Hubert Kiesewetter

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Hubert Kiesewetter (born July 11, 1939 in Dessau ) is a German economic and social historian and philosopher.

Life

At the end of June 1945, his family moved from Dessau to Auerbach an der Bergstrasse in Hesse on the instructions of the US authorities , where his father Erwin Kiesewetter worked with the future US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the denazification process. Kiesewetter completed elementary school there from 1946 to 1954 and then began a three-year apprenticeship in Darmstadt, with a qualification as a machine fitter and later training as a technician and locomotive driver at the Deutsche Bundesbahn . From 1960 he worked for various companies in Darmstadt and at the same time attended the evening grammar school in Darmstadt , where he passed his Abitur in 1963.

After meeting and later friendship with the son of the great-uncle of Theodor W. Adorno , Anton Calvelli-Adorno, he first decided on archeology, Latin and Greek and from the winter semester 1964/65 on philosophy with Adorno, whom he had met personally to study, also history and economics. After further studies in sociology and economics in Kiel , he finally went to the London School of Economics in London in 1967 because of Karl Popper to do his Master of Science there. The encounter with Popper turned into a lifelong scientific and personal friendship.

Strongly influenced by Popper's philosophy of science, social philosophy and critical rationalism , he decided to write a dissertation on Hegelianism with Ernst Topitsch in Heidelberg, which was accepted in 1973 under the title "From Hegel to Hitler". The work was received largely skeptically or even negatively by the philosophical experts, so that a habilitation in philosophy did not seem possible or sensible. From Hegel to Hitler is "a necessary book, insofar as it reminds against the prevailing liberal and left-Hegelian appropriation of the right-wing Hegelian Hegel", but "unfortunately an extremely one-page book if one wanted to accept it as an interpretation of the whole of Hegel," judged Henning Ottmann .

Finally, Kiesewetter completed his habilitation in 1985 at the Free University of Berlin for economic and social history with a thesis on the industrialization of Saxony in the 19th century. During this time he was able to work at the Institute for Economic and Social History under the direction of Prof. Drs. Wolfram Fischer, among other things, on the research focus "German industrial history up to the First World War" and on several projects on German and European industrial history.

Since 1986 he has conducted research in the USA, England and France. 1986/87 he was visiting scholar at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, 1987/88 Konrad-Adenauer-Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, shortly afterwards visiting professor at St Antony's College in Oxford (1989/90). Since the summer semester of 1990, Kiesewetter taught as a professor for economic and social history at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt . In 1994 he was visiting professor at the Sorbonne IV in Paris for six months.

His research focuses on regional industrialization research in Europe (especially Germany, France, Great Britain), regional analysis, philosophy of science and European history and politics since antiquity.

On his initiative, Sir Karl Popper received an honorary doctorate in 1991 from the Faculty of History and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. In 2001, together with Helmut Zenz, he organized a conference on Popper's social philosophy and ethics in Eichstätt, whose presentations were published in 2002 in the volume "Karl Poppers Contributions to Ethics" by Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen. In 2002, Hörverlag published five diskettes with speeches and conversations by Karl Popper under the title "Critique and Reason. On the Infinity of Ignorance", which Kiesewetter selected and wrote a 20-page accompanying text. In 2003, Kiesewetter reissued the two volumes of "The open society and their enemies" and the book "The misery of historicism" with extensive afterwords as part of Karl Popper's collected works.

Kiesewetter retired on October 1, 2004 .

Works

  • Industrial revolution in Germany. Regions as growth engines , Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp Verlag) 1989; Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag) 2004. ISBN 3-515-08613-7 . Japanese translation 2006.
  • From Hegel to Hitler. The political realization of a totalitarian power state theory in Germany (1815-1945) , Hamburg (Hoffmann and Campe Verlag) 1974; 2nd completely changed and expanded edition, Frankfurt am Main (Verlag Peter Lang) 1995. ISBN 3-631-49239-1
  • with Rainer Fremdling (Ed.): State, Region and Industrialization , Ostfildern (Scripta Mercaturae Verlag) 1985. ISBN 3-922661-14-9
  • Unique Europe: fortuitous and necessary factors of industrialization . Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 1996, ISBN 3-525-01362-0 ; 2nd modified edition, Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag) 2006. ISBN 3-515-08927-6
  • Region and Industry in Europe 1815-1995 , Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag) 2000. ISBN 3-515-06781-7
  • Karl Popper - Leben und Werk , Eichstätt (self-published) 2001. ISBN 3-00-007690-5
  • Unreal or real story? A treatise on methodological questions in historical science , Herbolzheim (Centaurus Verlag) 2002. ISBN 3-8255-0378-X
  • Overcoming Poverty in the Third World. Does Africa have a chance? , St. Katharinen (Scripta Mercaturae Verlag) 2002. ISBN 3-89590-112-1
  • with Michel Hau (ed.): The change in industry, science and technology in France and Germany in the 20th century , Würzburg / Boston (Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag) 2002, ISBN 3-935176-14-7 . French edition: Chemin vers l'an 2000. Les processus de transformation scientifique et technique en Allemagne et en France au XXe siecle , Bern (Peter Lang) 2000. ISBN 3-906758-61-3
  • with Helmut Zenz (Ed.): Karl Poppers Contributions to Ethics , Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2002. ISBN 3-16-147773-1
  • (Ed.): Karl R. Popper, Das Elend des Historicismus , Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2003, ISBN 3-16-148069-4
  • (Ed.): Karl R. Popper, The open society and its enemies I and II , Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2003, ISBN 3-16-147843-6 .
  • The industrialization of Saxony. A regional comparative explanatory model , Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag) 2007. ISBN 3-515-08582-3
  • with Dario Antiseri (Ed.): La società aperta di Karl Popper. Le vicende editoriali di un'opera scritta tra difficoltà e accolta tra sospetti e ostilità, Soveria Mannelli (Rubbettino) 2007, ISBN 978-88-498-1887-1
  • Julius Wolf 1862–1937 - between Judaism and National Socialism. A scientific biography , Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag) 2008. ISBN 3-515-09116-5
  • Karl Marx and Humanity , Berlin (Duncker & Humblot) 2011. ISBN 978-3-428-13428-1 (print); ISBN 978-3-428-53428-9 (e-book)
  • Critique of Modern Democracy , Hildesheim / Zurich / New York (Georg Olms Verlag) 2011. ISBN 978-3-487-14551-8
  • From Richard Wagner to Adolf Hitler. Variants of a racist ideology , Berlin (Duncker & Humblot) 2015, ISBN 978-3-428-14543-0
  • Karl Marx and the fall of capitalism , Berlin (Duncker & Humblot) 2017. ISBN 978-3-428-15105-9
  • The misery of conjunctivism. An analysis of methodological questions in historical science , Düren 2019. ISBN 978-3-8440-6783-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philosophisches Jahrbuch 82 (1975) 234.
personal data
SURNAME Kiesewetter, Hubert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economic and social historian
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Dessau