「現実科学」の理念と困難 : ハンス・フライヤーの社会学について

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the works of Hans Freyer, a sociologist who was famous for his "sympathetic" attitude towards the Nazi Regime. His works were rather "louche" (equivocal) , in the sense Pierre Bourdieu used when he called Heidegger a "louche" philosopher. Freyer was very popular during the Weimar Republic period, especially among the younger generation. He was a typical intelligentsia of his time. Born in 1887, he was deeply influenced by the German Youth Movement, and so he volunteered in 1914 to fight on the western front for 4 years. Attaching some importance to real human life, he criticized traditional sociology as abstract and impractical. He advocated the "Wirklichkeitswissenschaft" (real science) , the study of the contemporary social crisis in his sociological main works, Soziologie als Wirklichkeits-wissenschaft and Einleitung in die Soziologie. In the last part of Einleitung, he questioned what kind of will could change the existing social order. To answer this question, he is said to have written the famous Revolution von Rechts in 1931. In Revolution, Freyer proclaimed that a new kind of revolution was just about to begin, and that it would solve the old fashioned class-conflict problem which prevailed in the bourgeois-minded 19th century. Because the revolution of the left or of the proletariat proved to fail, generating some functional disorders, the possibility of true revolution could only be realized by the "right". He used the concept of "right" not so much in the sense of "political right", but refering to everybody who had a strong will to change the society. He called such a subject of revolution "Volk", which he defined not as any group or attribute, but simply as the will to participate to this movement. One of the most attractive parts of this work might have resided in this liberal ideal. Although Revolution does not contain any words such as "Nationalsozialismus" or "Hitler", Freyer was always considered to be a Nazi ideologue. After Hitler's seizure of power his enthusiasm soon cooled down, and he wrote very few political articles after that. However, following the Second World War, when he again became a member of the German Sociological Society, he continued to be criticized for his former political attitude. Of course, I think that it is necessary for social sciences to take a "Wertfreiheit" (to free oneself from any judgement of value). However, one must bear in mind that sociology sometimes remains equivocal in its nature, as in the early stages of its development when it began to invent scientific methods to study social reality.