Albert Salomon

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the German surgeon, see Albert Salomon (surgeon) .

Albert Salomon (born December 8, 1891 in Berlin , † December 18, 1966 in New York , NY ) was an American sociologist of German origin who emigrated to New York in 1935 and worked there until his death at the New School for Social Research researched and taught.

Life

Albert Salomon came from a Jewish family that had lived in Berlin since 1765. His father, Ernst Salomon, was a leather importer, his mother Marianne was the daughter of the Hamburg coffee importer Leopold Bunzel. His aunt Alice Salomon was a well-known social reformer and women's rights activist.

He began his studies in 1910 at the Berlin University . Here he first studied art history with Heinrich Wölfflin and the history of religion with Adolf von Harnack , studied the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and was impressed by Georg Simmel . He later went to southern Germany and initially studied briefly with Heinrich Rickert in Freiburg; He then attended humanities lectures and seminars in Heidelberg, among others with Erich Frank , Karl Jaspers , Emil Lask and Friedrich Gundolf , through whom he came into contact with the George Circle . The circle gathered for jour fixe at Marianne Weber and Max Weber , where he met Ernst Bloch , Emil Lederer , Georg Lukács , Karl Mannheim and Hans Staudinger, became closer to him than the George Circle .

During the First World War, Salomon served as a simple soldier in a field hospital. He then worked in his father's leather import business and as a bank clerk. In 1921 he received his doctorate in Heidelberg with the study The Friendship Cult of the 18th Century in Germany by Gerhard Anschütz , Eberhard Gothein , Emil Lederer and Heinrich Rickert .

After Salomon had initially withdrawn from the academic world, Hans Simons brought him in 1926 as a lecturer at the German University of Politics in Berlin, which was founded in 1920 . In the same year he published a fundamental essay on Max Weber in the journal Die Gesellschaft. International revue for socialism and politics , whose editorial responsibility he took over in 1928 in place of Rudolf Hilferding , who was appointed finance minister . As editor, he primarily relied on young authors who were hardly known at the time, such as B. Hannah Arendt , Walter Benjamin , Ernst Fraenkel , Theodor Geiger , Eckart Kehr and Herbert Marcuse , so that the magazine got a new face under his aegis; Solomon said he wanted to bring together "an elite of radicals" in society .

In 1931 Salomon was offered an honorary professor of sociology at the vocational education institute in Cologne. Shortly thereafter, he contracted polio , which resulted in a lifelong disability. In 1933 he lost his office in the wake of the so-called law to restore the civil service . In 1935 he emigrated with his wife and daughter - his son was born in exile - via Switzerland to New York, where he worked at the "University in Exile" of the New School for Social Research until his death in 1966. The best known of his students there are Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann .

plant

With his work during the Weimar era, Salomon places himself in the tradition of the understanding sociology of Max Weber, whom he declared to be a “bourgeois Marx” in his 1926 essay for Die Gesellschaft . This also indicates the second line of tradition that shaped Salomon's early work: Salomon positions himself on the side of a socialist and opposite to a bourgeois sociology, as he sees the bourgeois epoch approaching its end in the sense of Karl Marx . However, he attaches importance to the statement that "the spirit of Marx is not with the Marxists"; in his understanding of socialism he follows his sponsor Emil Lederer.

After emigrating to the New School, Salomon's first concern was to anchor Europe's humanities heritage and, in particular, continental European sociology in his new home. In addition to work on authors who belonged to his environment during his time in Berlin and Heidelberg, such as Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Max Weber and Alfred Weber or Ferdinand Tönnies , his research focus shifted more and more to thinkers of prehistory and early history of sociology, whereby he makes an idiosyncratic but systematically justified selection. Clearly he prefers Goethe , Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt , while he criticizes sociological classics like Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon or Auguste Comte as well as Hegel and now also Marx because they charged sociology with elements of a secular religion.

