Jürgen Kocka
Title: “The Interplay of Capitalism, Family and Inequality in Social History”
Abstract: Family cohesion has served as a major base for the rise and success of capitalism, while also defining certain limits to its expansion. It helped to provide resources and connections, motivation, qualification and meaning. Capitalism changed and frequently eroded the cohesion of families. It was the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter who in the 1940s predicted the decline of capitalism because of the decline of the bourgeois family. He was wrong as “Familienkapitalismus” is still strong in many countries today. The lecture will debate questions concerning the changing forms of interdependence between capitalism and family. While it is well known that capitalism has been and continues to be a major driving force behind increasing economic and social inequality over generations, it can be asked whether this type of inequality is more due to the social rootedness of capitalism in family structures than to the economic functions of capitalism per se. The presentation will deal mostly with the modern period (18th century to the present), and focus on industrial capitalism, though not exclusively.
Bio: Jürgen Kocka taught Social History at the University of Bielefeld, History of the Industrial World at the Free University of Berlin and European History at UCLA. He has published widely in the field of modern history, particularly the social, economic and cultural history of Germany and Europe as well as the comparative history of the 18th – 20th centuries. His research has frequently been located in the field of the overlap between history and social sciences. Preferred topics: the history of work, industrial enterprise, social classes and capitalism. His publications in English include Facing Total War: German Society 1914-1918 (1984), Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (1999), Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History (2010); Capitalism. A Short History (2016) and Historians and the Future (2020). He was a Permanent Fellow of the Berlin Institute of Advanced Study, President of the Social Science Centre Berlin (WZB), President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences and Vice-President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He has held visiting posts at different institutions, including IAS Princeton, NIAS and SCAS. He is a member of several academies, among them Leopoldina. He has received honorary degrees from several European universities, e.g. Rotterdam, Uppsala and the EUI Florence, and several prizes, with the International Holberg Prize among them. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College Oxford.
Affiliation: Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
