonizers. Social science thinking had even created a special social science discipline, anthropology, a discipline that was responsible for thinking about the “uncivilized social”, that is, for thinking about everything social that is not nation-state societies, and which, now that the world consists of state societies, has found a new disciplinary task with the establishment of cultural studies. And it is as paradoxical as it is telling that, with the exception of anthropology, which was reserved for thinking about the non-state social and which today, after the worldwide “civilization” of the world as state-constructed societies, puzzles over what its object might be, for the social science thinking of all other social science disciplines a social world was non-existent until it was transformed into a world consisting of nation-state constructed societies, only to then demand the “globalization” of their thinking.

This concept of a “globalization” characterizes this picture of a strange discovery of worldwide existing societies by the social sciences after the creation of a world of nation-state societies, just as if there had not been a world until now, i.e. the discovery of a world consisting of state societies, just as if this, the world as a world of states, was the final completion of the social nature of the world, and offers to social scientific thinking only with this world of states its object of thinking, frees the world so to say from its untheorizable non-social spots. “Globalization”, this worldwide spatial spread of something that neither knows a subject that operates this global spread nor wants to name an object, a something that is spread globally, and a concept that does not reveal which subjects are responsible for the mysterious global spread of this subject—an objectless something, nor for what reasons and for what purposes it spreads, is therefore the appropriate synonym of social science thinking for the discovery of a world, under the condition that it is a world of nation states, because for this thinking the world has finally become, quasi by itself, for this thinking, what it has always had to be as its very nature: Everything social in the world has thus matured quasi naturally towards its nature as citizen societies, has somehow come to itself. That is why the idea of a “globalization” of the social needs neither a subject that pursues this globalization, nor an object that this subject wants to bring about. It is to be imagined with this monstrous concept of a “globalization” that the social as a state constructed social develops quasi naturally into what it has always wanted to be as its very nature.

One must therefore conclude from the fact that the social sciences today proclaim the necessity of globalization that it took 200 years of social science thinking in the imperial world before, with the decolonization and transformation of colonized societies into state-constructed societies, a social world beyond the imperial world of states was discovered.

And this discovery also reveals what social science thinking is coming to terms with the nature of the formation of state societies in the imperial world of states. As if the emergence of imperial states was not the result of their colonial oppression and exploitation of the world, an exploitation of the colonized world which created the economic foundations for the economic wealth and political power of the imperial world in the first place, as if the creation of a world of states and their imperialism subjecting the social world to their domination purposes was not the way to build and live the world of nation-states, the social sciences realize, more precisely, the social sciences in the imperial world, the existence of a social world beyond their own national societies, and this only then and because and only after the science policies of their imperial states have discovered science as a new lever for global competition for economic growth and for global political power and therefore also drive the social sciences to extend their activities to the social world beyond their national societies. The fact that it was indeed the national science policies in the imperial states that, together with science as a whole, had to motivate the social sciences to do more international work tells all about the thinking about the social world in the social sciences of the imperial states of the world. It obviously needed and still needs such political instructions so that after 200 years of the social sciences, social science thinking can discover an era of “globalization”, almost as if the world until then had consisted of national social biotopes sealed off from one another and having nothing to do with one another.3

For the social sciences, especially in the imperial states, their discovery of the existence of a social world beyond their national societies, after their politics have pushed them there, is therefore still a trip to an in this sense categorically exotic elsewhere. Despite all the debates about the necessity of globalizing or internationalizing social science thinking, the essential part of social science theory production continues to produce knowledge that not only continues to cultivate the unworldly notion of theories about nationally isolated societies as the basis of its theorizing, but that also continues to produce social science knowledge that arises from perspectives that interpret everything social through the particular, mostly historical, forms of the construction of nationhood of the imperial world of states and, as will be shown later, bring in these nationally constructed theories from the imperial societies as their contribution to their globalization. Theories which, in their search for explanations for social phenomena of national societies, encounter the necessity of having to study the world of states, or which even recognize the phenomena practically defined by state sovereignty as practices of national politics and in order to do so therefore direct their social-scientific thinking towards the world of states as a whole, elsewhere also called imperialism, remain an exception and enjoy a reputation of scientific exoticism, despite, or rather because of, all the debates about a “globalization” of the social sciences. And that this, the nationalization of social science thinking, that this is what constitutes its “globalization”, will be shown later along the products of its “globalized” theory-building.

Less inspired by their intellectual curiosity about what is happening in the world, not to mention the discovery of theoretical necessities to be able to understand social phenomena only by thinking about them as an imperially made world, social sciences that are challenged and urged by their national political elites, of course not to analyze the social world as a whole beyond the national islands, but to participate in presenting the national knowledge resources as an attractive resource for investment seeking global capital, this rather mundane task, to prepare science as a source for international business investment, to present this as a new challenge of a discrete “globalization” as a virtually purposeless, purely scientific, self-critically presented imperative of a globalization of the social sciences, cleansed of all political and economic calculations, reveals nevertheless that the theoretical preoccupation with a nation-state constructed world beyond the individual nation-state societies is obviously a hitherto unknown phenomenon and field of activity for the social sciences, especially for the social sciences in the imperial world of states beyond the USA.

Consequently, and this is the next paradox of “globalized thinking”, the internationalized or globalized social science knowledge that deals with the newly discovered world of states consists, as before, of always nationally constructed knowledge: The most common way of reflecting on the newly discovered global social, which comes to mind in social science thinking, consists of comparing nationally constructed units of knowledge about social phenomena that are always a priori strictly nationally defined. From this it must be concluded that the social sciences, confronted with the task of dealing with the world beyond their theoretical constructs of a world of social phenomena sealed off by the state, simply cannot think of anything else to reflect on the world other than to multiply what they have always done, that is to theorize about a multiplicity of societies always presented nationally, that this thinking about the world of state societies is thus only able to imagine these comparisons as the mere parallel existence of nationally constructed theories. Just as if it were not the interrelationship of states that makes societies within states what they essentially are, when the social sciences look at the world of states comparatively, nothing else seems to come to their mind but to additively juxtapose theories about individual state phenomena, just as if these state societies of the world of states had nothing to do with each other.

De-colonization

Next to the discourse on the “globalization” of social science, there is another worldwide discourse, again 50 years later than the transformation of the colonized parts of the world into nation states and market economies, the discourse on the “de-colonization” of the social sciences, which is opposed by social scientists from the so-called developing countries to the discourse on “globalization” and in which these scientists insist that social science thinking, which creates its theories about the social world from the perspective of the imperial world, is an image of the world that only social sciences can develop in the imperial world.

In fact, for social sciences in countries where there is not a single social phenomenon that does not derive its characteristics from the dependence of these countries on the imperial world, it must be a strange idea of that “zombie” science which assumes that the social in a country could be thought of as an entity untouched by the world of states and which is only able to register the social world beyond its nationally defined societies after these in turn have become state societies.

From the point of view of thinking about the societies in these countries, which are formally also nation-state societies, but which are nation-state societies in which the political as well as economic substance of their societies is under the command of imperial states and which are entirely constructed to serve the imperial states, one might think it must be, at any rate, that it is a strangely illusionary idea to want to imagine their societies as societies exclusively shaped by an individual state and untouched by other states, just as the social science globalized thinking in the imperial world wants to make it its own in its juxtaposition of comparative theories that make no comparison.

