Leveled medium-sized company

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The term leveled medium-sized company for the social structure of the Federal Republic of Germany was coined in 1953 by the sociologist Helmut Schelsky .

thesis

Schelsky put forward the thesis that the social stratification in the Federal Republic is changing significantly due to increasing mobility . More and more people from the lower classes moved up to the middle class and from the upper class back down to the middle class, so that the latter is becoming considerably more important. Increasingly broader sections of the population see themselves as belonging to the " middle class ". He interpreted social prestige and class awareness, for example with regard to the reputation and position of a professor, as a relic of transition to the “leveled medium-sized society”. His position of a stratified model was particularly directed against older and current ideas of a class society .

Schelsky's examples were primarily based on the specific socio-economic conditions of the German post-war period, which culminated in the so-called economic miracle from the mid-1950s . The political maxim of the economics minister who shaped the social market economy and later Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard (CDU) was “ prosperity for everyone ”.

Derivation

According to Schelsky, the development towards a “leveled medium-sized company” has been evident in Germany since the time of National Socialism . However, it is generally found in the “ industrial - bureaucratic societies” of the western world and probably also in the “socialist” societies of the “ Eastern Bloc ”. Schelsky based himself on this argument e.g. Partly on the leveling assumptions of the American political theorist James Burnham , which were widely received at the time and which he had already presented in 1941 in his work Das Regime der Managers .

reception

The results of the "economic miracle" had an impact on the attitudes of large sections of the population, so that Schelsky's term was widely discussed and frequently adopted in sociology , in the mass media and in the general public . Schelsky was probably the best known living German sociologist at the time (similar to Ulrich Beck in the 1990s), which can be explained not only with his eye for emerging topics, but also with his organizational talent and his podium presence.

His statement contradicted u. a. Representatives of a class theory , especially Marxist scientists. For example, the social philosopher Leo Kofler heavily criticized Schelsky's theory. As early as 1957, the liberal sociologist Ralph Dahrendorf rejected Schelsky's view in his work Social Classes and Class Conflict in Industrial Society and emphasized the empirically ascertainable social imbalances. He considered the idea of ​​a leveled (unified) society to be a variant of the National Socialist concept of the national community , which also assumed a quasi-harmonious unity of society and denied its social division into classes or subgroups. Also René King strongly opposed the concept.

When the West German media reported on Schelsky's National Socialist past in the mid- 1960s , his statements were linked to it. However, because of the Cold War , the objections had relatively little public response until the appearance of the “ 68ers ” .

As soon as the normal economic crisis cycle caused greater social differences in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s, the time-related turn of the “leveled medium-sized society” lost its persuasiveness and significance. In the course of globalization and due to the distribution conflicts of a weakly growing economy, it almost completely disappeared from the public eye from the 1970s. To characterize the social structure in Germany, z. B. the term two-thirds society .

See also

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