Siegfried Landshut

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Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor W. Adorno (front right) and Jürgen Habermas (in the background right), Siegfried Landshut (in the background left) in Heidelberg in 1964

Siegfried Landshut (born August 7, 1897 in Strasbourg , Alsace , † December 8, 1968 in Hamburg ) was a German political scientist and sociologist . He is one of the re-founders of political science in the Federal Republic of Germany and held the first chair for the "Science of Politics" at the University of Hamburg . In addition, Landshut became known as the discoverer and editor of Karl Marx's early writings .

Life

Siegfried Landshut was the son of the architect Samuel Landshut and his wife Suzette, b. Cohn. In 1914, due to the war, he passed the Abitur at the Protestant grammar school in Strasbourg and on August 5th joined the German army as a volunteer. At the end of 1919 he returned to Germany from the German-Turkish front in the Middle East and began studying law and then economics in Freiburg im Breisgau and Frankfurt am Main . In 1921 he was charged with a dissertation on the homo economicus in Freiburg with Robert Liefmann doctorate . In the same year he married Edith Hess, the couple had three children.

In the following four years he studied with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, with Max Scheler in Cologne , with Alfred Weber and Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg , then again with Heidegger in Marburg and finally again in Heidelberg with Alfred Weber. His hope at Weber habilitated to have been disappointed. In 1936 he wrote in retrospect in a résumé: “Intention to do his habilitation with Alfred Weber. Difficulties because of the habilitation of a second Jewish private lecturer in the same subject (besides Karl Mannheim). ”On the mediation of Alfred Weber, Landshut received a two-year research assignment at the Institute for Foreign Policy at the University of Hamburg , which was headed by Albrecht Mendelsohn Bartholdy . His friendship with Hans von Dohnanyi began in Hamburg .

Eduard Heimann , with him Landshut was a half-time research assistant from 1927 to 1933.

After completing the research assignment with a study of the mandate system of the League of Nations , he became assistant to the economist Eduard Heimann . In 1928 Landshut submitted the post-doctoral thesis investigations on the original question of social and political problems to the University of Hamburg and was the first German scientist to ask for admission to the post-doctoral thesis for the "subject of politics", a subject that was not available in any German at the time University and that he wanted to re-establish. The project was supported by Heimann, but was rejected by sociologist Andreas Walther . Since Walther was appointed to the new chair for sociology at the University of Hamburg in 1926, there was a "relationship of increased competition" between him and Landshut. Since a habilitation was not possible without the consent of the sociology professor, Landshut tried to switch to Adolph Lowe at the University of Kiel . However, his application for employment and the opportunity to do a habilitation in Kiel was unsuccessful. In Hamburg he withdrew his request on July 21, 1928. The withdrawn habilitation thesis was published in 1929 under the title Critique of Sociology .

On January 22, 1933, Landshut submitted a second habilitation thesis in Hamburg, it was entitled Historical-Systematic Analysis of the Concept of the Economic . The thesis submitted in the subject of economics was accepted, but the trial lecture planned for April could no longer take place. On May 13th, the Faculty of Law and Political Science announced that considering the changed circumstances, the habilitation matter should be refrained from. As a result of the law to restore the civil service , his assistant position will be terminated on August 31st. Landshut had already left Hamburg on June 23, 1933 to give guest lectures in Egypt . He had his family join him because he had been promised a long-term lectureship. This did not happen, until 1936 the Landhuts stayed in Cairo under difficult economic conditions , then they moved to Palestine .

Givʿat Brenner , kibbutz building 1936, Landshut lived and researched here in 1940/41.

In Jerusalem , various institutions and aid organizations financed a two-year position as a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Landshut. Despite intensive efforts by personalities such as Martin Buber , Ernst Simon and Arthur Ruppin , there was no further employment at the university after two years. The family found itself again in a precarious economic situation. In 1939 the Economic Research Institute Jerusalem Landshut commissioned a study on the sociological basis of community settlement in Palestine. For research purposes he then stayed in 1940/41 at the Givʿat Brenner kibbutz . The resulting study, The Community Settlement in Palestine , was published in Hebrew in 1944. Lanshut had meanwhile taken on another task and headed the German department of the British Mediterranean broadcaster in Jerusalem from 1942 to 1945. In 1945 the family moved back to Cairo, where Landshut was head of the "Educational Section" of the "German Prisoners of War Directorate" for three years. This subdivision of the British [...] was responsible for the "re-education" of around 100,000 German prisoners of war in Egypt. In 1948 he moved to London. There Landshut took on a research assignment from the Anglo-Jewish Association on the subject of "Jewish Communities in the Muslim Countries of the Middle East".

In January and July 1950 Landshut gave guest lectures at the University of Hamburg, in the winter semester 1950/51 and in the summer semester he took on a teaching position in sociology and political science. He received the call to the first Hamburg chair for the "Science of Politics" on April 28, 1951, on July 18 he was appointed full professor. In addition to his university professorship, he held a teaching position at the Academy for Community Economy from 1952 to 1959 . 1964/65 he was chairman of the German Association for Political Science .

In 1965 Siegfried Landshut retired and continued teaching to a limited extent. His wife Edith Landshut died on June 26th of the same year.

Starting in 2018, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research will annually award the Siegfried Landshut Prize.