Nevertheless, instead of causing any irritation about the explanatory power of social science theories that create such illusory images of the social world, and then instead of therefore examining their theories, the advocates of a de-colonization of social science thinking not only fail to refute the theories of the sciences from the imperial world, but they in turn claim to develop theories that, in their own way, juxtapose equally nationally inspired views of their societies with the theories about the national societies of the imperial countries.

It must be the case that social science thinking, even in these countries, simply does not seem to know how social science knowledge, which is not determined by the view of state definitions of what nation-state societies are, could otherwise be such thinking about the world of state societies. It seems that the nature of social science thinking involves equating thinking about nation-state societies with thinking through the view of the social constructs, primarily through the view of the state itself, of such nation-state societies, and that the only form of this kind of thinking about this world of state societies is thinking as imagining a world of nation-state societies no differently than the mere addition of theories about such social biotopes.

The postcolonial debates, with their contributions and concerns, make these discourses even more paradoxical. If one takes a look at the critical contributions to the debate from the “de-colonized” social sciences, which come from the former colonized countries, then one has to conclude that their word-radical objections, such as those about “scientific power”, about scientific “inequalities”, a “scientific imperialism” and similar objections, are even more paradoxical, that all these critical contributions, for their part, do not always also operate with nationally constructed scientific subjects, be it the idea of a scientific world consisting of a “North” versus a “South”, or of a “local versus global”, or of a Eurocentrism or Occidentalism, all these subjects and objects of their theory-building constructed by the post-colonial debates turn out to be constructions of the same social science-trained thinking of those globalization debates which, as in those debates, consist of an agglomeration of national societies, instead of articulating any doubts about them, that the social science theories about the world of state societies operate with their a priori assumption that they can understand them as biotope societies separated from the world of nation states, in order to reject such theories as obvious false images of imperial world views.

Without even looking at the arguments of the debates about what the de-colonization of the social sciences should be, the categories central to the accusations against “globalized” thinking already show that the opposite is the case: Committed to opposing the newly discovered scientific challenge of that “globalization” of social science thinking with their discourse of de-colonization, these critical objections with their de-colonization debate interpret their objections as a plea for more “local” theories, for a more nationally contoured thinking as congenial contributions from the former colonized countries, and with this strange criticism they claim to be able to participate in the creation and debates about a new global thinking with contributions that are recognized as equal to their own nationally constructed theories about their always nationally constituted societies.

The alternative debate on the “globalization” of the social sciences, which contrasts this with its “de-colonization debate”, does not know how to present this demarcation of the social sciences in the formerly colonized world with its accusation of “Eurocentrism” against the theories from the imperial world in any other way than to liberate its thinking from theories that are first explicitly attributed the explanatory power for European societies, and which then, however, for the explanation of the national societies of the former colonial world demands theories tailored to their national societies, i.e. the principle of viewing the world as individual national societies, which in “globalized” thinking are viewed through nation-state perspectives, does not reject them as a pipe dream or even as errors of the social sciences of the imperial world, but explicitly develops them further, thus confirming this nation-specific view with its critique, which does not want to criticize any of these nationally inspired theories.

But that’s not all: In order to produce their post-colonial social science theories, they themselves, like “globalized” social science thinking, hypostasize not only nationally contoured questions of inquiry in thinking about their societies, decolonized social science thinking, thinking in the former colonized world that would have every reason to do so after its transformation into states, to look at the world of states and their imperialism, because their societies are all too obviously only what they are through the imperial states, the advocates of a de-colonization of social science thinking go one step further towards a nationally predetermined thinking by propagating this thinking as a thinking about nationally contoured objects and research questions, which is supposed to be able to construct its theories only through theoretically exclusive “local” perspectives, “local” views that are only accessible to those who share this exclusive, national view, thanks to their affiliation with these national societies—with the result that this kind of locally exclusive theory production, called indigenous sciences by post-colonial thinking, on nationally preconfigured social phenomena interpreted by nationally biased thinking, with such explicitly nationally inspired theories makes its contribution to that globalized scientific world as a post-colonialized theoretical contribution to theory formation—and thus finally turns this post-colonial thinking into a questionable theoretical matter.

When even renowned masterminds of this de-colonization project from the former colonial states, such as Aimé Césaire in his “Discourse on Colonialism,”4 morally scourge the imperial states for their misdeeds, in order to work their way through this moral condemnation to the most stubborn advocates of the humanistic ideals of the state idea, as if the moral self-portraits of states, which social science thinkers and poets like Césaire like to attach to them, were ever the yardstick for any state policies, then these products of post-colonial thought are certainly among the bleak highlights in the history of social science thought and raise the question of what this decolonized thinking is all about, which is dedicated to the state ideas of those states which, under the title of these state ideals, with their old colonialism and their new imperialism, are responsible for the misery in these states and which, with their wars, ensure the maintenance of their sovereignty over this decolonized part of the world of states.

All these peculiarities of “globalized” and “postcolonial” theorizing in the social sciences are reason enough not only to take a closer look at these debates and to ask what characterizes the theories produced under the maxims of these two postwar debates, but also to raise the question of what is actually the nature of social science thinking, which not only produces such debates, but also discovers the necessity of directing its thinking towards the world only when the world has become a world of states; and that is a thinking that then obviously seems unable to think about the world of state societies in any other way than that in which the world of these state societies, contrary to all everyday experience, is conceived as national biotopes untouched by each other, in order to reflect on these societies thus preconstructed in this “globalized” as well as in “post-colonial” thinking with nationalist perspectives.

The results of these reflections are presented in two volumes under the title “The Social Science of the Citizen Society”.

In the first book on “Critique of the Globalization and De-colonization of the social sciences”, these central post-war discourses of social science thinking and their legacies for science are discussed in the following five chapters:

1 The “globalization” of the social sciences—the introduction of nationalist thinking into social science thinking

2 The worldwide implementation of the social science of the citizen society through its “de-colonization”

3 Comments on life in a world of citizen societies and its social science idealizations

4 Knowledge that endows national identity—contributions to the ideological armament of states

5 The final highlights of the masterminds of the globalized post-colonial thinking

6 Old and new errors and their sources: Theoretical legacies of the globalization and de-colonization debates under the preparatory work of Historical Materialism

Book 2, entitled “The Nature of the Social Science of Citizen Society—Sketches for a Theory” analyzes the characteristics of the nature of social science thinking in four chapters:

1 Architecture and conceptual foundations of disciplinary thinking

2 Forms of telelogical thinking—progress of social scientific theorizing about itself

3 The discourse on and progress of social science knowledge

4 Beyond social science thinking

1 In this book, the concept of a plurality of “social sciences” refers to the disciplinary social sciences and thus to the specific form of social science theories of citizen societies. Their nature and their current progresses in theory building is the subject of the book “The Social Science of Citizen Society 2, The Nature of the Social Sciences—Sketches of a Critique”.

2 A “zombie science” is the social science thinking according to Beck, because it practices a “methodical nationalism”. This accusation of a “methodical nationalism” does not criticize nationalist thinking, but wants to say that thinking must be “cosmopolitan”, i.e., directed at the world beyond individual national societies, and this cosmopolitanism is perfectly compatible with nationalist thinking, yes, as we will see later, it is the more clever nationalism praised by Beck. (See also chapter 5 in this book) http://www.ulrichbeck.net-build.net/index.php?page=cosmopolitan.

