Abstract
Can sociology comprehend evil? The contemporary relevance of Kurt H. Wolff’s sociology is his lucid, critical vision of modernity which does not shy away from understanding what evil is. This is accompanied not by pessimism, but by trust in human beings and their positive ability to appeal to the moral conscience. Read today, Wolff’s pages must be placed in the category of a new understanding of the human subject and the diagnosis of our time, the request for which threads in and out of contemporary social theory. Awareness of history, rejection of sociological nominalism, emphasis upon the role of the human subject in an unprecedented situation: in Wolff, these themes converge and invite us to open ourselves to the re-enchantment of the world. After describing with some detail the main concepts of Wolff’s sociological theory and phenomenological approach, the paper suggests a reading of the re-enchantment of the world in terms of a sociological confrontation with evil, which has all too often been bypassed by sociology. We cannot grasp the evildoer's motivations from the perspective of an autonomous, rationally disengaged and masterful subject which tends to eclipse emotive and embodied senses of selfhood. By suspending the taken-for-granted definitions which exist in mainstream literature, by making an excruciating effort in looking at or reading detailed descriptions of evildoing, by assuming the victim’s suffering as part of our sociological explanation, we can start understanding what evil is today and in what way it is connected to modernity.
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Notes
The most important of these were brought together and republished in Wolff (1974), Part IV, Sociology of Knowledge.
Until the middle of the 1980s, Wolff used the male noun “man” as a neutral covering the two genders. Here I prefer to use the phrase “the human”. I agree with the observation of R. Brague according to whom it is the adjective “human” (more than the noun) which defines human beings for what they are (Brague 2013: 41). In other cases, I also use the phrase “the person, the human subject”.
In his essay of 1948 this effort of Wolff is so evident that we are led to ask whether it was not influenced by the climate of the American sociology of the time, a sociology that had greatly moved towards the development of quantitative methods and the quest for objectivity. For an excellent discussion of these subjects see Bannister (1987).
It is no chance that Wolff himself was fond of drawing. Art was not only an intellectual interest (Wolff 1985, 1991), but a daily activity which he performed with a very ironic style. Some of his drawings are featured as book covers (Wolff 1989, 1991), and many were offered as presents to friends and students.
The author recalls the work of Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Mannheim and Wright Mills; he also refers to two studies published in 1984: Henry Greenspan’s interviews with Holocaust survivors (Greenspan 1984) and Roger Tulin’s participant observation on the lives of skilled workers in small factories (Tulin 1984; see Wolff 1991: 5f.).
Surrender-and-catch is one of the principal topics of Wolff’s work. It is an original notion which benefits from his very many lines of analysis: the human-studies conception of sociology, the phenomenological approach, and the approach to unprecedented situations. For a survey, I refer the reader first of all to the original work (Wolff 1976) and to critical comments. For example Heller (1980), Mackie (1981), Zaner (1981), Backhaus (2003).
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the Villa Vigoni German-Italian Center for European Excellence, which provided support and funding to organize an international seminar on Kurt H. Wolff and existential sociology. In October 2013, an earlier version of this article was presented at the seminar.
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Corradi, C. Modernity and Evil: Kurt H. Wolff’s Sociology and the Diagnosis of Our Time. Hum Stud 39, 465–480 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9349-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9349-1