Social science achievement and its reception

Landshut established political science in Hamburg and played a key role in the re-establishment of the subject in the Federal Republic, but his own political science work was only received to a limited extent and was largely forgotten after his death. In a commemorative address for his former Hamburg colleague in 1969, Wilhelm Hennis emphasized that he hardly knew any work by another German scholar whose effectiveness had been so impaired by "the unfavorable times" as the Landhut. Even closest colleagues only knew that Landshut was the editor of Marx's early writings and had also looked after a successful Tocqueville selection. A little thirty years later, Hennis Landshut named the most unknown of the “founding fathers” of the subject, but also the most important head of the generation of political science after 1945. According to Rainer Nicolaysen , the marginality was also based on the Aristotelian understanding of politics that Landshut represented. Landshut consistently tried to re-establish political science from its more than two thousand year old tradition. After that, politics was not only one of the oldest sciences, it was the royal discipline for Landshut, which deals with decisive questions of human coexistence and, as a practical science, is oriented towards the common good. Landshut wanted to make it clear through backward-looking investigations that such an understanding of politics has nothing to do with the struggle for power or mere administration and security of life. Michael Th. Greven described Landshut as one of the “most profound representatives of political science Neo-Aristotelianism”.

Landshut's best-known work, Critique of Sociology , contains sharp criticism of the disorientation of this discipline towards its own question. Science, especially sociology, cannot be defined by methods and theories that are applied to any object. This would lead to the dissolution and fragmentation of the subject. At the beginning there must therefore be the search for the central problematic of sociology, the uncovering of its “factual character”. As can be seen from the original title of the work, which Landshut had withdrawn as a habilitation thesis due to expected rejection, investigations into the original question of social and political problems , he was particularly concerned with clarifying basic political science terms. He did this "energetically and stubbornly" with great interpretations of Machiavelli , Hobbes , Rousseau , Tocqueville , Marx and again and again Max Weber .

Wolfgang Knöbl recognizes in Landshut a continuous questioning of social and humanities positions, a fundamental and persistent criticism of largely unproblematic theorems and terms. This made him a scientific outsider. This is precisely why his work is still of interest to those who are increasingly critical of the development of research, which is often driven by third parties, and who doubt its relevance.

Fonts (selection)

  • Critique of Sociology. Freedom and equality as the original problem of sociology , Duncker & Humblot, Munich 1929, first habilitation thesis (withdrawn because of threatened rejection), as it was still under the title: Investigations into the original question of social and political problems .
  • With JP Mayer editor; Karl Marx: The historical materialism; The early writings . Kröner, Stuttgart, 1932. 2 volumes. New edition, Karl Marx: The early writings . Kröner, Stuttgart, 1953.
  • Karl Marx . Colemann's small biographies , Lübeck, 1932. 40 pages.
  • The Community Settlement in Palestine , 1944. In Hebrew.
  • Jewish Communities in the Muslim Countries of the Middle East; A survey. London, n.d. [1950].
  • As editor: Alexis de Tocqueville: The Age of Equality; A selection from the complete works . Kröner, Stuttgart, 1954.
  • Critique of Sociology and Other Writings on Politics . Luchterhand, Neuwied am Rhein / Berlin 1969.
  • Politics. Basic concepts and analyzes. A selection from the complete works in two volumes . Edited by Rainer Nicolaysen . Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-935035-52-1 .

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Landshut is referred to as a sociologist in many short descriptions, but his biographer considers this term to be "very misleading" because Landshut has always seen himself as a political scientist. See Rainer Nicolaysen : Siegfried Landshut. The rediscovery of politics. Suhrkamp / Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-633-54134-9 , p. 18 f.
  2. ↑ Information on the biography is based, unless otherwise stated, on Rainer Nicolaysen: Siegfried Landshut. The rediscovery of politics. Suhrkamp / Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 569-571 (time table).
  3. ↑ Quoted from Rainer Nicolaysen: Siegfried Landshut. The rediscovery of politics. Suhrkamp / Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 65.
  4. ^ Rainer Nicolaysen: Siegfried Landshut. The rediscovery of politics. Suhrkamp / Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 94.
  5. ^ Wilhelm Hennis : To Siegfried Landshut's scientific work . In: Zeitschrift für Politik , NF 17 (1970), pp. 1–14, here p. 4.
  6. ^ Rainer Nicolaysen: Siegfried Landshut. The rediscovery of politics. Suhrkamp / Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 98.
  7. ↑ Siegfried Landshut: Critique of Sociology. Freedom and equality as the original problem of sociology , Duncker & Humblot, Munich 1929.
  8. ↑ First published in full in: Politics. Basic concepts and analyzes. A selection from the complete works in two volumes . Ed. by Rainer Nicolaysen. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-935035-52-1 ., Vol. 1, pp. 189-290.
  9. ↑ Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Siegfried Landshut Prize .
  10. ↑ Institute for Social Research establishes prize. Questions of the greatest urgency . In: Die Tageszeitung , October 3, 2018.
  11. ^ A b Rainer Nicolaysen : Siegfried Landshut redivivus , Hamburg Institute for Social Research .
  12. ^ Wilhelm Hennis : To Siegfried Landshut's scientific work . In: Zeitschrift für Politik , NF 17 (1970), pp. 1–14, here pp. 1 f.
  13. ↑ Political science as a discipline. On the path of political science after 1945 . Wilhelm Hennis in conversation with Gangolf Huebinger [on November 11, 1998]. In: Neue Politische Literatur 44 (1999), pp. 365 - 379, here p. 370.
  14. ↑ Michael Th. Greven : Siegfried Landshut: A founding father of political science Neo-Aristotelianism. In: Neue Politische Literatur 49 (2004), pp. 216–219, here p. 217.
  15. ^ A b Wolfgang Knöbl : Siegfried Landshut - place of arrival Hamburg , Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
  16. ^ Wilhelm Hennis : Existential Politics. On Rainer Nicolaysen's biography of Siegfried Landshut . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 24, 1997.
personal data
SURNAME Landshut, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sociologist and political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasbourg , Alsace
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 1968
Place of death Hamburg