PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Modernity brought the promise of a better world - a world in which society and the economy are more rationally organized and in which people themselves could be improved. In the 1880s, European states began to translate the findings of the social sciences into practical politics ("the scientization of the social"). Once the established monarchies had been overthrown in Germany and in Russia, the new political forces needed to legitimize their claim to power before the people. The most practical way to do so was to exploit the idea that the social could be subjected to scientization, and thus legitimize political domination by means of implementing a new type of rationality. With the transition to Stalinism and National Socialism, their approaches became more radical. Both dictatorships launched large-scale projects to restructure their societies according to the concepts of class and race respectively. They bet on an unprecedented degree of state organization and control over the economy and society. Their economic success in the 1930s owed much to rearmament programs, which could do nothing but resolve into a new war. Today it appears surprising how naively expert advice was handled at that time, such that the complete physical destruction of enemies and the idea that lives could be treated as worthless could be sold as a "scientific" means of creating better societies. In order to understand what happened in the Soviet Union and Germany, one cannot look at it from a single national perspective. That is why I adopt an entangled history approach. The dissemination of modern ideas and the scientization of the social were taking place through a network connecting scholars and thinkers from all over the world This article sets the inter-war period in the context of the whole period during which the scientization of the social was taking place without any particularly critical reflection (from the 1880s to the early 1970s). In the first part, I present the concepts of Modernity and the scientization of the social and propose a periodization of their political use. In the second part, I focus more specifically on the events and developments in the Soviet Union and Germany, and the means of political communication by which the legitimization of the new powers were achieved.