Thomas Wagner (sociologist)

Thomas Wagner at the Erlanger Poetenfest 2017

Thomas Wagner (* 1967 in Rheinberg ) is a German cultural sociologist and author.

Life

Wagner writes as a freelance author for the German and international press ( young world , background , weekly newspaper , Die Zeit , Süddeutsche Zeitung , Frankfurter Rundschau , Der Freitag , Neues Deutschland , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Wespennest , taz , Graswurzelrevolution ) and worked as a lecturer for creative subjects Writing and literacy with children and mentally handicapped adults (including Lernmobil e.V., Berlin ). From 2013 to 2015 he was literary editor for the daily newspaper Junge Welt.

He is the author of the keyword articles “society free of domination” (together with Rüdiger Haude) and “consensus” in the historical-critical dictionary of Marxism . With Rüdiger Haude, he wrote the book Dominion Free Institutions (1999), which was awarded the Science Prize of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Sachsen .

Books

In 2010, together with Jan Rehmann , Wagner published the book Attack of top performers? - The book on the Sloterdijk debate , which documents the controversial debate about Peter Sloterdijk's proposal to replace income tax with voluntary donations, and classifies it in terms of science and politics. When Sloterdijk was awarded the Karl Kraus Prize in 2012, which is linked to the obligation “never to write a line again”, the award jury concluded with a quote from the book by Wagner and Rehmann: “Sloterdijk's achievement for The hegemony project of the ruling elite consists of the actual merging of an economically liberal property individualism with Nietzsche's heroic egoism and authoritarian approaches of the conservative revolution. "

In his book Die Mitmachfalle (2013), Wagner criticizes strategies and procedures for citizen participation : Participation procedures, according to his core thesis, are widely used by authorities and companies to defuse democratic protests. In robocracy. He warns Google, Silicon Valley and humans as obsolete models (2015) against the idea of ​​a “technological singularity” ( Ray Kurzweil ) or “superintelligence” ( Nick Bostrom ) developed in research laboratories, disseminated by Singularity University and promoted by California billionaires . Singularity aims to initially improve people through intelligent machines and, in the long term, to marginalize them or to transform them technically in the sense of transhumanism . "Because the supporters of the idea of ​​machine control are not about better control of nature by humans for humans, but rather about their self-abolition, one could speak of robocracy here instead of technocracy," writes Wagner in the Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik (3 / 2015). Wagner considers these scenarios, which Anthony Giddens , Bill Gates and Ian Morris , among others , would consider realistic or desirable, to be dangerous. He fears that "the robocrats will distract from the really relevant social problems and contradictions, their causes and realistic solutions - and that they will cause considerable damage to democracy itself."

Wagner's book Die Angstmacher: 1968 und die Neuen Rechten (2017) named Stefan Locke in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a work “which differs in one respect and thus helps to gain knowledge: he talks to the protagonists of the scene and he reads theirs Writings before he writes about them. ”According to Wagner, 1968 was not only the beginning of a left-liberal model of society, but also a new beginning for the political right, which increasingly learned from the forms of action of the 1968s. Today the right calls for more direct democracy, criticized the power of opinion of the media and religion, especially Islam , demonized capitalism and political correctness, and condemned wars. The blanket classification as “right” seems to explain everything for quite a few in politics and the media to this day. One seldom distinguishes between conservative , right-wing populist , right-wing radical and right-wing extremist . “In a mixture of cowardice and laziness”, the attempt is made to avoid any further dispute, which, for example, gives Pegida and the AfD even more popularity. Wagner raises the question of whether an open dispute is not the better way to deal with right-wing intellectuals. “A tough discussion, an argumentative argument” is not a surrender to evil, but a demonstration of a democratic culture of debate from which the opponents of the “New Right” could benefit by sharpening their positions and getting to know new perspectives.

Fonts (selection)

• with Rüdiger Haude: Institutions free of domination. Studies on the logic of their symbolizations and on the logic of their theoretical denial , Nomos Verlag , Baden-Baden, 1999, ISBN 3-7890-5955-2 .
• Iroquois and Democracy. A contribution to the sociology of intercultural communication , Lit, Münster, 2004, ISBN 3-8258-6845-1 (dissertation).
• with Jan Rehmann: Sloterdijk's path from cynicism critic to rule cynic , Das Argument 280 (2009), pp. 116–130.
• (Ed.) With Jan Rehmann (Ed.): Attack of the service providers? - The book on the Sloterdijk debate , Argument Sonderband, New Series 307, Argument Verlag, Hamburg, 2010, ISBN 978-3-86754-307-1 .
• The meddlers. How writers get involved today . Argument , Hamburg, 2010, ISBN 978-3-88619-487-2 .
• Democracy as a sham. Or: Germany's gentle path to Bonapartism . Papyrossa Verlag, Cologne, 2011, ISBN 978-3-89438-470-8 .
• with Michael Zander: Sarrazin, the SPD and the New Right. Investigation of a syndrome . Spotless-Verlag , Berlin, 2011, ISBN 978-3-360-02062-8 .
• (Ed.): In the back the stone load - Sisyfos company. Erasmus Schöfer's romantic tale . Dittrich , Berlin, 2012, ISBN 978-3-937717-74-6 .
• The participation trap. Citizen participation as an instrument of power . Cologne, Papyrossa Verlag 2013, ISBN 978-3-89438-527-9 .
• Robocracy. Google, Silicon Valley and humans are being phased out . Cologne, Papyrossa Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-3-89438-581-1 .
• The net in our hands. From digital capitalism to data democracy . Cologne, Papyrossa Verlag , 2017, ISBN 3-89438-635-5 .
• The fear makers. 1968 and the New Right . Berlin, Aufbau-Verlag , 2017, ISBN 978-3-351-03686-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://www.grund.de/search/Thomas+Wagner
2. ↑ See introduction to VW and transhumanism . Junge Welt, July 7, 2016. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
3. ↑ http://hugendubelverdi.blogspot.de/2012/04/karl-kraus-preis-2012-fur-peter.html
4. ↑ Stefan Locke: Get out of the bunker mentality , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 4, 2017.

Web links

Commons : Thomas Wagner (sociologist)  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Thomas Wagner in the catalog of the German National Library