3 It is not by chance that the social sciences in the imperial state that supervises all imperial states, the USA, make an exception here. Long before the discussions on the necessity of a globalization of the social sciences started, the social sciences in the USA knew about the world beyond their national society with the rise of their country to the global world power and developed the idea of “area studies” that do not make a big fuss about their imperial missions. The unworldly idea of a social world established as a world of states, of wanting to imagine itself as a social world of social units untouched by each other, is the privilege of the social sciences in the imperial states, which under the global supremacy of the USA practice their imperial policy above all as global economic policy, and which must therefore receive a wake-up call from their national science policy, to “internationalize” their science, after their economic policy had noticed that science had become a new lever in the global struggle of capital for markets.

4 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Monthly Review Press, New York 1972.

1. The “Globalization” of the Social Sciences—the Introduction of Nationalist Thinking into Social Science Thinking

For social science thinking it is a theoretical challenge when it is required to theorize beyond its national societies, especially for the social sciences in the countries where they have emerged. After

 a period of more than 150 years of colonization of the world, with the exploitation of the colonized world as the economic basis for the political and economic power base of the domination of the European capitalist states over the world,

 another half century after the establishment of the US model of imperialism, in which the former colonies have now been transformed into nation states participating in the global battle of nation states about political and economic power,

 the post-war model of imperialism with a world that now consists of a world of states, which, with few exceptions, are all constructed according to the pattern of the rationale of the American concept of nation states,

 a world divided into imperial states and states, which are under the command of the imperial states, many of which, like the former colonies, are sovereign states in a more formal sense only,

 all of which are under the supervision of the American world power,

 all committed to serve the growth of global capital and all drawing their political power resources from this global growth of capital and directing these power resources inwardly and outwardly to nothing other than this service for the growth of capital.

It nevertheless takes another half century for the social sciences in the imperial world to discover that there is a social world beyond their nation-state societies, a social world which they now, self-critically, believe they cannot continue to ignore.

The social sciences in the imperial states of Europe, in particular, thus discovered the necessity of what they call the internationalization or globalization of the social sciences—an internationalization that they henceforth put into practice as a comparison of theories of individual nation-state societies.

The reason why this “globalization” of social science theory formation is not justified as a conclusion from some shortcomings in theory formation, but rather comes across as a scientific imperative, is that this necessity of a “globalization” of social science theory formation, presented as self-criticism, is also only a euphemism for the fact that it was not the social sciences that had discovered the existence of a social world beyond their individual national societies in thinking about their objects. It was the science policies in the imperial countries, namely in Europe, later followed by those in the rest of the imperial world, as well as in some economically more important “emerging countries”, which prompted the sciences under their supervision to direct their theory production also towards the social world beyond their national territories and to create social science knowledge also about other nation states and their societies, especially those in which these science policies had a political or economic interest.

In fact, the selection of societies and states to which this scientific interest in “globalized” knowledge is then directed can easily be recognized as a selection of states which they have not encountered through a scientific interest, but in which states of the imperial world of states have a special political or economic interest, such as, for example, the unfortunate fact, from the point of view of the European Union, that certain states are under the exclusive control of a competing imperial state, the United States, which other imperially ambitious powers, such as the said European Union, have started to question, and this certainly not because of any scientific interest, but for political and economic reasons. In this, questioning the exclusive grip of the US on certain states, the social sciences should also play their part. The Europeans’ newly discovered scientific interest, for example, in Latin America, with which they are trying to challenge the US monopoly on this continent and this not at all primarily in matters of science, as is not concealed in their funding programs, or the interest of Japanese social sciences in South-East Asia, also being steered in the right direction by means of appropriately oriented funding programs, both cases may serve here only as two examples of why the self-critique of the social sciences is only the politically controlled interest that it elevates to a scientific mission, the already strange discovery of the existence of a social world beyond the world of imperialist states.

And even this is not yet the whole truth about the reasons why social sciences have proclaimed a new era of internationalized social science thinking. After all, it was not even the science policies in the imperial countries that forced their sciences to embark on the global voyage of discovery of the social world beyond their national territories. In fact, it was the global business world, which has always regarded the limited territories of nation states as an obstacle to its business activities and has always worked to remove the restrictions on its business to the markets of its nation states, that found its congenial partner in the nation state authorities and in the interest of these imperial states to extend their political power over other states, with the result that today’s world has been turned into a world for business. So that, since this global capital, which treats the globe as its means of growth, as well as its inhabitants, with the development of new technologies in which the natural and engineering sciences play a key role in its competitiveness, this global business world has come to value science as a means of doing business, and therefore, nolens volens, also the services of the social sciences came into their sight.

And it was only following the discovery of the global business world’s interest in science as an important lever for their business interests that science policies began to use their sovereignty over science to reorient science as a means for imperial states competing among themselves for their attractiveness to these global business interests. In this sense, science policies notice the new interest of the “markets” in science serving them, awaken them from the accusation of being in an “ivory tower”, which has been reinterpreted only for this purpose and which rubs the goals of previous science policies and their concept of science as an accusation against science’s unworldliness, and turn the whole science and its form of institutionalization into institutions for market competition for knowledge useful to the business world in a global knowledge market. It is only since then, and only because the international business world wants to see its interest in science established as a lever for its global business interests, that the reforms of the science scene initiated by science policymakers have redirected it towards these interests of the global capital in science and reformed it in line with these interests.

In order to ensure this new orientation of science, the national science policies in the imperial states, under the expert advice of the business world, have transformed their science scenes into a politically controlled national economic resource, according to the dictates of the business world and its thinking, and have forced their sciences to do so by making accordingly constructed ‘offers’ to redesign science as a national knowledge market as a contribution of the states to their establishment as an attractive location for the global business world, a national knowledge market that sociological thinking emphatically.1

As is usual in social science thinking to transform the social problems of citizens created by politics into aids for the problems of citizens, it ennobles its new economic missions in the global scientific world assigned to it by politics, as a further development of social science thinking towards “globalized” thinking, which has finally made its way self-critically to a scientific study of the world.

1.1 Social sciences before their “globalization”: Idealizations of citizen societies and their state

Social science thinking before its “globalization” consists in the idealization of citizen societies and their nation state. What characterizes non-“globalized thinking” as state-idealistic thinking, i.e., thinking that attaches a raison d’être to citizen societies and their state in general as the basis of its theories, beyond nationalistic scientific thinking, i.e., thinking that adopts the self-representations of individual nation-state societies, prior to this epistemic transition to “globalized” thinking, will be illustrated by a few examples.

Thinking from the perspective of the citizens—theories as a recipe for a domesticated materialism

In addition to psychology, educationalists specialize in the social science view of citizen societies through the view of the subjects of these societies.

As social-scientific thinkers who are completely committed to Weber’s “concrete reality”2 and with the assurance of not dealing with an invented reality but with the—telling—pleonasm of a real reality, thus making the existing social concerns their own as concerns of their theorizing about it, social-scientific theorizing commits itself to this reality, by making the practical concerns of the social subjects the guideline of thinking and thus to reject as mythologically speculative theoretical concerns the concerns of a non-real reality that has nothing to do with the kind of science about the really real that is so propagated as the cognitive guide of thinking.

