German sociologist and philosopher Oskar Negt, who died in the spring of 2024 at the age of 89, was a scholar and public intellectual working broadly in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. He studied at the University of Frankfurt and from 1970 to his retirement in 2002, he held the chair as professor of sociology at the University of Hanover. He published books on many themes in social theory, but unfortunately only a few of these works are available in English.
Late in his life, Negt published two autobiographical books. The first, Überlebensglück (2016), dealt with his childhood and youth, including his experience of living as a boy in Danish refugee camps by the end of the Second World War. The second book, Erfahrungsspuren (2019), under review here, deals with his life from the time he started studying at university around 1955. Roughly translated, the title means traces of experience and the book focuses on Negt’s professional life and work, including fields of action and collaborations. Private life and family matters are mentioned only in passing.
After finishing secondary school, Negt started studying law at the university of Göttingen, but coming from a rural background he soon felt out of touch with the lifestyle of the other law students, the dances and the informal contacts to seniors in the world of law. In the end, he changed to studying sociology at the University of Frankfurt.
One of his teachers was Jürgen Habermas and in 1961, when Habermas became professor in Heidelberg, he asked Negt to be one of his assistants. Being a teaching assistant at a German university in the early sixties was a strictly subordinate position. However, Negt’s experience in Heidelberg was different; Habermas seldom asked his assistant for specific services and respected his own priorities. Negt sees this as an example of mutual recognition in a context full of hierarchies.
Negt worked as Habermas’ assistant for almost eight years. He found the work exciting, but he also felt his own situation precarious, being assistant to a professor who wrote book after book and whose reputation continued to grow. Negt’s own dissertation was delayed and the career in trade union education that he had pursued parallel to the university had been blocked by leading trade union officials who saw no need for sociologists.
After the death of Adorno in the summer of 1969, Negt was offered a professorship in Frankfurt, but when he demanded that the position should also involve some share in heading the Institute of Social Research, the offer was withdrawn. He then applied for a position as professor at the University of Hanover. This was a technical university that had recently branched out to include social sciences and humanities. Negt knew little about the internal situation of the university, but one evening Peter von Oertzen, the Minister of Culture in the state of Niedersachsen, called Negt and invited him to an informal talk in a small group of officials, including the prime minister. It turned out that they were worried about his use of the word revolution in some contexts and wanted to be reassured before offering him the position. Negt managed to reassure them by interpreting the concept in a broad way and referring to Kant. Even though he was placed second on the candidate list for the professorship, von Oertzen offered him the position, and he accepted. This step provoked the predominantly conservative staff of the university, and Negt was received with cold silence from colleagues. It took time before Negt was fully recognized as a colleague. Still, he liked the city of Hanover as well as the university, and he remained there until his retirement.
The autobiography confirms that Negt sees his work as a continuation of Frankfurt School critical theory. He points out that a key characteristic of this school is the unfolding of the anti-institutional inside an institution. The location of the institute in an established institution guaranteed an indispensable position of security but constituted a dilemma for the Institute academics, who despised purely academic work and philosophy but were equally sceptical towards the established organisations of the labour movement.
The Frankfurt School tradition covers a wider field of scholars than those connected with the Institute of Social Research. Negt refers to an old joke: a Japanese leaves the Frankfurt main station, enters a taxi and asks the driver to take him to the Frankfurt School. The truth in the joke is that rather than a place, the Frankfurt School is a set of specific research practices initiated originally by the Institute for Social Research but located in many different contexts and fields of investigation.
The philosophical basis for the Institute was clearly stated in Adorno’s inaugural lecture in 1931, which signalled the step out of idealist philosophy. However, this did not lead the Frankfurt scholars to abandon the need for a philosophically informed theoretical awareness. Negt sees this as a key original contribution of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer emphasised the inclusion of empirical research from different disciplines, guided by philosophical theory. But Negt points out that among the Frankfurt scholars, there was a certain contempt for what Robert Merton has called theories of the middle range. Adorno, Horkheimer and others focused on the extremes in culture and society, even though they took care to show in detail how the extremes manifested themselves in social situations or cultural products.
Negt finds that when students today are introduced to the Frankfurt School, they are often referred to the work of Habermas. It is true that this includes and continues much of the critical tradition, but it is still a theoretical construction in its own right, in some ways clearly different from original critical theory. An important part of Marxian theory, the critique of political economy of capital and labour, was present in early critical theory but is more or less dismissed by Habermas. Negt clearly respects Habermas’ work, but he deplores the fact that critical theory is often seen as seamlessly included in it. In his own work, Negt has emphasised the political economy of living labour and the key role of work in broader societal development, involving alienation as well as utopian perspectives. In spite of differences, Negt finds that the relationship between Habermas and him remained respectful and warm.
A key collaborator for Negt over the years has been lawyer, filmmaker and intellectual Alexander Kluge. They have co-authored several major works covering many aspects of social philosophy and cultural analysis. Two of these have been made available in English, and this has perhaps influenced the perception of Negt outside German-speaking circles. For instance, a review by Adrian Grama of Negt’s two autobiographical works in New Left Review was entitled ‘Negt without Kluge’ (NLR, May-June 2020). However, Negt’s single-authored work no is less substantial, and often more focused in aim and argument. But the chapter on the collaboration with Kluge offers insight in the form of intellectual collaboration that the two have practiced. They wrote together in long sessions where they dictated in turn to a clerk and then discussed and refined the text.
Much of Negt’s work has involved trying to link theory and practice in an emancipatory perspective. He points to four fields where he has worked with this. One is trade union education; another is a school experiment pursuing new learning concepts and perspectives – the Glocksee comprehensive school in Hanover. A third field is the civil society organisation ‘Socialistische Büro’, which was an NGO initiative started in the early 1970s pursuing socialist debate and work in different fields of practice without linking to any of the competing left-wing parties. The last field was an advisory group established by young socialist politician Gerhard Schröder, lasting to his time as prime minister from 1998-2005. This was a mixed experience; Negt finds that as Schröder closed in on the post, debate on policy issues became less and less substantial.
In one of the chapters Negt reflects on his work as university teacher. He sees the university as one of the last societal institutions offering free spaces for experiments and storehouses for knowledge beyond what is useful in the here and now. In his own teaching, he emphasises the importance of lectures: ‘This was an academic process that gave me great joy and which I pursued from my appointment in Hannover to my retirement’ (226). He points out that Kant emphasised preparing the material for his lectures, so that in oral presentation he could unfold the processes of knowledge. Letters from Kant’s contemporaries indicate that his impact as an academic teacher was often greater that the impact of his writings. Negt argues that Kant saw his lectures as a field of experiments involving questions and tentative answers.
The chapter on the university closes with a conversation on teaching between Negt and his wife Christine Morgenroth. She points out that in his early work on trade union education, Negt developed a model of exemplary learning, relating teaching content to critical aspects of the situation of workers, and she asks if he has also had a didactic concept for his university teaching. Negt says no, adding that has always had reservations about the intensity of learning in small groups. To him the intensity of learning in the public form has been very important. But as mentioned above, Negt’s work in education includes not only the trade union context but also the Glocksee experimental school which drew much inspiration from the educational philosophy of progressivism. It is surprising that he seems to have more or less separated these experiences from his own teaching.
The experience traces presented in Erfahrungsspuren provide compelling insights in the professional life and the intellectual contribution of a key figure in critical theory. The main focus is not on presenting life situations, but rather on reconstructing and discussing the intellectual and political contexts, challenges and accomplishments that Negt experienced in his adult life. In this, the book is generally successful.
Reviewed by Palle Rasmussen