Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz

Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz (born September 20, 1953 in Menziken ) is a Swiss sociologist , philosopher and historian of ideas .

Life

Merz-Benz studied philosophy, education, political science and sociology at the University of Zurich , where he was awarded a doctorate in sociology in 1985. phil. PhD. His dissertation was published in 1990 as a book under the title “Max Weber and Heinrich Rickert. The epistemological foundations of sociology ". In 1994 Merz-Benz completed his habilitation with a thesis on Ferdinand Tönnies; his work is the first and so far only habilitation on the work of this sociological classic. For his book “Tiefsinn und Scharfsinn. Ferdinand Tönnies' conceptual constitution of the social world ”he received in 1996 the special prize of the Premio Europeo Amalfi .

In 1998 and 2000 he was Professeur Invité ( visiting professor ) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris . In 2001 he was appointed adjunct professor at the University of Zurich, and since 2002 he has been a research associate at the Sociological Institute and the Philosophical Seminar of the University of Zurich. He retired in 2018. His farewell party took place in June 2018.

In 1994, together with Carsten Klingemann , he founded the working group “Social and Idea History of Sociology” of the German Society for Sociology (DGS) and has been its co-spokesperson ever since. Since 2010 he has been co-editor of the “Yearbook for the History of Sociology”. The central theme is the “history of sociology as the self-explication of sociology”.

His main research interests are sociological theory and history of theory, the history of sociological ideas, the sociology of religion and the sociology of culture. In addition to works on sociological classics (again Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies as well as, among others, Georg Simmel , Karl Mannheim , Norbert Elias , Talcott Parsons and Alfred Weber ) there are works on systems theory ( Niklas Luhmann ) and cultural theory (transculturality). For a long time he has also been concerned with the genesis of sociology from the philosophy of Neo-Kantianism ( Heinrich Rickert , Richard Hönigswald ). At the moment his main interest is the development of a concept of sociological education and the establishment of a humanistic sociology.

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

• Max Weber and Heinrich Rickert . The epistemological foundations of understanding sociology , Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1990, ISBN 978-3-88479-326-8 .
• Profundity and ingenuity . Ferdinand Tönnies ' conceptual constitution of the social world , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 978-3-518-58186-5 .
• Knowledge and Emanation. Ferdinand Tönnies' theory of sociological knowledge . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-02287-7 .

Editorships

• Peter Gostmann / Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz (eds.): Humanism and Sociology , Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2018, ISBN 978-3-658-21797-6 .
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz (Ed.): Public opinion and sociological theory: Thinking further with Ferdinand Tönnies , Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 978-3-658-09446-1 .
• Peter Gostmann / Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz (eds.): Power and rule . On the revision of two basic sociological terms , VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2007. ISBN 978-3-531-15365-0 .
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz / Gerhard Wagner (eds.): Culture in times of globalization . New aspects of a sociological category . Verlag Humanities Online, Frankfurt am Main 2005. 272 ​​pp. ISBN 3-934157-38-6 .
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz / Ursula Renz (eds.): Ethics or Aesthetics . On the topicality of the neo-Kantian cultural philosophy , Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004. ISBN 3-8260-2724-8 .
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz / Gerhard Wagner (eds.): The stranger as a social type. Classical sociological texts on a current phenomenon , UTB (UVK), Konstanz 2002. ISBN 3-8252-2358-2 .
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz / Gerhard Wagner (eds.): Sociology and Anti-Sociology . A discourse and its reconstruction Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 2001. ISBN 3-87940-737-1 .
• Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz / Gerhard Wagner (eds.): The logic of systems. On the criticism of the system-theoretical sociology Niklas Luhmann , Universitätsverlag Konstanz (UVK), Konstanz 2000. ISBN 3-87940-701-0 .

Web links

• Publications by and about Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library
• Literature by and about Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz in the catalog of the German National Library
• UZH - Sociological Institute: Merz-Benz CV
• Foreword to the book "Culture in Times of Globalization"

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See: Editorial preliminary note, in: Tönnies-Forum , 6th year, Issue 2, 1997, pp. 37–38, here p. 37.
2. ↑ Farewell party Prof. Dr. Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz on June 6, 2018, accessed on April 2, 2020