In his courses Salomon also deals with the ancient Stoa , with Thomas von Aquin , Francisco Suárez , Joseph de Maistre , Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise de Bonald and Donoso Cortés , or with Wilhelm von Humboldt , Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche . In his publications, this approach to the history of ideas in the social sciences is reflected in sociological portraits. B. Erasmus von Rotterdam , Hugo Grotius , Fontenelle , Goethe , Montesquieu or Adam Smith apply. The methodological relevance of these portraits lies in the description of the interaction between biographical, socio-economic and epistemological developments. The portraits are sociological manifestations of the gestalt theoretical approach that Salomon encounters in the New School staff in the person of Max Wertheimer .

Salomon sees himself as the protagonist of a humanistic way of thinking and living, of which he regards Jacob Burckhardt as the most important representative ; accordingly, the foundation of a humanistic sociology can be regarded as his most important contribution to the social sciences . According to this line of tradition Salomon is increasingly critical with ideas of modernity apart, the Humanum diminish the marginal size and raise the idea of progress to unreflective axiom; In a parallel action to Karl Löwith , Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin , with whom he also maintains contact, Salomon recognizes a substitute religion that resulted in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Solomon's sociology sees itself as an aspect of the Enlightenment - which for him is not an epoch of contemporary history, but a transhistorically valid postulate - just as it requires Enlightenment itself. Solomon's criticism applies to a sociology whose first reason is not the human being, understood in his reality and effectiveness, "as doer and treated, striving and suffering", "the eternal human being who always remains the same in changing disguise", but rather in faith to one's own scientific method and exhausted in its transfiguration.

Relevance to the present

The sociological line of tradition to which Solomon's criticism applies is that prevailing in sociology of the 21st century - e. B. in the form of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory or the theory of rational decision , but especially in the form of the epistemologically demanding and empirically irrelevant practice of quantifying social research . On the other hand, various current approaches, e.g. B. the hermeneutic sociology of knowledge or variants of the actor-network theory compatible with Solomon's way of thinking; Through his work they experience a substantive spiritual scientific justification and at the same time can be understood as a productive continuation of his approach, so that Salomon's work remains topical.

During his lifetime, Salomon was unable to implement his plan for a comprehensive monograph on the history of the social sciences. The latter is probably one reason why, compared to other of his colleagues at the New School, such as Alfred Schütz , despite the connectivity of his thinking, he leads a mostly only incidentally mentioned marginal existence in the subject, especially since his work was difficult to access until recently . A five-volume edition of the work is currently in progress at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Frankfurt am Main . The first results of a reception of Solomon's work are now available, including a. a monograph that systematically traces Solomon's position in the "intellectual field" of his time and his "space of thought".

Fonts (selection)

• Salomon, Albert, 1921: The cult of friendship in the 18th century in Germany. Attempt at the sociology of a way of life. University of Heidelberg, dissertation (microfiche). Reprinted in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie , 1979, pp. 279–308.
• Salomon, Albert, 1955: The Tyranny of Progress. Reflections on the Origins of Sociology. New York: Noonday Press. In German translation by M. Rainer Lepsius: Progress as fate and fate. Considerations on the origin of sociology. Stuttgart: Enke 1957
• Salomon, Albert, 1963: In Praise of Enlightenment. Cleveland: Meridian Press.
• Salomon, Albert, 2008: Works , Vol. 1: Biographical Materials and Writings 1921–1933 . With a foreword by Norman Birnbaum. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, ISBN 978-3-531-15483-1 .
• Salomon, Albert, 2008: Works , Vol. 2: Writings 1934–1942 . With a foreword by Guy Oakes. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, ISBN 978-3-531-15697-2 .
• Salomon, Albert, 2010: Works , Vol. 3: Writings 1942–1949 . With a foreword by Dirk Kaesler . VS Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften Wiesbaden, ISBN 978-3-531-15698-9 .

