300 Sozialwissenschaften
Introduction
(2020)
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the complex process of the criminalisation of squatting alongside and beyond its juridical apparatuses. It provides insights into the ways in which the substance of social citizenship has been rapidly and significantly weakened, so that life has become much more precarious for low-income urbanites as well as large parts of the middle-class. The book reconstructs the history of Berlin’s tenant referendum, which induced the passing of a new local Housing Provision Act—one of the most progressive pieces of housing legislation in Germany. It investigates the modes of doing citizenship and social rights in practice, which characterised the creation of Berlin’s Medibüro, a network of medical offices, where medical activists provide free medical services to residents lacking access to the medical insurance system, especially to illegal migrants. The book concludes by providing a brief outlook on future research on urban citizenship.
In the Middle Ages the European cities constituted the bourgeois laboratory for the formulation and the institutionalisation of the rights of citizenship. In 2014, the urban population accounted already for 54 per cent of global population. Yet, globalisation and neo-liberal policies have significantly challenged the social protection systems and social justice. From a sociological perspective, increased urbanisation implies a state of increased individual freedom, while at once it provokes growing social fragmentation. The chapter focuses on these dialectics and analyses to which degree social fragmentation affects the formal institutionalisation of citizenship rights and the substantial access to formally established rights, while at the same time excluding the most disadvantaged social groups, reducing them to mere ‘denizens’ of urban societies.
Durkheim in Germany
(2017)
Just after the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action in 1981, a new generation of interpreters started a different reception of Durkheim in Germany. Hans-Peter Müller, sociologist and editor of the German translation of Leçons de sociologie, reconstructs the history of the German Durkheim’s Reception and illuminates the reasons for his interest in the French sociologist. He delivers different insights into the background which permitted the post-Habermasian generation to reach a new understanding of Durkheim’s work by enlightening the scientific and political conditions from which this new sensibility emerged.
The interview offers a reconstruction of the German reception of Durkheim since the middle of the 1970s. Hans Joas, who was one of its major protagonists, discusses the backdrop that finally permitted a scholarly examination of Durkheim’s sociology in Germany. Focussing on his personal reception Joas then gives an account of the Durkheimian themes that inspire his work.
Dialogue. Divergence. Veiled Reception. Criticism: Georg Simmel’s
relationship with Emile Durkheim
(2017)
Simmel was the only German sociologist who directly cooperated with Durkheim. After an initial impression of convergence between the sociology of social facts and the sociology of social forms, a break between the two founders of sociology became inevitable. Yet, Durkheim and Simmel went on positioning themselves against one other in the years ahead. Durkheim’s allegation of ‘individual psychologism’ induced Simmel to a veiled reception of Durkheim’s methodological approach that permitted him to refine the sociological epistemology he eventually presented in the Soziologie published in 1908. On this basis, he was able to formulate a final criticism of the sociology of social facts as a social psychology.