Georg Rusche

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Georg Rusche (born November 17, 1900 in Hanover ; died October 19, 1950 in London ) was a German sociologist.

Life and activity

Rusche was the son of the doctor of the same name, Georg Rusche. After attending school in Hagen, he studied philosophy, law and social sciences in Münster, Frankfurt, Göttingen and Cologne . In 1924 he graduated with one of Erwin von Beckerat supervised work at the University of Cologne Dr. phil. A second doctorate (Dr. soz.) Took place in 1926, also in Cologne. He then worked briefly as a prison director in Bautzen .

At the end of the 1920s, Rusche became Karl Pribram's assistant at the Economics Department at Frankfurt University . From 1930 he also worked at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research .

Life in emigration until 1940

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power , Rusche, who according to the National Socialist definition was considered a half-Jew due to his mother's descent , was dismissed from the service of the University of Frankfurt. He then went to Paris as an emigrant from there to Great Britain. Since he could not find a job there, he temporarily moved to Palestine in 1935 , from where he finally returned to Great Britain. During these years he lived in constant material distress and he was involved in dubious deals that served the purpose of getting money: For example, a newspaper article reported about a marriage fraud he had committed : He promised a woman marriage - although he was homosexual to get financial help from her family and then broke the proposed marriage, citing his psychosexual problems. He also suffered from depression at least since this point in his life and was considered a difficult personality.

In 1939, Rusche's most important work, Punishment and Social Structure , co- authored with Otto Kirchheimer , appeared in English translation in the United States as the first publication of the International Institute of Social Research. The work, a systematic investigation of the interrelationship between the penal system and social affairs (especially the labor market) from the late 16th century to the 1930s, was based on a research project that he had started while working at the Institute for Social Research in Germany in 1931 : After he had written a short essay on the relationship between the penal system and the labor market, inspired by his work in the Saxon penal system, he was commissioned by the Institute for Social Research in 1931 to carry out a book-size study on this subject. A summary of this project was published in 1933 in the institute's journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung . During his emigration, Rusche had completed the associated manuscript of the work, which was more than 400 pages long. However, since the reviewers saw this as in need of revision and Rusche was unable to do so due to his stay in Palestine, the lawyer Kirchheimer was commissioned with the revision. The work, which was revised between the winter of 1937 and the summer of 1938, was therefore published in English in 1939 under the names of both researchers. A translation back into German was first published in 1974.

Punishment and Social Structure is considered a key text in critical theory , but was only moderately received in criminal sociology. In terms of content, Rusche and Kirchheimer try to show that the penal system is not to be viewed as an independent social entity, but that there is a close relationship between it and the socio-economic conditions in which it is embedded (known in research as the Rusche and Kirchheimer theory ): You opposed the then prevailing theory that the social reaction to crime was simply a consequence of the crime as such and interpreted the incarceration of prisoners as an expression of the overarching social structures. The labor market and its requirements and conditions at a particular point in time determine the type, organization and extent of imprisonment at that point in time. As a supplementary hypothesis, they also introduced the idea into research that the living conditions in prison in a society at a certain time are always in direct relation to the living conditions outside it: for the prison system to have a deterrent effect, the quality of life in prison must be always be lower than the quality of life of the poorest of the poor - from whose class a large part of the prisoners would usually come - outside the prison.

Both put the emergence of the penitentiary and almshouses in the early modern era in connection with the economic policy of mercantilism and the resulting need for labor.

World War II and post-war period

In 1940 Rusche was arrested as an enemy alien in Great Britain - as he was still formally a German citizen - as a result of the outbreak of World War II . Together with several hundred other German and Italian prisoners of war and internees, he was deported to Canada on the ship Arandora Star : He survived the sinking of this ship - in which half of the just over 1500 people on board were killed - during the crossing across the Atlantic by a German submarine on July 2, 1940 and was recovered from another ship with other survivors. He was subsequently held in various internment camps before he was released again in early 1941.

After the war he lived again in Great Britain, where he earned his living at émigré schools. He changed his occupations in quick succession, u. a. on allegations that he had improper relationships with some of his pupils. In November 1950, Rusche committed suicide.

literature

  • Alessandro DeGiorgi: "Prisons and Social Structures in Late Capitalist Societies", in: David Scott (Ed.): Why Prison? , 2013, pp. 26-30.
  • Barry Godfrey / Graeme Dunstall: "Sociological Inquries. The Legacy of Rusche and Kirchheimer", in: Ders./Ders .: Crime and Empire 1840-1940 , 2013, pp. 28-30.
  • Andrian Howe: Punish and Critique. Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penalty , Routledge, New York 1994, pp. 10-16.
  • Dario Melossi: Georg Rusche. A Biographical Essay. Crime and Social Justice , 14th vol. (1980), pp. 51-63.
  • Ders .: "Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer. Punishment and Social Structure", in: Crime and Social Justice Spring-Summer 1978, Issue 9, pp. 73-85.
  • Helge Peters: "Social structure and penal execution", in: Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff: Lexikon sociological works , 2013, p. 584.
  • Franklin E. Zimring / Gordon J. Hawkins: The Scale of Imprisonment , 1993, pp. 3-14 and 29-47.

Fonts

  • " Prison revolts or social policy. About the processes in America", in: Frankfurter Zeitung of June 1, 1930. (Reprinted as "Prison Revolts or Social Policy: Lessons from America", in: Crime and Social Justice , 13 (1980), p . 41–4)
  • Labor market and prison system. In: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , 1933, pp. 63–78.
  • Comments on the concept of law and the principles of philosophical legal theory , 1924.
  • Comments on the logical basis of theoretical economics , 1929.
  • Punishment and Social Structure (with Otto Kirchheimer ), New York 1939.
    • Social structure and prison system (with Otto Kirchheimer), translated by Helmut u. Susan Kapczynski, European Publishing House, Cologne / Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-434-20054-1 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See: Rolf Wiggershaus : Die Frankfurter Schule. History Theoretical Impact Political Significance, Munich 2008, p. 262.
  2. ↑ Axel Honneth (Ed.): Key texts of the critical theory . VS, Wiesbaden 2006, p. 282 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Rusche, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH 17th November 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1950
Place of death London