An Interview with Oskar Negt (2004)

In: International labor and working class history: ILWCH, Band 90, S. 203-207

Abstract

Oskar Negt is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Hannover and a prolific writer, best known in the Anglophone world for two books written with the film maker and novelist Alexander Kluge: Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, published in Germany in 1972 and in the United States in 1993 (then reissued by Verso Books in 2016), and History & Obstinacy, which appeared in Germany in 2008 and in an English translation from Zone Books in 2014. In addition to his sociological and theoretical reflections, however, Negt is also a well-known worker educator, whose first major publication in 1971 was Soziologische Phantasie und exemplarisches Lernen: Zur Theorie und Praxis der Arbeiterbildung [Sociological Imagination and Exemplary Learning: On the Theory and Practice of Workers' Education], which has never been translated into English. Soziologische Phantasie und exemplarisches Lernen was an influential, widely read text that provoked considerable discussion in European workers' education circles, some of which can be followed in the 1978 anthology edited by Adolf Brock, Hans Dieter Müller, and Oskar Negt entitled Arbeiterbildung: Soziolgische Phantasie und Exemplarisches Lernen in Theorie, Kritik und Praxis [Workers' Education: Sociological Imagination and Exemplary Learning in Theory, Critique and Practice].