Theories as a reproduction of the reality that is real in them, that it takes care of its concerns and forbids itself to ask why who actually has them, formulates a kind of social science thinking in which not only the state-constructed world constitutes the object of social science thinking, but this is a thinking, which, with its programmatic of self-obligation to the given reality, i.e. its methodical affirmatism, also wants to commit itself to making the real reality, i.e. this given social reality, its analytical viewpoint, i.e. commits itself to making the view of this reality its own view through the views of this reality given in this reality for the scientific views on this reality. It is no wonder that a thinking that takes on such a self-assurance of its methodological affirmatism not only ends up in the idealism of its theorizing, which it so resolutely denies with its pleonasm to deal only with real reality—and thus expresses this reality as the concern that drives this thinking, but also introduces a concept of reality that it calls empiricism, which originates from a rather mystical concept of reality, such as that of its actual actors.

Children, students, pensioners, employees, taxpayers, unemployed, entrepreneurs, politicians, families, scientists, all these subjects are not only state-created and regulated subjects, but, by their very nature, creatures of state defining power. Even if the individual interpretation of these creatures within the framework of what they are defined as is left to the freedom of interpretation of these creatures, their freedom is simply nothing more than to interpret them and a theory formation that is committed to the perspectives of the social world by these subjects that arise from this freedom of interpretation is a theory formation that thus makes before any thinking these concerns its own viewpoint of its thinking.

And there is no need for who knows how ingenious thought, to infer from the obligation to make the realization of all life projects dependent on the disposal of money, that this obligation is not aimed at helping these life projects to become a reality. The fact that without money you get nothing does not justify the conclusion that the practical everyday mind likes to draw, which economists also like to confirm as a scientifically sound insight, that the purpose of money is to provide citizens with the necessary things for their life projects. If this were the case, one could distribute the useful things in life to people and nothing would be more superfluous than money. The same experience in dealing with money is sufficient to know that the whole running after money only ensures that money is increased where there is already more than enough—from the point of view of such life projects—and therefore the sense and purpose of such money-calibrated societies, is not the supply of money for the purpose of realizing any life projects, but the increase of this strange use-free wealth, which is measured in the increase of itself freed from any use, and not only not by what one could do with it, but uses these concerns to get to the things of life through money to increase the wealth of money itself.

It is more difficult than to deduce this from mere experience to insist, day after day, contrary to all experience, that running and working for money must be good for achieving what one intends to do in life, if only by proving this profit and loss account by limiting one’s life projects to what money is just enough for, i.e., by applying one’s knowledge in exactly the same way as the obligation to acquire money as the only permissible form of living one’s life demands. Everyone can decide for themselves whether and how they want to cheat themselves what the market economy and their political watchdogs are actually there for and what they are not for, when they are confronted with the fact that other views than mere grumbling are allowed, but forbidden as a practical alternative.

For social scientific thinking, such quite practical constraints to construct the world in the sense of what is prescribed do not apply, and scientific thinking which nevertheless wants to base its theory formation on the same views of those state creatures, which have been constructed out of the emphasis on practical blackmail by the established constraints, without being subjected to these constraints, is a thinking, which, without any compulsion before thinking about anything, imposes upon itself the obligation to orient its thinking towards what the social definitions of the state subjects determine as questions formulated in the sense of their purposes, that is, to renounce in advance with this commitment to the views born of the pursuit of these purposes views that cannot be committed to any pre-selected view of things.

A sequence of thoughts about “concrete reality” that is highly ordinary for this kind of thinking may illustrate how this thinking, through its adaptation to valid existing social purposes and concerns, produces theories that reproduce the considerations of the subjects of state provenance included in these social purposes, and thus not only repeat all their false considerations as scientific knowledge about them, but with this reproduction as scientific theories of their logic of forced self-deception and subservience, attest to the consecration of well-founded insights.

“If skill requirements increase, low skilled workers will be under increasing pressure, in the industrial sector and in some service sector. Demographic evolutions could reinforce this tendency.”3

Thanks to his sympathy for the failed materialism of the typical citizen, the social science theorist reveals in his discussion of how this citizen uses his knowledge for his concerns, how social science thinking constructs its knowledge of the world of citizens as knowledge from the perspective of these citizens: By adapting to this view of the world, everything that a citizen does takes the form of coping with the state definitions of what they demand of the citizen, transformed into existing living conditions, and the theories of the science thus introduced about this ontological creature of suffering take the form of critical care for its concerns as precisely these creatures of suffering. Following this logic of caring, sharing of the concerns that these creatures have only because they have subordinated themselves to state concerns as living conditions that are no longer at issue, and about which their science, in its shared concern to get along with them, in no way wants to enlighten who, why and how these circumstances of life are established, the knowledge of these creatures becomes “competences”, a mental ability very peculiar to these state creatures, which is characterized by the fact that the owner of such “competences” only obeys the owner only in that the mental products born from this ability must promise to those whom the owner of such “competences” wants and must obey. In this, too, is found the equally strange nature of social-scientific knowledge, which, in its caring service to such civic shrewdness, never ever wants to criticize it for its stupid as well as harmful thoughts, but makes its standpoint of critical accommodation its own as the maxim of its theory formation. Thus, and only in this way, the growing abilities of this civic creature do not become better means of giving his concerns a better chance, but rather a growing pressure for this subject to make itself servant to the additional demands of foreign concerns, whose subjects and aims are thought in these theories into the unknown as natural constraints from somewhere, constraints generating circumstances, about which this caring science better does not enlighten its “low skilled workers”, but in the interest of avoiding worse in its theories advises them to better obey.

Because scientifically educated sympathizer of the “low skilled workers” knows a phenomenon, “demographic evolutions”, in which he, thanks to his state-trained eye, does not regard “age” and “aging”, i.e. harmless old age and aging, as quite natural aspects of life, but spells out old age and aging to his clients as the threat that it is from the point of view of state social security funds, a view that is obviously very clear to the social science thinker, in which the whole of life is thought of as a foreign challenge and any future at all as a threat, because here, too, nothing more makes sense to the thinker concerned with social science than the state’s views of old age as costly, useless junk, from which he derives such threatening “tendencies” that life brings with it for this kind of thinking, for which his “low skilled workers” will have to take responsibility as a matter of course—or they should just simply not to become so old, so that they could avoid such “tendencies”. Because social science thinking is the theoretical support of the practical management of citizens and produces its theories from this perspective, its idea of thinking of the population as its own threat is also not a headache for this thinking, on the basis of which such theorists who would ask themselves the question what is decidedly tendentious about their way of producing their theories, in which the nature of human life, age, is its unavoidable threat.

In short: Social science thinking, which derives its ideas from the adaptation to the viewpoint of the citizen, is able to deal with the demands of the civic life of a materialism permitted by the state—as long as it proves its usefulness for the materialism of the state and its economy—and to act as a subject for it, who strives to domesticate its materialism in such a way that it sees in the service for all requested purposes, which deny its aims in life and come to it in this thinking as if these requested purposes were the nature of all social life, the way to achieve his private aims in life, this is the view that gives birth to the theories of social scientific thinking.

It is this view of state creatures of the state-constructed social reality through the state-defined social purposes, their subjects, life programs and biographies that social science thinking does not want to analyze as state constructs, but rather presents them in their partisanship for the concerns of these subjects underhand, as if they were quasi natural conditions of life with which their subjects, who, for their part, are nothing but state creatures, have to cope as if they were natural living conditions, even though, of course, every social scientist knows very well that the state-constituted society is anything but a natural event. With this transformation of all state-constructed social subjects and their state-manufactured and cared for living conditions, in which this way of thinking unnoticed all the differences between the state’s view of social life and that of its social subjects, into the idea of natural living conditions and their constraints, this thinking underhand turns the state itself into the pure reaction to “problems”, in whose representation as constraints is erased, that it is the state that imposes these problems on them, with the beautiful result that the state itself, just as the citizens admonish it as a lever for their concerns, is constantly discussed as a service provider in solving such problems.

