Wolfgang Essbach

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Wolfgang Eßbach (born February 15, 1944 in Brunndöbra , Vogtland ) is a professor emeritus for sociology at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg im Breisgau . His work focuses on the areas of cultural sociology , anthropology , sociology of technology , sociology of art and religion , the history of ideas and sociological theory.

Life

Wolfgang Eßbach attended elementary school and high school in Schöningen ( Helmstedt ) and studied German , philosophy , pedagogy and history in Freiburg and Göttingen from 1964 to 1971 and sociology at the Georg-August University in Göttingen from 1971 to 1978 . During this time he was also politically active, including from 1967 to 1968 as chairman of the Göttingen AStA , which was then dominated by the SDS , and in the Göttingen student magazine politikon . After the state examination , he received his doctorate in 1978 . His doctoral supervisor was Hans Paul Bahrdt , the successor to Helmuth Plessner at the Göttingen Chair of Sociology. He also completed his habilitation in Göttingen in 1985.

Since 1987 Eßbach was Professor of Sociology in Freiburg. He was the first president of the Helmuth Plessner Society and spokesman for the cultural sociology section of the German Society for Sociology (DGS) for several years . He was a staunch critic of state university policy and the Bologna Process . At the end of the winter semester 2009/10 he retired.

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In Wolfgang Eßbach's theoretical orientation as a sociologist, at least four focal points can be identified.

On the one hand, Essbach endeavors to orientate himself towards Karl Marx and critical theory . This is particularly evident in the intellectual-sociological habilitation thesis on the Young Hegelians .

Secondly, he represents an anthropological orientation in sociology that was primarily trained by Helmuth Plessner . The hallmark of this is the co-editing of the anthology on Plessner's Borders of the Community .

Thirdly, Eßbach stands for the relevance of post-structuralist issues in sociology. He was one of the first German intellectuals who received Michel Foucault in Germany and emphasized his fundamental importance for sociology.

And fourth, Eßbach stands for a historical and empirical approach to sociology, as it is particularly evident in the work of the sociology of religion .

History of ideas and intellectual sociology

Essbach's first major work, his dissertation, is, according to the subtitle, about the "controversy" between Marx and Stirner . This was, however, a posthumous one, led by epigones , if at all , because Marx did not publish his Stirner criticism during his lifetime, so that Stirner could not reply to it. Eßbach saw his work as "risky research against the current". The study would not have come about, he writes, “if I had been able to trust the established scientific and political views.” It is more than “just a meticulous filling in of research gaps in a specialty.” A few years later, in his Habilitation thesis on The Young Hegelians , this rebellious tone is missing. If Eßbach had previously concentrated on the historical place “where the Marxian project of emancipation arises” in order to understand and thus remedy the “weak points of Marxism that are emerging today ”, he now turned his attention to the wider environment , on the Young Hegelians as an intellectual group to which Stirner and Marx belong. He switched from the historical perspective to the sociological one.

The history of ideas orientation again became important in his contributions to intellectual discourses of the Weimar Republic and in his lectures on the history of thought about society, modernity and culture (theory I-III, see web links ). As a founding member and long-time president of the Helmuth-Plessner Society, Eßbach then sought the connection to his beginnings as a Stirner researcher. In a "Contribution to the presence of Stirner thought motifs in the work of Helmuth Plessner" he tries to sound out how "Stirner's thought motifs [can] help to renew the anthropological question."

Cultural Sociology and Sociology of Artifacts

In the field of cultural sociology, Eßbach early advocated opening up sociological work beyond the purely social world to the analysis of relationships to material substrates (things, artefacts , environment). He turned against anti-technical and anti-aesthetic attitudes in sociological theory critically. In his concept of an anthropology of an artificial environment, Eßbach u. a. on the technology theories of Heinrich Popitz , Serge Moscovici and Bruno Latour . Eßbach assumes that in the ongoing processes of mechanization and aestheticization of the human living environment learned and envisaged world and self-images are continuously made more flexible, relativized or devalued. On the one hand, these artificializations and unsecuring motivate the longing for certainty in religious orientation, on the other hand, the ideas about the anthropological constitution of man change in these processes.

