Wirklichkeit(en): Soziologie und Geschichte by Uta Gerhardt (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 125© Max Weber Studies 2016. Uta Gerhardt, Wirklichkeit(en): Soziologie und Geschichte (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), 432 pp. (pbk). ISBN 978-3-8487-1587-9. €79.00. The title of Uta Gerhardt’s book refers to reality in the plural, which is meant as an allusion to the program of humanistic (geisteswissenschaftlich ) interpretive sociology. She sees the origin of this program in Georg Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892) and Max Weber’s programmatic essay ‘The “Objectivity” of Social Science and Social Policy’ (1904). According to Gerhardt, both authors took a stand against the positivist conception of reality in their time. They argued that meaningful scientific knowledge in the social and historical sciences was always the result of a selection of the relevant parts of the phenomenon as seen by the author. Gerhardt sees Alfred Schütz as continuing the program of an interpretive sociology in his Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), which initially failed to catch on due to the circumstances of the time. As the fourth major point of orientation, Gerhardt mentions Talcott Parsons, who introduced this program on the North American continent with his famous book The Structure of Social Action (1937). The twelve chapters of the book are located within this coordinate system. Regarding herself as ‘the faithful successor’ to those ‘great classics’, Gerhardt wants to ‘bring their science of reality [Wirklichkeitswissenschaft ] back to life today’ (16). She applies it to a range of more recent phenomena in order to ‘explore […] what an interpretive analysis is able to achieve’ (18). Most of the essays refer to—or are based on—her earlier work. The book itself is divided into four parts, each containing three texts: ‘Society I: Social Life’, ‘Society II: Sociological Theory’, ‘History I: National Socialism’, and ‘History II: Transformation to Democracy after 1945’. The first part of the book presents sociological approaches to understanding various social groups. In the first chapter, ‘The German Family and Violence’, Gerhardt describes two explanatory models in the field of sociology of the family, namely, the authoritarianism thesis and the anomie thesis. By making recourse to a text of Parsons’s from the 1940s and its explicit distinction between ‘the integrated (democratic , pluralistic) and the deviant (dictatorial, totalitarian) society’ (39), she shows the similarities between authoritarianism and anomie as explanatory categories and thus the fertility of Parsons’s theory. The second chapter, ‘And that I get a pension…”, treats the phenomenon of social aging from the perspective of medical sociology. Based on research data gathered as part of the author’s 1987–1993 study of the 126 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. further careers of patients of open heart surgeries, Gerhardt argues that neither the course of treatment nor social status sufficiently explains a patient’s decision to resume working life or go into early retirement . Rather, this decision can only be understood by investigating the patient’s attitudes regarding social aging through interviews. In the third chapter, ‘Expellees and Refugees Revisited’, Gerhardt deals with the problem of integrating refugees in West Germany after the Second World War. Here she shows how theories of state integration (Schütz) and cultural integration (Simmel), despite all their merits, do not adequately address the problem, much less resolve it. Relying on an unpublished report of Parsons’s, which dealt with the integration of African Americans, the author shows that integration only came about as a result of a newly defined ‘societal community’ (87) that constituted values agreeable to all the involved groups. In the second part of the book, Gerhardt deals with various aspects of sociological theory. The fourth chapter, ‘An Interpretive Social Science’, is a description of Simmel’s sociology. Gerhardt characterizes it as a methodologically sound, systematic, and humanistic approach that owes much to Dilthey’s philosophy, which she regards as a response to the positivist theories of evolution in the nineteenth century. Gerhardt identifies three types of form analysis in Simmel’s methodology: simple, logical, and process-related (109–16). The three ‘sociological a priori’ that make society possible , according to his transcendental perspective, are described as the overarching systematic prerequisites for his analyses of the forms of social life...