Positivismusstreit (The Positivist Dispute)

The term Positivismusstreit was coined by Theodor Adorno to characterize a dispute that started formally at a meeting of the German Sociological Association in Tübingen in 1961 and that shook the sociological community in Germany from the 1960s to the early 1970s including the revolts around 1968. In addition to Adorno, this dispute included the most prestigious social thinkers such as Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, Karl R. Popper, and later Niklas Luhmann. In effect, the dispute is ongoing, and may possibly never end, as it is a fundamental dispute about the paradigms within social thought. In effect, it continues a dispute that started at the beginning of the twentieth century and was known as the Methodenstreit (dispute over methodology), and in which the most prestigious German social scientists of that time were engaged, like Max Weber and Gustav Schmoller.

Actually Adorno's term is misleading because the main protagonists on the other side did not understand themselves as positivists. For example, Karl R. Popper, probably the most well known among the participants, was never a member of the Vienna Circle, which launched the debate in the 1920s and 1930s. They gave their approach the name of logical positivism and may therefore be called neopositivists. They had developed rather distinctive arguments in comparison to the original school of positivism. Hans Albert agrees with this typification in regard to himself, though he designates his own methodology as Kritischer Rationalismus (Critical Rationalism). But certainly neither Ralf Dahrendorf nor Niklas Luhmann can be subsumed under this heading. As a result, Hans-Joachim Dahms (1994) summarizes the dispute as a multifront one: the Frankfurt school against logical positivism, American pragmatism and critical rationalism. The debate was continued namely by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann—then the younger generation—in a book under the title Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Theory of Society or Social Technology) in 1971.

What is so important about this dispute? Is it only a German ideological dispute? It is interesting to see that some of the most influential social theorists took part in the ongoing dispute. This includes work by Anthony Giddens (1974, 1978) and three volumes by Peter Halfpenny and Peter McMylor (1994). This dispute is described in all dictionaries and encyclopedias, and in Germany it is even included in encyclopedias intended for the lay public. However, in the English-language encyclopedias and dictionaries it shows up only within an article on “positivism” as such.

In part we may explain the resurgence of the debate on positivism in postwar Germany by attending to the difficult situation there. Different schools, both inside and outside of Germany, were fighting for hegemony after National Socialism. Remigrants like Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, but also René König, and emigrants like Karl R. Popper fought against those such as Helmut Schelsky who had survived the war with a chair in occupied Strasbourg. In 1949, while still in exile, René König wrote a book with the title Soziologie heute (Sociology Today). Several years later, in 1959, Helmut Schelsky responded to this book by providing his definition of German sociology. The conflict was also about the role and character of the German Sociological Association and who should preside over it. It is necessary to understand this struggle for influence in order to understand the dispute over positivism in Germany. This also makes it understandable why Adorno chose—consciously or unconsciously—a misleading title.

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