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Oskar Negt

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Oskar Negt
Negt in 2007
Born(1934-08-01)1 August 1934
near Königsberg
Died2 February 2024(2024-02-02) (aged 89)
Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany
Education
Occupations
  • Philosopher
  • Critical social theorist
OrganizationsLeibniz University Hannover

Oskar Reinhard Negt (German pronunciation: [ˈneːkt]; 1 August 1934 – 2 February 2024) was a German philosopher and critical social theorist. He was a professor of sociology in Hanover from 1972 to 2002, regarded as one of Germany's most prominent social scientists.[1]

Negt studied law and philosophy in the University of Göttingen and the University of Frankfurt with Theodor Adorno, and was an assistant of Jürgen Habermas at the Universität Frankfurt. Negt is known for his collaboration with the filmmaker and visual artist Alexander Kluge. His focus was on the education of workers as political action, believing that democracy was a form of government that had to be learned.

Life and career

Negt was born on an estate near Königsberg on 1 August 1934,[2] the son of a small farmer[3] and the youngest child of seven. His father was involved in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) during World War II, facing pressure under the Nazi regime. In 1944, Negt was separated from his parents and displaced to Denmark following the Red Army's invasion of Königsberg. During his stay in Denmark, Negt and two of his older sisters stayed in an internment camp for two and a half years, until which the camp doors were finally reopened and Negt and his sisters were reunited with their parents in Soviet-occupied Berlin, after having been placed in quarantine near Rostock on their return to Germany. During this time Negt's childhood was deeply affected, missing out on early development with no exposure to schooling. In 1951, with rising political pressure on Negt's family due to his father's involvement in the SDP, Negt's family fled to West Berlin, where they would spend six months as asylum seekers. In 1955, the Negt family settled into Oldenburg in Lower Saxony.[4]

In 1955 Negt arrived in Göttingen to study law,[2] but found the commitments entailed by membership in the local Burschenschaft overly burdensome.[5] He later left, joined the Socialist German Students' Union (SDS), and enrolled in the Universität Frankfurt (now Goethe University Frankfurt) for the study of sociology and philosophy with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,[1][2] He met Jürgen Habermas there who was impressed with one of Negt's class papers.[5] His dissertation in philosophy, supervised by Adorno, was titled Strukturbeziehungen zwischen den Gesellschaftslehren Comtes und Hegels (Structural relationships between Comte's and Hegel's social theories).[2] Negt was offered a position as a research assistant for Habermas (on the topic of Marxism and the SDS) at the University of Heidelberg in 1961,[5] where he wrote his habilitation about the education of workers (Arbeiterbildung) in 1968.[2] In 1968 Negt upset his mentor Habermas[5] by editing a collection of essays on him (titled The Left answers Jurgen Habermas), some of which were highly critical.[6][7]

Negt worked towards a collaboration of marxists and the labour unions.[2] In the 1968 student movement he was one of the mentors of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition,[1] and later director of the Sozialistisches Büro [de] in Offenbach,[2] trying to influence an überfraktionelles Bewußtsein, an "over-factional consciousness" of the fragmenting protest movement, with the goal not to train professional revolutionaries, but to accompany revolutionaries in their professions.[7]

Negt held a chair of sociology at the Technische Hochschule Hannover from 1970, called by the minister of culture on Lower Saxony, Peter von Oertzen [de], who was then in the process of expanding the technical school to a university, later called the Leibniz University Hannover.[7] He was emerited in 2002.[1] He founded one of the first reform schools in Germany, the Glockseeschule [de] in Hanover, in 1972.[2][7] The same year he refused solidarity with the RAF, which took courage at the time.[8]

Negt published his autobiography in two instalments in 2016 and 2019, titled respectively Überlebensglück (Survivors’ Luck: An Autobiographical Search for Tracks) and Erfahrungsspuren (Tracks of Experience: An Autobiographical Thought-Journey). He also collaborated with the filmmaker Alexander Kluge on three films about post-socialist Europe. Negt's work with Kluge has been described as "highly unconventional" but significant in "an attempt to reinstate the human body to its rightful place in critical theory."[9]

Personal life

Negt died in Hanover on 2 February 2024 after a long illness, at age 89.[2][7][8]

Intellectual influences

Negt's work is said to be difficult to classify due to the enormous range of influences found in it from so many texts and philosophers.[5] These include Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, and some of the major Western Marxists. He drew on work in labour sociology, organizational theory, political journalism and more. Negt's primary concerns relate to labor, teaching, and politics.[5]

Negt was brought up as the son of a small farmer and a member of the Social Democratic Party, and this "rural and... proletarian existence" led him to have ties with SPD causes, including trade unions.[3] These experiences led him to feel that while standard education for union members in metal working factories in Germany was sufficient for teaching legal questions, it was insufficient in political education. Negt thus understood genuine education to be inherently political, because democracy must be learned, making education existential for a democratic society. Negt was thus suspicious of the ideology and logic of capital and the market replacing all other forms of social reality. This informed his views on education as the holistic development of the person, limited not only to "processing knowledge and information" but also the ability to deal with emotions, to compromise, negotiate, and share with others. Thus for Negt, "good political education" means that the students can "think for themselves."[3][7]

Work with Alexander Kluge

Negt is known especially for his public interventions in politics in collaboration with the artist Alexander Kluge.[10] Their seminal work Public Sphere and Experience was an analysis of the limits of the bourgeois public sphere, which shaped Public opposition.[11]

Awards

In 2011 Negt was awarded the August-Bebel-Preis for his political work.[1]