Nevertheless, social science thinking does not accommodate its theory formation to the practical views of state-defined subjects, because social science thinkers want to justify the state social order with apologetic intentions. Social science thinkers, at least those thinkers who do not yet “globalize” their theory formation, are certainly not nationalists who share and propagate the concerns of a particular state. Politically, they may be; the very basic apologetics of their theory formation, to interpret the state-made social world through the gaze of state-made subjects, is, in a certain sense, the result of a methodological apologetics of their particular way of theory formation, not the result of their political view, but arises, as it were, underhand as a result of their self-imposed way of thinking, which is justified by their scientific-theoretical gurus with their epistemological skepticism. With the commitment to reality as a measure of the objectivity of their theories, the social purposes valid in this reality become an incorporated epistemological interest in their theory formation.

Undoubtedly, social science theorists know that the subjects of a state-created social order, that citizens are a historical construct; under the hand of their methodological apologetics of subjecting their thinking to the made form of reality, all social constructs and the subjects of the social system, to which the social sciences owe their own emergence, as if they were human nature. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, social science thinkers waste no theoretical attention whatsoever on the most obvious inconsistencies of the everyday minds of those who seek to find their paths in life in the paths prescribed for them, they do not ask why, or what fore, because, for reality thinkers, this would be speculative thinking, and they reproduce not only unmoved by the view of the state creatures who try to adapt themselves to this world prescribed for them, despite all the absurdities of this view and despite all the practical failure of its practical implementation, these interpretations of their social life in their theories of social science, gained from their practical needs, but also offer them these theories as a caring service for all the “problems”, which they do not want to get to the bottom of under any circumstances in order to eliminate them, in the interest of their epistemological connection to reality, so that these problems thanks to their thus guaranteed return also provide these sciences with the material for the return of their theories of problem solving. Theories of muddling through, theoretically constructed as each one on the one hand of the other hand and presented with academically twisted insights, are the insights that these theories with their thinking committed to methodical apologetics offer to their clients, clients they never criticize for the mistakes of their thought constructs, which these clients usually not only do not understand but do not even know, because these professional scientific thinkers produce this kind of sophisticated theories, with reference to their concern for the concerns of their research objects only for themselves anyway.4

The inevitable superficiality of this thinking cannot realize that all members of these societies, with a few exceptions, have in common characteristics of their way of life, which, despite all their superficial differences, determine them to an identical as well as fundamental form of life. Whether people are civil servants, white-collar workers, middle or higher class, blue-collar workers, pensioners, housewives, students or the unemployed, all these figures of state social definitions have in common for their way of life that they are variations of a tolerated materialism, that is to say, that they are all—with the few exceptions of those who are defined in this nomenclature far less narrowly, usually more technically as investors, because they are masters of the organization of the life of the society as a whole,—for all the differences in their political definitions, all share the substantial characteristic which consists in having to establish the materialism granted to them as a service for the growth of a wealth of those exceptional people, for whom this politically granted materialism of all those ordinary people is their essential means and their greatest obstacle. The toleration of their materialism, their freedom without the means of its realization, is paid for by all these members of society, who are all the same servants of wealth, with a life consisting of the same lifelong labor for this wealth of the “investors” which they produce and do not gain their lifetime. Such essential distinctions as commonalities escape the reality-based thinking that, with its commitment to reality, gets caught up in the observational observations of society and its superficial differences.

This kind of thinking committed to—its imagined empiricism—with its peculiar superficiality of its form of theory formation, which consists in a hyper-specialized knowledge of all possible facts, numbers and data, and this “empirical world”, which, like every theory, are at first thought buildings, but which in this kind of thinking are thought buildings about a world, which only this kind of social-scientific thinking creates with its thinking through some kind of approaches from the arsenals of disciplinary theory formation, a world, which exists only in the minds of this thinking and in its thinking committed to the purposes of the existing world considers it to be the real reality, and which then confuses knowledge in this “empirical world” about the world with knowledge, this kind of thinking, in its superficiality, escapes all differences between what people and what citizens are, differences between the life plans and goals that people set for themselves and the life paths on which the life paths regulated by law domesticate these life plans in such a way that they prove themselves to be a service to their state and their economy.

In its way of thinking, this science not only fails to notice that there are some differences between people’s life plans and their legal domestications; in its equation of its phenomenological thinking, it does not cause this thinking any headaches either, to present the limitations of such life plans, which are quite noted in it, and their adjustment to the life practices required by the state via law, forced by state power, as factually required necessities of every social life and its naturalized conflicts, and thus to ennoble the state domestications of the permitted materialism of state creatures for the benefit of the materialism of their rule as an aid to the materialism of their subjects. In this way, they ultimately discover the nation-state constructed society as the natural home of man and the view that the state takes of its society as the most natural view of social science thinking of all that is social.

Even if everyone can know that no human being ever demands the effort of work, social science thinking as the state itself, through the eyes of the authorities, present work as an offer, as a service of the authorities to their subjects, an offer to which, as this thinking finds, the state is not obliged, but always helps to ensure that this offer exists; the difference between the desire for money and the desire for means of living is not a real distinction for this thinking through the view of social life regulated by law, because the reality of this society, which is organized by the state, by law allows all its citizens to obtain food only by means of money and allows them to obtain this money only, if they sell their labor to such people who are looking for labor, that is, this service relationship of money owners and owners of work very much in accordance with the constitution as the only way to realize their life plans with money, that is, with those state-administered wealth share certificates.

Thus, for this thinking, this state stipulation that all members of this society can only get hold of the wealth produced by them if they acquire these state share certificates of wealth by selling their labor to their labor buyers, and if they accept, by this sale of their labor, that the work products of their work are owned by the buyer of their labor, for this thinking this is not a case—to put it in legal prose—of a well-coordinated hostage-taking of the society in deed unity with blackmail by the state authorities and by those few exceptional citizens, those buyers of work who, even without working themselves, have all the wealth shares as well as the products of work at their disposal, but for this thinking which is committed to reality and which is not open to any criticism, all this is the philanthropic provision of offers by the state and the economy for the realization of the individual life plans of people, without which these have-nots, who produce everything and to whom nothing of what they produce belongs, would come to nothing and thus, thanks to this provision of jobs, are be able to spend their life as a working life after all.

This realistic view of this society, for which the state is something like the embodiment of a communal organization of the supply of the food necessary for the life plans of its members, a quasi kind of communism, becomes, just like the accommodation of its thinking to the state constructions of the members of society and to their world full of all too human “problems”, including their lifetime—a “social challenge”, which here too reflects rather one-to-one the view of the state of the aging of its subjects. Longer life—a problem? For whom?