Sociology of Religion

Eßbach's recently published work Sociology of Religion , the first volume of which was published in 2014, deals with the conjunctions of sacralization and desacralization by way of a historical-sociological analysis of the development of European religion. In doing so, Eßbach develops a socially-historically founded typology of religions of religions that arose in European modernity between denominational Christianity on the one hand and religious indifference on the other. He shows how shapes z. B. of the religion of reason , national religion , art religion and science religion with the European sequence of the experience of the religious wars at the end of the Reformation , the revolutionary period from 1789 to 1848, the unleashing of the market economy in the second half of the 19th century to the First World War and the experience of the artificial lifeworld in the 20th century. The religious “pluralism” of the present is understood as a certain layered, cumulative phenomenon, the individual elements of which can hardly be calmed down in a tense structure.

Fonts (selection)

  • Counter moves. The materialism of the self and its exclusion from Marxism. Frankfurt a. M .: Materialis 1982, originally as a dissertation at the University of Göttingen 1978: The importance of Max Stirner for the genesis of historical materialism.
  • The Young Hegelians. Sociology of a group of intellectuals. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1988.
  • Study of sociology. Munich: Wilhelm Fink (UTB) 1996.
  • (Ed.): What modernity? Intellectual discourses between Germany and France in the field of tension between national and European identity images. Berlin: Berlin-Verlag Arno Spitz 2000.
  • et al. (Ed.): Plessner's “ Limits of Community ”. A debate. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 2002.
  • et al. (Ed.): Landscape, Gender, Artifacts. On the sociology of natural and artificial alterities. Würzburg: Ergon 2004.
  • The society of things, people, gods. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2011.
  • Sociology of religion 1. War of faith and revolution as the cradle of new religions. Munich / Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2014, ISBN 978-3-7705-3971-0 .
  • Sociology of religion 2. Unleashed market and artificial lifeworld as the cradle of new religions. Munich / Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2019, ISBN 9783770558209 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 19, 2011: "At the tomb of the intellectual" .
  2. ↑ Publications - Institute for Sociology. Interventions on higher education policy. University of Freiburg, accessed on November 29, 2012 .
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Eßbach: countermoves. The materialism of the self and its exclusion from Marxism. Frankfurt a. M .: Materialis 1982, pp. 1-3.
  4. ↑ Ibid .; more detailed on this in the context of Marx-Stirner research: Bernd A. Laska : Stirner redivivus. Part 1: About Marx and Marx research . In: Der Einzige , No. 3 (11), August 3, 2000, pp. 17–24.
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Eßbach: Radicalism and Modernity in Jünger and Bloch, Lukács and Schmitt. In: Manfred Gangl, Gérard Raulet (Hrsg.): Intellectual discourses of the Weimar Republic. On the political culture of a mixed bag. Frankfurt a. M .: Campus 1994, pp. 145–159.
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Eßbach: Placed on nothing. Max Stirner and Helmuth Plessner. In: The only one. Yearbook of the Max Stirner Society, Volume 1 (2008), pp. 57-78 (cited. 58, 69).
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Eßbach: The community of goods and the sociology of artifacts. In: Aesthetics and Communication. Online entanglements. Immanences and Ambivalences , ed. v. Dierk Spreen, No. 96, 1997, pp. 13-20.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Eßbach: Anti-technical and anti-aesthetic attitudes in sociological theory. In: Andreas Lösch, Dominik Schrage, Dierk Spreen, Markus Stauff (eds.): Technologies as discourses. Constructions of knowledge, media and bodies. Heidelberg: Synchron 2001, pp. 125-138.
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Eßbach: On the anthropology of artificial environment. In: Kurt W. Alt, Natascha Rauschenberger (Hrsg.): Ökohistorische Reflexionen. People and the environment between the Stone Age and Silicon Valley. Freiburg: Rombach 2001. pp. 171-195.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Essbach, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Essbach, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Brunndöbra , Vogtland