Theory of Bourgeois Society. On Sociology of Modernity

The subject of this project is the appropriate theory for the whole of contemporary society. The concept of 'society' for contemporary sociological diagnostics of modernity seems at the present to be disintegrated into postmodern-, multicultural-, media-, risk-, knowledge-, event-, responsibility-, world-, etc.- society. In contrast to that it shall be asked if and for what reasons "bourgeois society" is still a coherent concept for a sociology of modernity. As a societal-diagnostical concept "bourgeois society" is therefore not congruent with practical concepts of "civil society" or "neo-liberal society". The theory of "bourgeois society", which in action theory and structural theory refers to the social invention of private property (bourgeoisie, commercial society), autonomy (since the medieval city; civil society) and the crisis and creativity triggering (traditionally educated) middle-class intellectuals (Bildungsbürgertum), is able, as a historical sociology, to diagnose contemporary society as a thoroughly "bourgeois society". Compared with the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century it is, however, a new figure: it is the bourgeois society after its experience of contingency and destruction in the twentieth century, a bourgeois society within mass society ("becoming bourgeois of mass society"), which implements its structures in world-society as a transnational network.

Besides the realization of classical concepts, bourgeois society, bourgeoisie, bourgeois life style (Smith, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Sombart, et al.), and the incorporation of historical research on bourgeoisie, the thesis shall be tried by the findings of the research on families, social structure, wealth, education, politics, media, city, and civil religion. The various concepts of society above might then be understood as the facets of diagnoses of bourgeois society, which function as regulations of attention and resources, and Luhmann's systems theory or Bourdieu's habitus theory might be reconstructed as advanced variants of their scholarly self-description. Sociology itself acts as a perpetuated observing science of this "bourgeois society" of modernity.

Bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Zur historischen Soziologie der Gegenwartsgesellschaft,
in: Clemens Albrecht (Hg.), Die Bürgerliche Kultur und ihre Avantgarden, Würzburg 2004, S. 97-118.

Warenwerbung und Warentest oder Poetismus und Rationalismus. Komplementäre Sozialmechanismen in der bürgerlichen Massenkultur,
in: K.-U. Hellmann/D. Schrage (Hrsg.), Konsum der Werbung. Zur Produktion und Rezeption von Sinn in der kommerziellen Kultur, Wiesbaden 2004, S. 49-62.

Exzentrische Positionalität. Der Potsdamer Platz aus der Perspektive der Philosophischen Anthropologie,
in: Joachim Fischer/Michael Makropoulos (Hg.), Potsdamer Platz. Soziologische Theorien zu einem Ort der Moderne, München 2004, S. 11-32.

Bourdieu und Luhmann. Soziologische Doppelbeobachtung der 'bürgerlichen Gesellschaft' nach ihrer Kontingenzerfahrung,
in: Karl Siegbert Rehberg (Hrsg.): Soziale Ungleichheit - Kulturelle Unterschiede. Verhandlungen des 32. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in München 2004, Frankfurt/New York 2006, CD, S. 2850-2858.

Bourdieu und Luhmann als Theoretiker der "bürgerlichen Gesellschaft",
in: Vorgänge, Nr. 170, 44. Jg., Heft 2 (Juni 2005), S. 53-60.

"Weltgesellschaft" im Medium der "bürgerlichen Gesellschaft",
in: Sociologia Internationalis, 43. Bd. (2005), H. 1/2, S. 59-98.

In welcher Gesellschaft leben wir eigentlich? In der bürgerlichen!,
in: Aus Politik und Zeitschichte (Thema: Bürger - Bürgertum - Bürgerlichkeit), 9-10/2008, S. 9-16.