Sociology

I am a sociologist by profession, though I am now something of an outsider within the discipline. By the late 1960s at the latest, sociology had ceded the study of economics to a separate discipline—economics—both in the United States and in Germany. In opposition to this, a dissident faction of political economists emerged, a group among which I very soon counted myself. Later, in the 1980s, sociologists developed a subdiscipline—economic sociology —to fill the gap. At the MPIfG, Jens Beckert and I pursued a synthesis between political economy and economic sociology in order to regain a macro-sociological and conflict-theoretical perspective on societies as a whole. This did not result in any particular need for me to participate in the politics of the profession, apart from occasional statements on the development of the discipline and its—dwindling—public significance.