Publications

In English

  • The Misery of Bourgeois Democracy in Germany. Telos 34 (Winter 1974). New York: Telos Press.[12]
  • (with Kluge) Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Verso;[13] Reprint edition (February 2, 2016) Originally issued as Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Theory & History of Literature) by Univ of Minnesota Pr; First edition (December 1, 1993).[14]
  • Adult Education and European Identity. Policy Futures in Education. 6 (6): 744–756. (2013)[15]

In German

Negt's complete works were published by Steidl Verlag in twelve volumes in 2016.[1]

  • Strukturbeziehungen zwischen den Gesellschaftslehren Comtes und Hegels. (dissertation) Frankfurt 1964.[2]
  • Soziologische Phantasie und exemplarisches Lernen. Zur Theorie der Arbeiterbildung. (habilitation) Frankfurt 1968.[2][8]
  • Politik als Protest. Reden und Aufsätze zur antiautoritären Bewegung. Frankfurt 1971.
  • (with Kluge) Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit. Frankfurt 1972.[3]
  • Keine Demokratie ohne Sozialismus. Über den Zusammenhang von Politik, Geschichte und Moral. Frankfurt. 1976.
  • with Kluge: Geschichte und Eigensinn. Geschichtliche Organisation der Arbeitsvermögen – Deutschland als Produktionsöffentlichkeit – Gewalt des Zusammenhangs. Frankfurt 1981.
  • Lebendige Arbeit, enteignete Zeit. Politische und kulturelle Dimensionen des Kampfes um die Arbeitszeit. Frankfurt /New York 1984.
  • Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Bremen 1988.
  • Modernisierung im Zeichen des Drachen. China und der europäische Mythos der Moderne. Reisetagebuch und Gedankenexperimente. Frankfurt 1988.
  • Die Herausforderung der Gewerkschaften. Plädoyers für die Erweiterung ihres politischen und kulturellen Mandats. Frankfurt/New York 1989.
  • (with Kluge) Maßverhältnisse des Politischen: 15 Vorschläge zum Unterscheidungsvermögen. Frankfurt 1992
  • Kältestrom. Göttingen 1994. ISBN 3-88243-358-2
  • Unbotmäßige Zeitgenossen. Annäherungen und Erinnerungen. Frankfurt 1994.
  • Achtundsechzig. Politische Intellektuelle und die Macht. Göttingen 1995.
  • Kindheit und Schule in einer Welt der Umbrüche. Göttingen 1997.
  • (with Hans Werner Dannowski [de]) Königsberg–Kaliningrad: Reise in die Stadt Kants und Hamanns. Göttingen 1998.
  • Warum SPD? 7 Argumente für einen nachhaltigen Macht- und Politikwechsel. Göttingen 1998.
  • (with Kluge): Der unterschätzte Mensch. Frankfurt 2001. (* ISBN 3-88243-786-3
  • Kant und Marx. Ein Epochengespräch. Göttingen 2003.
  • Wozu noch Gewerkschaften? Eine Streitschrift. Steidl Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-86521-165-8
  • Die Faust-Karriere. Vom verzweifelten Intellektuellen zum gescheiterten Unternehmer. Göttingen 2006. ISBN 3-86521-188-7

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f "Oskar Negt". Steidl Verlag. Retrieved 7 November 2018.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Nachruf: Wir trauen um Oskar Negt". Sozialismus (in German). 3 February 2024.
  3. ^ a b c d Pohl, Kerstin; Hufer, Klaus-Peter (2016). "An Interview with Oskar Negt (2004)". International Labor and Working-Class History. 90: 203–207. doi:10.1017/S0147547916000120. ISSN 0147-5479.
  4. ^ Negt, Oskar (2016). Überlebensglück. Steidl Books. ISBN 978-3-95829-212-3.
  5. ^ a b c d e f Grama, Adrian (May–June 2020). "Negt without Kluge". New Left Reviwe. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  6. ^ Abendroth, Wolfgang. (1968). Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas. OCLC 164464576.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Später, Jörg (2 February 2024). "Oskar Negt ist gestorben". FAZ (in German). ISSN 0174-4909. Retrieved 2 February 2024.
  8. ^ a b c Reinecke, Stefan (3 February 2024). "Es gibt immer eine Lösung". taz (in German). Retrieved 6 February 2024.
  9. ^ Adelson, Leslie A. (February 1987). "Contemporary Critical Consciousness: Peter Sloterdijk, Oskar Negt/Alexander Kluge, and the "New Subjectivity"". German Studies Review. 10 (1): 57–68. doi:10.2307/1430443. ISSN 0149-7952. JSTOR 1430443.
  10. ^ Hottman, Tara (2015). "Message in a Bottle". Qui Parle. 23 (2): 215–227. doi:10.5250/quiparle.23.2.0215. ISSN 1041-8385. S2CID 142732197.
  11. ^ Krause, Monika (February 2006). "The Production of Counter-Publics and the Counter-Publics of Production: An Interview with Oskar Negt" (PDF). European Journal of Social Theory. 9 (1): 119–128. doi:10.1177/1368431006060481. ISSN 1368-4310. S2CID 142970446.
  12. ^ Negt, Oskar (1977-12-21). "The Misery of Bourgeois Democracy in Germany". Telos. 1977 (34): 123–135. doi:10.3817/1277034123. ISSN 0090-6514. S2CID 146844406.
  13. ^ Negt, Oskar; Kluge, Alexander (2016). Public sphere and experience: toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-78478-241-2. OCLC 991594772.
  14. ^ Negt, Oskar. (1993). Public sphere and experience : toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere. Kluge, Alexander, 1932-. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-2031-8. OCLC 27725297.
  15. ^ Negt, Oskar (2013), "Adult Education and European Identity", Learning with Adults, Rotterdam: SensePublishers, pp. 113–130, doi:10.1007/978-94-6209-335-5_9, ISBN 978-94-6209-335-5
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