After the discovery in Europe and the USA—i.e., in the latitudes of the states dominating the world of states, in other parts of the world, lifetimes move in the opposite direction—that people live longer, it did not take more than a few weeks for the social science professional thinkers to get in line to rediscover one of their “problems” in a longer life as well. While the thinkers, completely in the sense of their sympathies for the concerns of the citizens of the citizen society, first dealt with questions about what one could do in this additional lifetime, after a few weeks of such distant thoughts, the methodical affirmatism of social science theorizing and its art of listening to reality and its purposes as the purposes of humanity had brought this thinking into line and recognized the lifetime of society as that of useful servants of wealth, who has his measure in his monetary growth and not in what these citizens need for their life plans and therefore rethinks the lifetime as a time for service to this wealth, consequently limits this to their period which is profitable in the sense of this monetary growth and with the extension of the remaining lifetime of the servants of wealth discovers the problem that they nevertheless have to get hold of money, which this has earned and which has been forcibly put aside for these useless times, now longer than before, i.e. of more money. That this pot of money grows with the growing age of the people is a problem for the administrators of these useless funds, useless because, from the point of view of its increase, it is a waste of wealth, so that since the extension of the life span, it is debated as the problem of an “aging population”, a debate that reveals already in its concept, which view of the lifetime of whom discovers what problem in this, when it is no longer a question of a longer lifetime of people and what one could do with time, but of a population living longer, that is, the state's view of the phenomenon has entered into the theorizing about a longer lasting life. It had probably taken a few months until the social science professional thinkers had brought themselves to the line of the state's view of the lifetime of its citizens, and discovered, in the usual manner, the same invented “challenges for the community” that they then, as always and everywhere, also presented to people, who have no work and, therefore, when they live longer, have more time but no money for all sorts of things, translated into the problem of costs to the community, i.e. the state, and this problem of how can the state afford people living longer who are useless now presented towards people as their real concern about living longer.

Thus, the theories that eavesdrop on the purposes of reality succeed in taking on all phenomena defined as “problems”, which they alone constantly create as “problems”, i.e. as a way of thinking adapted to the practical handling of these phenomena, according to the purposes given in these problems, because they naturalize their purposes, assume them to be unquestionable, thus, share them under the hand of their care and declare their solution to be the task of politics, and then, with the political care of the monopoly power of society, to call for solutions to all these problems, all of them problems which for this way of thinking can never have been caused by this state endowed despite of all its power, but which this state must be able to solve, so that these political powers have to listen to their professional scientists incessantly and critically, so that they can finally take care of their tasks, invented by their social scientists, which only they attach to state politics. This is annoying for the political powers on the one hand, but it helps to maintain the belief that the solution to all these problems of the citizens must be the task of politics.

Lessons about “Auschwitz”—citizen societies and the refinement of the missions of their state

With its theories and contributions, the Frankfurt School, especially its exponent Adorno, can certainly be described as most influential for the social science thinking of post-war debates not only in Germany but worldwide. From these reflections on the war by Adorno, one can study how non-globalized social science thinking, even when it discusses national political activities, does not adopt the concerns of the German state or its self-representation, thanks to the idealizations of its missions—and yet, with its criticism of this state, theoretically sketches the foundations for the post-war self-portrait of this state.

Adorno’s reflections on what he circumscribes as “Auschwitz” are to be discussed here as an example of how this critical social science thinking at times, when those debates about a globalization of social science thinking were unknown, does not discuss the state program of a certain state, but, using the example of state activities of a particular country, here of Germany, discusses constitutive elements of state societies and their state in general, in this example, in that for these discussions of state missions components of war activities, i.e. activities between states are first constructed as affairs of an individual state, this thinking thus fades out the world of states and their imperialism, and in that this thinking, secondly, with its critique of state war practices, then, through the critical delimitation of war practices and the idealization of what the actual tasks of states against war are, makes itself common to the principle of state politics and, through this, to the German state—in its critically contested, idealized form—and in this way shows itself exemplary, how the—not global—social science thinking does not court any individual state, but rather the concept of state-constructed societies, like that of citizen societies and their political power, and how this thinking then endows this political power with the mission to actually stop the use of warlike violence, which only these political powers are capable of.

“The demand that Auschwitz may not happen again is the very first of education. It precedes all others to such an extent that I don’t believe I need or should justify it.”5

Auschwitz: The crushing of enemies within for the war against another state power outside that has been made an enemy, the violent subjugation of the rule of another state over land and people to its own power by destroying its means of violence and purifying its own society of citizens of its own state power within that has been made an enemy, this is how war goes—and that, war, is first and foremost a matter of what, of education?

War a matter of education? And what if one does not heed the not very squeamish admonition of this figurehead of critical sociological thinking, his view that “Auschwitz” is “first and foremost” a task of education and that this is so fundamental and, therefore, so self-evident that it does not need any justification, what if one does not obey this admonition after all and tries to trace which thoughts must have been made in order to be able to understand Adorno’s view, which indeed was and still is the most common critical view about “Auschwitz” after the war, not only among intellectuals in Germany, and what if one then also tries, in spite of his admonition, to find out how it is that this view means to present it as so self-evident that one must not ask for any why and for what, in order to immunize it against any criticism, and still takes the liberty of asking for any reasons for this view?

In order to anticipate the result of the transgression of this Adorno’s prohibition of thinking that “Auschwitz” is supposed to be a question of education, a theory that derives its entire conclusiveness of this theory about “Auschwitz” only from this prohibition of thinking: It is the state infatuation, not in Germany, but in state societies in general, which cannot be shaken by the war and “Auschwitz”, especially the state infatuation of sociological thought, which, with its diagnosis and with its prohibition of thinking, precisely sketches the view of the war and Auschwitz and precisely the pattern of the post-war raison d’être of German politics, and with which this politics sets off for the next attempt, this time on the economic path after the military path failed, at least for the time being, to become a European economic superpower again, and tackles this again immediately after the war. And today, now that this economic path has been successfully taken, the question is being discussed everywhere as to whether it is still possible to stay out of the world’s wars, in which one has long been involved everywhere, in other words, whether one wants to get even more involved in the military path again.

And how does a critical theorist end up with the pattern of Germany’s post-war raison d’être, including its new national self-image, far from being a nationalist thinker?

It goes like this: With the synonymization of Germany’s politics under the Nazi regime to “Auschwitz”, Germany’s war, i.e. the attempt to establish itself as a European and thus as a leading world power by destroying the political dominions in competing European states and conquering the power over them, this war is, first of all, with the help of scandalizing the destruction of all actual or supposed enemies within warring Germany, just as if there would be war without these scandalous excesses of violence, not only moved out of the focus of reflection, but, at the same time, also deprived any reflection on the connection of war, its specific forms of violence, which only states are capable of, and also on all the internal “cleansing” of the people who are considered enemies of society, of the ground for any reflection. With this scandalization, the war and everything that belongs to it is no longer an object of reflection, so removed from critical reflection, and thus also the internal “cleansing” of the population, carried out with state perfection, of parts of the population that are not considered suitable for war because they are politically and racially unreliable, all this is now no longer an object of any kind of reflection, and thus, as quite beyond the rationality of warlike actions of states, as the actual and only object of thinking about war. Isolated from war what is part of any wars because it is scandalized away, this is the arche typus of the post war (not exclusively) German way of thinking about the war. War, the kind of violence of states against states, is thus no longer the object of reflections on what is discussed by critical thinkers under the synonym “Auschwitz”, the world of states and their warlike dealings, including their internal excesses of violence against parts of their population from the observations of states in war, so successfully dissected from thinking as an object of social science thinking.

With this arrangement of the object of thinking synonymized as the scandalous “Auschwitz” and then, with the separation of state interests in war by means of the condemnation of its warlike means and its victims, then, with the next step, war made a matter of misguided morality and thus a matter of education, not only are the warlike activities inwardly are separated for outwardly, but also the state, the subject of the warlike actions, is finally socio-scientifically defined: All differences of state and subjects are dissolved, all, state and citizen without distinction between the politically ruling and the subjugated subjects, are equally held responsible for “Auschwitz”, and with the assignment of the internal war affairs, scandalized to the abomination, made to a mistaken educational matter, and with this in the next step they are made a question of criticizing the morality of the German citizen, so that the very state, the subject of war and the subject of “Auschwitz”, can appear as the corrective authority of the misguided morality of citizens, thanks to this kind of thinking, and with this the state is assigned its educational mission and through this mission attributed the new raison d’état of the state which is thus purified and reformed.

