Volume 81 No. 3 (Fall2014) German Perspectives on the Social Sciences

This issue is available for order through the Johns Hopkins University website. Please click here to purchase.

Click author name for bio and other articles by the author.

GERMAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Arien Mack, Journal Editor
Volume 81, Number 3 (Fall 2014)


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Harald Hagemann
Introduction
The introduction focuses on the foundation of the “University in Exile” in 1933, which provided a forum for the integration of émigré scholars into American academic life, and led in the 1960s to the establishing of the Theodor Heuss chair at The New School for Social Research. It then discusses some outstanding contributions of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, which was succeeded by Social Research in 1934. Finally, a short summary on the contributions to this special issue is given.

Hauke Brunkhorst
Constitutional Evolution in the Crisis of the Early Twenty-first Century
Beginning with some general remarks on law and evolution, the paper queries the Westphalian narrative of modern state formation, centered on the evolutionary concept of normative constraints of morally neutralized processes of evolutionary adaptation. In light of long-time evolutionary change, a brief sketch follows concerning the democratic transformations of international and national constitutional law. But there can be no jurisgenetic progress without the threat of jurispathetic regression. The internal and external limits to democratic constitutionalism have come to the fore since the effective political establishment of a global neoliberal regime in the mid-1970ts. Europe is no exception but is still in a process of constitutional evolution that is open to alternative pathways enabled by the egalitarian normative constraints of global, regional and national constitutional and public law

Urs Jaeggi
Here and There: Reflections on Postcolonial Art and Society
" Do we live in a post-colonial neocolonized world? Is “think local and act global” a solution? What contribution can literature, music and art make to the discussion?

Karl-Heinz Kohl
The Future of Anthropology Lies in Its Own Past: A Plea for the Ethnographic Archive
While anthropology went through a period of disturbing self-reflectivity and profound epistemological doubts, its classical field of study changed dramatically. Instead of small and relatively homogenous face-to-face societies, today’s anthropologists are studying the social transformations triggered by the pressure of globalization. Yet the more these societies adapted themselves to the conditions of modernity, the greater the significance of the ethnographic data collected by anthropologists since the end of the eighteenth century. For indigenous peoples, these data often represent the only written sources on their history, becoming increasingly important in their struggle for land and cultural rights.

Norbert Frei
German Zeitgeschichte and Generation, or How to Explain the Belated Career of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft
The concept of Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history) was introduced in postwar Germany as a critical inquiry into the history of the Nazi period. Yet the historians themselves had been contemporaries of the "Third Reich.” During the first decades of scholarly research, the question "How could that happen?" almost exclusively related to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, and only much later on was redirected to the Second World War and the Holocaust. The article argues that in order to explain this shift, one needs to take into account the change of generations—both within German society in general and among contemporary historians.

Christoph Menke
Feeding America: Immigrants in the Restaurant Industry and Throughout the Food System Take Action for Change
"The restaurant industry is one of the largest and fastest growing segments of the US economy. At the same time, it is also one of the lowest-quality employers in terms of wages and benefits in the United States, which disproportionately affect immigrants and people of color. This is in part due to policy passed in Congress lobbied for by the National Restaurant Association, which primarily represents the nation’s Fortune 500 restaurant corporations. To address the needs of restaurant workers, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United developed a multi-pronged strategy involving multiple stakeholder groups within the industry: workers, employers, and consumers."

Ellen Ernst Kossek and Lisa Buxbaum Burke
At the Brink of Law: Hannah Arendt’s Revision of the Judgment on Eichmann
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem ends with the repetition, and affirmation, of the court’s judgment on Eichmann. The article argues that this re-performance of the legal act of judgment follows precisely from the self-reflective problematization of legal judgment which Arendt’s book presents as the only way to do justice to the Eichmann case. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem should thus be read as an exploration of the paradox at the bottom of law.

Bertram Schefold
Economics without Political Economy: Is the Discipline Undergoing Another Revolution?
There is a controversy in Germany and at an international level on whether economics, as represented in the top journals, is moving away from political economy towards abstract reasoning. Defenders of the mainstream argue that with inevitably increasing specialization, research must combine theoretical and empirical methods to solve problems of applied economics that are politically relevant. Such an approach misses what was meant by political economy since its inception; the problem is to reconstruct the concept so as to understand the changes and the economic crises of society in the process of globalization. What political economy really means is a deep problem in the history of economic thought.

Heinz-Dieter Kurz
Transatlantic Conversations: Observations on Marx and Engels’ Journalism and Beyond
The paper discusses the activities of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as journalists. The focus of attention is on their lead articles written for the New York Tribune in the period 1851–1862. Important themes of the articles include the role of slavery for the development of US capitalism, the latter's characteristic features as compared with British capitalism, which for some time they considered the paragon of capitalist development, and some of the reasons why Marx failed to complete volumes II and III of Capital.

Stephan Klasen
Inequality in the United States and Germany: Facts, Interpretations, and Blind Spots
There is renewed scholarly and public interest in the issue of economic inequality on both sides of the Atlantic. This paper first presents some trends and facts on inequality, then reviews debates about high and rising inequality in the US, before turning to blind spots in inequality debates in Europe, with a particular focus on Germany. The paper ends with some speculations about the differences in the nature of the debates and policy action on inequality on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rainer Forst
Justice and Democracy in Transnational Contexts: A Critical Realistic View
Whereas in the area of international relations classical realism has come under attack, in political philosophy various versions of realism have recently been developed. Yet all of these approaches overlook either the reality of social conflicts or the emancipatory function of normative notions such as human rights or the meaning of political autonomy. A realistic and critical theory of transnational justice needs to begin with an analysis of the relations of rule and/or domination, whether within, between, or beyond states. And because reflexive justice requires structures of justification whereby those subject to rule or domination can become the normative authorities co-determining them, a complex account of transnational justice and democracy results. "

Axel Honneth
The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept
Though the idea of “social pathologies” or “diseases” of a whole society has been quite common since Rousseau`s Second Discourse and especially prominent within the tradition of critical theory, it is not really clear who precisely is proposed to have fallen ill here in the first place. Is it only some sufficient number of individual persons, is it the collective understood as a macro-subject, or is it the “society” itself as having been encroached upon by a particular disorganization of its social institutions in their functional efficiency to such an extent that one can confidently speak of a distinctively social “disease”? For all three alternative attributions— i.e., the sporadic individuals with the total amount of their illnesses, the collective with its own particular clinical syndrome, and the society itself as fallen ill—sufficient instances can be found in the corresponding literature. In order to find a way out of these conceptual perplexities lying at the very heart of this way of talking, I deal with the theoretical proposals by Alexander Mitscherlich and Sigmund Freud, who both defend a specific concept of “social pathologies” or “diseases” based on psychoanalytical insights. The result of my critical reconstruction will be that only an understanding of the society as an organic entity allows a nonreductive use of the idea of “social pathologies”.

Albrecht Wellmer
On Critical Theory
“Critical Theory" was originally an interdisciplinary project of the members of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt in the twenties and thirties of the previous century, a project inspired by Marx’ s critique of political economy. In this essay the term is used in a wider sense, including not only the work of later members of the Frankfurt Institute such as Habermas and Honneth, but also some related work done by philosophers outside the Frankfurt tradition, including Balibar, Hardt/Negri and Žižek. While various forms of critical theory are shown to be responses to varying social and historical constellations in this essay, the essay is also an accumulation of arguments showing why (existing?) capitalism and democracy have become irreconcilable opposites.