Between politics and common sense: The epistemological and symbolic boundaries of sociology during National Socialism

Abstract

This article aims at exploring the complex interplay between sociology and politics during the Nazi Regime by looking at how some nationalist and national-socialist ideas were incorporated in the works of sociologists. In order to do so, I shall focus on the production and dissemination of sociological knowledge, interlacing two levels of analysis. The first level examines the manners in which sociologists linguistically and epistemologically appropriated some key concepts of nationalist thought and national-socialist ideology. The second level considers the pragmatical use of sociological concepts and methods for investigating and recording the daily life of different groups within the Third Reich’s territory. For this purpose, I will first draw an overall picture of the social and symbolic spaces of the sociological field in the interwar period, looking at how some nationalist key concepts gained different meanings over time. I will then analyse the intellectual/scientific trajectories of two sociologists, Adolf Gunther and Erich Rothacker, who began their careers in the second decade of the twentieth century. I argue that, in both cases, the academic/intellectual habitus each author developed before 1933 played a crucial role in determining their rise or decline as sociologists and, broadly speaking, as intellectual figures during the Nazi regime.