No wonder that the political representatives, in this cleaning made from warriors into supreme moralists, rejoice over the morally corrupt citizens who are thus made the real responsible for “Auschwitz”, and quickly blurt out that their hand may fall off when they reach for a weapon again.

Any questions about the state aims of things not so unusual for states, such as wars acts like the internal “purges” which, to recall briefly, no citizen, but only state and their political leaders can instigate and carry out, wars in which these states are the ones who burn their citizens, and if any citizens do not want they shoot them in line with all states war laws, wars against other states which are therefore accompanied by wars against these citizens, such as their internal “purges”, which are after all not a particularly unusual event in the history of states, all such questions after all the destructions of the just finished world war, all such questions about wars, which one could also raise as a scientist, what these states aim at with their wars, what duties they enforce on the citizens in them, the very war morality states create for this, with what kind forces all this is enforced on the citizens, not to mention what the German state wanted with its war against the world powers, all these questions are buried with the help of the power of persuasion of the moral force of the misery of a defeat, buried under the mountains of dead citizens and buried under the burden of destruction, buried with the accusation of a misguided moral education of the citizens of this state, all buried together with all the war debris.

The citizen and his morals are pilloried, and the state rises from the ruins of his war confronted with a massive accusation that, the war shows for thinkers like Adorno that it has completely failed in its educational mission—and thus, as an outline of the foundations of its future reasons of state, is assigned by this critical thinker the task of learning from “Auschwitz” by fulfilling its moral mission now educating its citizens to become morally decent citizens—just as if they, the citizens were the real war criminals. What better idea could the remaining remnants of the political class have than finally taking the ever very humane aims of states into their own hands and to take on the mission of finally educating the morally depraved subjects to educate them now to be good national citizens.

Now, one also understands how good it is that the critical sociologist adds that this noble mission of a purified morality and the politics purified by it must not be doubted by anyone. With this logic, which derives from the misery of a lost war together with its hardened prohibition to interpret all its atrocities differently than as the result of a failed moral education of the citizens, and which derives from this for the political class, the makers of the war and rulers over the remaining citizens, the mission to teach the citizens now mores for their disgrace, why one now feels attempted raising the question what this sociological thinker, in his unshakable infatuation with the state in his critical conception of the state as the failed guardian of humanistic ideals, what this thinker would have thought about the state and the morality of the citizens, if this state with its citizens had not lost but won this war and had celebrated this with its victorious citizens. The answer may be thought up by everyone.

In the same way, or as the critical spirit of Adorno conceived it, post-war political propaganda in the construction of the new joint imperial project of Germany and France, called Europe, puts the remaining citizens in charge of rebuilding not only their civic morale, but also the next project of imperial ambitions: The war was branded as a heinous “crime”—because Hitler had not won it, and the “Wehrmacht” was “abused” by Hitler for this purpose, so that the reconstruction of a new Wehrmacht began without interruption. For a short time, one could also think that this branding of war as a “crime” was a position against war (as I said, arm off when someone takes up a weapon again, Adenauer), but with the establishment of the new military force, this was quickly dismissed and corrected as unrealistic pacifism and instead, with the commitment to the moral inscrutability of its state history, which, similar to and thanks to the idea of Adorno’s prohibition of reflection, could not be explained by anything, with the assurance, to say it with Adorno, “that Auschwitz will not happen again”, with the reconstruction of the same state and the same market economy, new plans for the next, now peaceful conquest of Europe and the world were started with the morally clean means of a successful market economy, actively militarily supported by the USA, which through this war then instead of the Germans became a world power, now also militarily repaired by them for its war goals against the same enemy. No state in the world would, of course, reject this offer and with “Never again Auschwitz” as the proof of a new purified raison d’être, and, what a surprise, the fingers that were supposed to fall off when reaching for a weapon again, thanks to the successful application and redemption of Adorno’s demand for a purified moral education, not only remained on the line thanks to this ostentatious confession of a moral guilt, but were, as we can see today, the perfect garnishment of the strategy to make the German state for the time being, at least, a hegemon in Europe, with the best prospects to challenge the global supremacy of the world power USA under German leadership of Europe and to reopen an old calculation for the Russians. With this, we arrive in the ideological department of state politics in today’s world, thanks to the application of the socio-scientifically critical thought patterns of thinkers like Adorno.

For in this or a similar way, critical social science reflections before their “globalization” about the war of states construct their ideas about their actual higher humane, moral missions and thus strengthen the belief that all these states, despite all this, are actually always concerned about the well-being and morals of their citizens and that it is them, these states, who always have their concerns with the morals of their citizens. The real goal of states, set with the social-scientific criticism of the German state as the failure of its educational mission to educate morally integrity-conscious citizens, endows the world of states with their critical idealism and missions in a way similar to what happened for post-war Germany, and thus provides the states of the world with their critical images of their noble missions and those of their special missions in the world of nation-states, self-portraits, which sometimes, thanks to the course of world history, such as in the case of Germany, need to be readjusted. For this, for the rescue of the idea of the state as the guardian of all values, whose persuasiveness it has called into question with its war, social science thinking a la Adorno knows how to offer its theoretical services for correction to all doubters about what drives nation states. For Adorno, for this pre-globalized thinker, it was the German politics that he critiqued for misusing the nation state and failing to do what the nation states are originally for, for the moral education of the citizens and this state mission is for thinkers like Adorno so natural that he takes for granted that it is so redundant to be justified.

The Vietnam War—a challenge for the cohesion of a citizen society

Another social scientist, one of the world’s most distinguished thinkers and, a synonym for critical thinking like Adorno, is Bourdieu, another pioneer of social science theorizing before this “globalization” of theorizing.

The fact that the title of his famous book, “Homo Academicus,”6 insinuates that Bourdieu—a social scientist who, like Adorno, is certainly not suspected of being a nation-state biased thinker—announces under this title a theory about a species of man, the academics that can be found all over the world, does not in the least irritate this prominent and much-cited thinker, when his book, under this general title about a human species found worldwide, presents a study that deals with investigations at two faculties of a university in France, and a study which, quite apart from any “globalized” thinking, does not say a word about who and what distinguishes this Homo Academicus as a species that can actually be found worldwide. This study, unaffected by the actual worldwide existence of his subject, a human species of every citizen society, theorizes on the question, not what distinguishes this human species, the academic, but, after he flirtatiously debates in a long introduction about whether an academic like him can theorize about the academic in order to arrive at the result, he with his broadly rolled out self-critical methodical insights can do it, in order to, after he has awarded himself the theoretical suitability, debate under this ambitious title of his book the question why academics in these two faculties, of which one, obviously following the plausibility of an assumed common sense and—anticipating the answer to his whole questioning—stands for “conservative” and the other for “progressive” academics, what characterizes these “conservative” and “progressive” faculties and why these academics joined or did not join the protest movements in France in the 1970s.

