230013 UE B4 Guided Reading: Thinking Democracy (2025S)

Eric Hobsbawm described the 20th century as an age of extremes. On the one hand, democracies based on a high level of industrialisation and institutionalised education within a constitutional framework were consolidated in the Anglo-American world. On the other hand, totalitarian dictatorships emerged in which romantic and utopian ideas of a distant past or a distant future were to be realised. The most important examples of such societies are represented by National Socialist Germany and Soviet Communist Russia.
The seminar uses classical and contemporary texts to analyse and interpret this dual development of society in the 20th century. One line leads from the Frankfurt School to contemporary authors such as Baumann, Giddens and most recently Alexander, who saw national socialism as a consequence of modernity. On the other side are authors such as Parsons or Gerhardt, who saw a collapse of the modernisation process in National Socialism as a result of Max Weber and his ideal-typical construction of modern society. Parsons in particular had noticed the dual structure of social development and had recognised it in his first major work based on Weber, Pareto and Durkheim.
By analysing sociological theory, the seminar aims to help develop an understanding of the prerequisites of modern society and modern sociology, which boils down to the theorem that the empirical methods of social research (questionnaires and narrative interviews) can only be used under conditions of legal-rational social formation. Selected examples of the analysis of everyday situations, the structure of administration or the world of work will be used to show how the totalitarian societies of the 20th century do not in fact correspond to the structure of modern society. More recent historical literature will also be included for this purpose.
The seminar can also be applied to the interpretation of contemporary societies that are in more or less major crises.