Memoria di una disciplina: sociologia e nazionalsocialismo

After the second World War the debate on sociology during National socialism has been for a long time dominated by the master narrative of its nonexistence or irrelevance. At the basis of such thesis there were the following explanations: an universalistic understanding of sociology as 'objective science', the fact that a large part of German social scientists emigrated after 1933 and the 'suspension' of the German sociological association (DGS). In the last thirty years however a renewed interest to the history of the discipline under the Nazi regime highlighted three crucial aspects: its institutionalization process outside university, its mutual relationships with the political sphere and a sociologization process of other disciplines. Starting from this new historical perspective the work is articulated in three parts. In the first part I reconstruct the debate on sociology and National socialism by looking at the different discourses on the past as different 'strategies of memory' aiming at asserting or maintaining own social and symbolic position in the new field of sociology in the light of the democratic process of the German Federal Republic. In the second part I analyze the genesis and logic of the sociological field during the regime, by focusing on the possible correspondence between its social and symbolical space. The analysis is also useful to illustrate the structural transformation of the field after 1945 with respect to the (positive or negative) career of the social scientists operative in Nazi-Germany and to their production. In the third part I try to clarify the distinction between their academic and scientific capital before and after the regime within the contexts of production and of reception of their works and theories. The main goal is to decode the generalized assumption that during the nazi dictatorship sociology was ideological, especially with regards to those social theories close to historical (and cultural) sociology. The case study is not only emblematic for understanding the consolidation process of sociology in Germany in the second half of the 19th century but it can be also useful for comparative analysis with countries such as Italy where the history of the discipline presents several analogies.