Even if it is not easy to ignore the tautological answer to the question, which is already too openly predicated on the pretentious distinction between conservative and progressive academics, it is, nevertheless, remarkable how little the social science thinking of a theoretician who is, by no means, a nationalist, how little it somehow irritates this non-“globalized” thinking to think under the title of the species of academic about the differences between academics in matters progressive versus conservative that make him concerned as a sociologist, that is, the question of whether this homo academicus is, as one would sociologically say, a retarding or progressive social subject. Social science thinking before that “globalized” version does not reflect on any individual nation-state characteristics of phenomena, here that of the academic, but on nation-state constructed objects as such, beyond any comparison of nation states and their creatures such as the Homo Academicus, even if no one knows better than Bourdieu that the academic is a creature of state science that experiences quite diverse interpretations among the states of the world, differences unlike him globalized theorizing is so keen on.

Such questions of international comparative theories about the academic are not familiar to pre-globalized social science thinking, which is interested in the creatures of states in general, here the academic, and sociological thinking is interested in the academic—in what sociologists are interested in everything and everyone, which is why they are sociologists.

What does the sociological thinker, who is one of the most cited thinkers worldwide, theorize about under this title when he reflects on the academic under the question of their progressiveness versus conservatism? What moves this critical theorist under this question, under which he analyzes the Homo Academicus?

Dealing with the question of why the two departments at the Sorbonne have different political positions on what makes the student movement concerned, a thinker like Bourdieu knows, of course, that this protest by initially essentially intellectuals was directed against the US war against Vietnam, an object of protest that he is very familiar with and personally shares, but which is not addressed anywhere in his studies of conservative and progressive departments at the Sorbonne under the topic of a “homo academicus”. The Vietnam War, or rather the protest against it, is for this academic who theorizes about Homo Academicus only the political occasion promising him scientific attention, to debate the questions that interest him as a sociologist about any topic.

Vietnam War and protest against it, that is the world of politics, world politics is a subject of political science and for that reason alone it is not the subject of sociological studies. Sociological thinkers are concerned about a completely different, much more profound question, they always reflect on whatever they their object of thinking is: Bourdieu, social scientist, sociologist, left-wing thinker, what makes him concerned and what he does as a sociologist to answer the question why academics joined the protest against the war in Vietnam or not, a war, by the way, in which France, as the old colonial power, was still heavily involved—Bourdieu, who is above all whatever he thinks about a sociologist, and as sociologist, he does what sociologist always do: he digs in tons of all kinds of data, all of which have in common that they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the Vietnam War or the war in general, but which are made up of all the ordinary kinds of data, the study of which provides sociologists with enlightening information about everything, really everything they study, data that sociologists find incredibly exciting, whatever they study, and which they also interpret when they are looking for an explanation, better after a confirmation of the explanation they have—which distinguishes conservativeness from its tautological opposite progressiveness—and do this through association-impregnated interpretations of data that should allow them to understand why people somewhere in the world are protesting against whatever, i.e. progressive, for him equals good, no matter what and where and why, just as the same data allow them to deeply understand why people only drink the same Coca Cola and others don’t, or why some beat up their children, i.e. are conservative, i.e. are bad.

Social scientists, here sociologists, know already, thanks to their disciplinary access to the objects of their theorizing, exactly how and where they find their answers to their questions, because they already have them, thanks to their disciplinary access, here why the world knows conservative and progressive academics and dig in their data on academics, just as if these subjects were a mere sociological synonym for any citizen in matters of progressiveness versus conservativeness. As for anything they dig in data like these: the family status, i.e. married, divorced, their sex, their age, what newspapers they read (conservative or progressive, enlightening), what kind of cars they drive, Deuschewo or Peuschewo, the districts where they live, Clichy or Bois de Boulogne, the size of their apartments in square meters, the number of children, the age when they got married, etc. and so on. ; in other words, all the card indexes constructed from a profoundly nation-state perspective and the state data derived from them on information defined by citizenship and collected accordingly, which serve the sociologically trained mind of a sociologist as profound “indicators” for theorizing about what sociologists always and in everything makes concerned, namely, the question of the extent to which citizens succeed in making friends with what sociologists have defined as their deepest need, their nationally defined duties, sociologically translated as the need for conformity with or deviations from their “social roles” or similar varieties of social classifications of the wholeness of societies, in order to pursue their sociological concern and to constantly observe whether the citizen simply follows their intended classification to and their community (conservative), i.e. everything remains as it is, or strives towards new kinds of interpretation of citizens life (progressively), so that the cohesion of society might be challenged on the basis of the given “norms”, and so that politics is challenged in its function, attributed to it by sociologists, of holding all and everything together, social cohesion they call the sociological top concern. Just as sociology ticks: Sociality as the noblest supreme task of state politics and sociological science as providing alarm signals for the demand for political intervention if this sociality is to be endangered. This is how sociologists look at the world, this is how they look at anything and this is how they look at academics.

For Bourdieu, in search of an answer to the question of who follows the protests and who does not, this question can thus be answered as easily as all sociologically constructed tautological questions. The fact that the objects of his research are academics can be entirely ignored; they only stand, anyway, for the only question that makes sociological thinking, no matter which genre of citizen arouses their interest concerned.

And one had almost suspected it: people who pay attention to their social status, who live in posh apartments in the Bois de Bologne, who drive fat cars, etc., etc., in other words, who have indicators pinned to them as proof of their conservatism, betray to the sociological mind that these conservatives can unambiguously only be conservatives and who—crystal clear—because conservatives, are conservative, and therefore do not join what is not conservative, i.e., the protest. And, who would have thought it, the other way round are those progressives: people who don’t get married when they should, drive a 2CV, live in cheap apartments in Montmartre, read critical newspapers, are people, as you can “conclude” from the indicators, who change or swap roles and these are without doubt the ones who go to protest for exactly that reason, and are therefore clearly—progressive.

Because sociological thinking translates every question about whatever and whoever into its one and only question, how the cohesion of society is, it has no problem asking the question of who is protesting against the Vietnam War and who is not, this question of a war, of a military conflict between states, to the sociologically translated completely detached question of who is the preserver and innovator, in order to understand sociological thinking as immensely critical with its concern for the preservation of the cohesion of a citizen society, so that there are citizens who join the protesters, because they, since they are progressive, represent the society’s future. And, because this sociological thinking can always use the same “indicators” for this kind of theoretical insight, which always addresses the same sociological question about everything and everyone, the competitive society is always criticized for this, with all its potential to endanger social cohesion, any society, sociological thinking knows originates from the nature of any society, any society is a society with all the invented worries about the eternally threatened cohesion of society. In line with of all the criticism, sociological thinking is also realistic enough to regard the state-made competitive society, with all its various private subjects and social conflicts, despite showing their most obvious nature as nation-state made subjects all being private property owners, as the archetype of all social life and to, therefore, keep a critical eye on it from sociological thinking to see whether anything does not cause this society to totter and require the intervention of its political violence.

Thus Bourdieu writes a book about what he, as a social science thinker, considers worth explaining about demonstrations against a war: first and foremost, himself, Bourdieu, the superior homo academicus, who ponders about homo academicus, its “social structure” or similar things that are immensely worth knowing for social science thinkers, who are all concerned about the existence of citizen societies, above all, their ever questioned cohesion and even more so about that of their representative of sociality, their state. This thinking, it must be noted, is all not nationalistic, despite all the concerns for the cohesion of the citizen society, or better not yet nationalistic, engaged by concerns about the cohesion of citizen societies and their states and committed to the sustainability of these citizen societies and their states, the more.