Bernhard Giesen

Bernhard Giesen (2007)

Bernhard Giesen (born May 20, 1948 - December 26, 2020 ) was a German sociologist and science theorist .

Life

Bernhard Giesen studied sociology at the University of Heidelberg (MA 1972), received his doctorate in 1974 from the University of Augsburg with a dissertation on " Theories of Structural Inconsistency" and completed his habilitation in 1980 at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster with a thesis on "Social Identity and Evolution " .

From 1979 to 1983 he was the spokesman for the section “Sociological Theories” in the German Society for Sociology . In his work as a professor of macro-sociology at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen from 1982 to 1999, he was, among other things, the spokesman for the interdisciplinary state research focus “National and cultural identity as a problem in the modern European era” (1988–1991); later head of research in the DFG Collaborative Research Center “Cultures of Remembrance” (1997–1999).

From 1999 until his retirement in 2013, Bernhard Giesen was Professor of Macrosociology at the University of Konstanz ; There he was head of research in the DFG Collaborative Research Center “Norm and Symbol” and member of the board of excellence cluster 16 “Cultural Foundations of Integration”.

His most important visiting professorships include: Stanford University 1989, UCLA 1990–1991, University of Chicago 1991, Bielefeld University 1991–1992, European University Institute Florence 1994–1995, Stanford University (Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences) 1998-1999. From 2001 he was a regular visiting professor at Yale University .

Giesen died at the end of December 2020 at the age of 72 after a long period of suffering.

Act

In the seventies, Bernhard Giesen's work initially focused primarily on questions of scientific theory and methodology, which were also reflected in a relevant textbook written together with Michael Schmid. He worked on the possibilities and limits of comparing theories in sociology, the challenges of reductionism and the possibilities of reducing social macro-phenomena to micro-processes that generate these phenomena, as well as the relationship between sociology and historical studies. In 1980 he published an "evolutionary theoretical introduction to macrosociology".

Bernhard Giesen began his career as a “Popperian” and has followed the developments of this teaching tradition since the late 1970s. Like Thomas S. Kuhn , Imre Lakatos , Paul Feyerabend, and Stephen Toulmin , he found that scientific theories, as well as cultural patterns and decision-making heuristics, are difficult to isolate, and was faced with the question of what the evolutionary success or failure of a particular theory program or one cultural codes are decisive.

On the basis of these epistemological reflections on non-scientific foundations of the sciences, Giesen examined the French postmodern philosophies, which had a broad resonance in Germany at the time, with an "evolutionary perspective on postmodernism", in a Gehlen - Schelsky tradition with a view to the priestly rule of intellectuals.

At the end of the 1980s and parallel to German reunification, Giesen turned to nationalism. In historically extensive work, he investigated the semantic shifts and reversals of the national self-image in the German-speaking area. He identified “intellectual” support layers for whose discourse the immunization tendencies, which were repeatedly criticized in the philosophy of science inspired by Popper, were almost constitutive, and came to the conclusion that the successful assertion of collective identity could not be reduced to a falsifiable proposition , but especially in the field of rhetorical strategies.

In studies on triumph and trauma, he showed that such discourse / identity strategies are found on the side of all those involved in the discourse, on the winners and losers side. On the basis of the perpetrator trauma of the Germans, he analyzed the identity-creating, linguistically unattainable function of collective cultural trauma.

In Zwischenlagen (2010) he tried to design a “culturalist sociology” based on the extraordinary - heroes, perpetrators, victims, demons and monsters - which is not about economic and power analyzes, but about the collective interpretation of the world their individual use. Universal rationality is being replaced by changing ideas of identity.

selected Writings

• Problems of a theory of structural inconsistency. Maro Verlag, Gersthofen, 1975, ISBN 3-87512-104-X .
• with Michael Schmid : Basale Sociology: Theory of Science. Goldmann, Munich, 1976, ISBN 3-442-13303-3 .
• with Jeffrey C. Alexander, Richard Münch , Neil J. Smelser (Eds.): The Micro-Macro Link. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987, ISBN 0-520-05786-4 .
• Macrosociology: An Introduction to Evolutionary Theory. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg, 1990, ISBN 3-455-09232-2 .
• The De-Reification of the Social: An Evolution Theoretical Perspective on Postmodernism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M., 1990, ISBN 3-518-28508-4 .
• The Intellectuals and the Nation: A German Axial Age. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M., 1993, ISBN 3-518-28670-6 .
• National and cultural identity. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M., 1996, ISBN 3-518-28540-8 .
• Collective Identity: The Intellectuals and the Nation 2. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M., 1999, ISBN 3-518-29010-X .
• with Klaus Eder (Ed.): European Citizenship: Between National Legacies and Postnational Projects. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, ISBN 0-19-924120-1 .
• Triumph and Trauma. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder (Colorado), 2004, ISBN 978-1-594-51039-7 .
• with Jeffrey C. Alexander, R. Eyermann, Neil J. Smelser, Piotr Sztompka (Eds.): Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004, ISBN 0-520-23595-9 .
• with Jeffrey C. Alexander, Jason L. Mast (Eds.): Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritua. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, ISBN 0-521-85795-3 .
• Intermediate layers: The extraordinary as the basis of social reality. Velbrück Wissenschaft, Bonn, 2010, ISBN 3-7329-0014-2 .
• with Werner Binder, Marco Gerster, Kim Claude Meyer: Approximate: violence, myth, morality. Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswist, 2014, ISBN 978-3-942393-64-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Bernhard Giesen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Bernhard Giesen in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• History and Sociology Department at the University of Konstanz: Bernhard Giesen

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bernhard Giesen obituary on Lebenswege.faz.net from January 2, 2021