literature

• Grathoff, Richard, 1995: Portrait: Albert Salomon 1891–1966 , pp. 235–242, in: International Sociology , 10
• Gostmann, Peter; Ikas, Karin and Wagner, Gerhard, 2005: Emigration, permanent reflection and identity. Albert Salomon's contribution to the history of sociology , pp. 267–284, in: Sociology. Forum of the German Society for Sociology , vol. 34, issue 3.
• Gostmann, Peter and Claudius Härpfer, 2006: The world of yesterday in the mind of sociology. Albert Salomon and das Tikkun , pp. 23–47, in: Amalia Barboza and Christoph Henning: German-Jewish science fates . Studies on Identity Constructions in Social Science. Bielefeld: transcript.
• Gostmann, Peter and Claudius Härpfer (eds.), 2011: Abandoned stages of reflection. Albert Salomon and the Enlightenment of Sociology. Wiesbaden: VS publishing house for social sciences.
• Gostmann, Peter, 2014: Beyond the Pale. Albert Salomon's Thought Space and the Intellectual Field in the 20th Century. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
• Härpfer, Claudius, 2009: Humanism as a way of life. Albert Solomon's transfiguration of reality . Wiesbaden: VS publishing house for social sciences.
• Matthiesen, Ulf, 1988: “In the shadow of an endless time.” Stages of the intellectual biography of Albert Salomon , pp. 299–350, in: Srubar, Ilja (Ed.): Exil Wissenschaft Identity: The emigration of German social scientists 1933–1945. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
• Mayer, Carl, 1967: In Memoriam: Albert Salomon 1891–1966 , pp. 213–225, in: Social Research , 34, 2
• Sven Papcke : German sociology in exile. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-593-34862-4 (including Chapter X: Progress as Unreasonable. Consequences of Economic Dynamics in the Social World. Theses of the sociologist Albert Salomon. Pp. 206-224).
• Vaitkus, Steven, 1995: Albert Salomon´s Sociology of Culture , pp. 127-138: International Sociology , 10

Web links

• Guide to the Papers of the Albert Salomon Family , Leo Baeck Institute , New York, with a short biography in English.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Albert Salomon: The friendship cult of the 18th century in Germany. Attempt at the sociology of a way of life. In: ders., Werke, Vol. 1: Biographical materials and writings 1921-1933 . VS Verlag 2008, pp. 81-133.
2. ^ Albert Salomon: Max Weber. In: ders., Werke, Vol. 1: Biographical materials and writings 1921-1933 . VS Verlag 2008, pp. 135–156.
3. ↑ Albert Salomon: In the shadow of an endless great time. In: ders., Werke, Vol. 1: Biographical materials and writings 1921-1933 . VS Verlag 2008, pp. 13–29, here p. 26.
4. ^ Albert Salomon: Max Weber. In: ders .: works. Vol. 1: Biographical materials and writings 1921-1933. VS Verlag, 2008, pp. 135–156, here p. 154.
5. ↑ Albert Salomon: In the shadow of an endless great time. In: ders .: works. Vol. 1: Biographical materials and writings 1921-1933. VS Verlag, 2008, pp. 13–29, here p. 26.
6. ^ Albert Salomon: Emil Lederer 1882-1939. In: ders .: works. Vol. 2: Writings 1934-1942. VS Verlag, 2008, pp. 217-224.
7. ↑ Albert Salomon: The Religion of Progress. In: ders .: works. Vol. 3: Writings 1942-1949. VS Verlag, 2010, pp. 191-210.
8. ^ Albert Salomon: Beyond the story: Jacob Burckhardt. In: ders .: works. Vol. 3: Writings 1942-1949. VS Verlag, 2010, pp. 137-190.
9. ↑ Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz : The humanistic definition of sociology - or why sociological education is still indispensable. In: Peter Gostmann & Claudius Härpfer (eds.): Abandoned stages of reflection. Albert Salomon and the Enlightenment of Sociology. VS Verlag, 2011, pp. 57-96.
10. ^ Albert Salomon: Crisis - History - Image of Man. In: ders .: works. Vol. 2: Writings 1934-1942. VS Verlag, 2008, pp. 225–248, here p. 244.
11. ↑ Peter Gostmann: Beyond the Pale. Albert Salomon's Thought Space and the Intellectual Field in the 20th Century . Springer VS Verlag 2014.