Reflections on America E-Book

Claus Offe

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 192

Beschreibung

At a time when so many cracks have emerged within the imagined community of 'the West', this important new book, by one of the leading social scientists in Europe, examines the intellectual history of comparing Europe and the United States. Claus Offe considers the perspectives adopted by three of Europe's greatest social scientists - Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno - in their comparative writings on Europe. While traveling, studying and working in the US, all three constantly looked back to their European origins, trying to decipher from their American experience what the future may hold for Europe, be it for better or worse. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat, observed the functioning of American democracy with a mix of admiration, envy and deep concerns about the fate of liberty in the 'democratic age'. Max Weber, the German sociologist, reported enthusiastically about the youthful energy he found in the United States, which, however, he saw as gradually succumbing to the stifling tendencies of European bureaucratization. Theodor W. Adorno, the critical theorist and refugee from Nazi Germany, observed with a sense of despair the workings of the American 'culture industry' which he equated to the totalitarian experience of Europe, only to switch to a much more favorable picture upon his return to Germany. Europe and the US are conventionally assumed to share the same trajectory and develop according to some common pattern of 'occidental rationalism', with the observed differences resulting from mere lags and relative advances on one side or the other. In this insightful book, Offe questions the relevance of this paradigm to transatlantic relations today.

Leseprobe

Reflections on America

REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA

Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States

Claus Offe

Translated by Patrick Camiller

polity

First published in German as Selbstbetrachtung aus der Ferne: Tocqueville, Weber und Adorno in den Vereinigten Staaten by Claus Offe © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004

This translation first published in 2005 © Polity Press

The right of Claus Offe to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the

Goethe-Institut.

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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978-0-7456-9456-6

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Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

1  Introduction

2  Alexis de Tocqueville or the Tyranny of the Middle Class

3  Max Weber: American Escape Routes from the Iron Cage?

4  Theodor W. Adorno: ‘Culture Industry’ and Other Views of the ‘American Century’

5  The United States in the Twenty-First Century: Traditions of Religious Socialization and Struggle against ‘Evil’

References and Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

DiA

Tocqueville, Alexis de,

Democracy in America

, 2 vols. [1835, 1840], 1945

DoE

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno,

Dialectic of Enlightenment

, 1986

ES

Weber, Max,

Economy and Society

, 1978

GARS

Weber, Max,

Gesammelte Aufsätze zur

Religionssoziologie

,3 vols. [1920], 1988

GAWL

Weber, Max,

Gesammelte Aufsätze zur

Wissenschaftslehre

, 1968

GPS

Weber, Max,

Gesammelte Politische Schriften

, 2nd edn, 1958

GS

Adorno, Theodor W.,

Gesammelte Schriften

, 20 vols., 1997

PE

Weber, Max,

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of

Capitalism

, 1958

SSP

Weber, Max,

Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik

, 1988

Acknowledgements

This little book is based upon the Adorno Lectures I gave at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in November 2003. The occasion provided a welcome opportunity to revisit the institute in the close academic neighbourhood of which I began my career forty years ago. It also gave me the chance to revisit the writings of three classical authors in the work of whom some common threads and themes are to be discovered and who propose alternative ways of how we can make sense, to the extent we still can, of the notion of ‘the West’. Helpful suggestions have been provided by David Abraham, Harald Bluhm, Christian Brütt, Axel Honneth, Martin Jay, Hans Joas, Peter A. Kraus and Anson Rabinbach, as well as my graduate students Julien Deroin, Nicole Dolif, Dominik Sommer and Robert Schwind at Humboldt University.

Claus Offe

Berlin, 1 March 2005

It is not, then, merely to satisfy a curiosity ... that I have examined America;

my wish has been to find there instruction by which we may ourselves profit.

Alexis de Tocqueville

1

Introduction

Towards the end of 2002, when Axel Honneth did me the honour of inviting me to give the Adorno Lectures of 2003, it might already have been foreseen that relations between Europe and America would define the current intellectual and political debates. In choosing my theme, however, I had no intention of involving myself in current affairs, and I would like to hold to that decision, even if not in a completely consistent manner. My academic teaching has already concerned itself with Max Weber’s largely unclarified relationship to Alexis de Tocqueville1 – to whom he was clearly indebted for many of his ideas or actual concepts, yet whom he never once mentions – and with the subterranean relationship of Adorno and the so-called Frankfurt School to Weber’s sociology and diagnosis of the times. There are also a few things to be discovered about the intellectual legacy that links Adorno to Tocqueville (who was widely read among émigrés of the 1940s in ‘German California’), not the least being the latter’s surprisingly developed theory of a ‘culture industry’ in the 1830s. I therefore welcomed the opportunity to shed some light, if not on a continuity and contemporary elaboration of common intellectual themes, then on thematic affinities and divergences that the three great social scientists display, from their different temporal vantage points, in their analyses of a common object, the United States, as well as in the questions they raise about the condition of Europe in their time. The object of these lectures is the disturbing special case of the American model of Western modernization in contrast to European social conditions and the dangers and prospects of development in store for the continent.