The Social Science of the Citizen Society. Michael Kuhn

worldwide implementation of the social science of the citizen society through its “de-colonization”

      3 Comments on life in a world of citizen societies and its social science idealizations

      4 Knowledge that endows national identity—contributions to the ideological armament of states

      5 The final highlights of the masterminds of the globalized post-colonial thinking

      6 Old and new errors and their sources: Theoretical legacies of the globalization and de-colonization debates under the preparatory work of Historical Materialism

      Book 2, entitled “The Nature of the Social Science of Citizen Society—Sketches for a Theory” analyzes the characteristics of the nature of social science thinking in four chapters:

      1 Architecture and conceptual foundations of disciplinary thinking

      2 Forms of telelogical thinking—progress of social scientific theorizing about itself

      3 The discourse on and progress of social science knowledge

      4 Beyond social science thinking

1 In this book, the concept of a plurality of “social sciences” refers to the disciplinary social sciences and thus to the specific form of social science theories of citizen societies. Their nature and their current progresses in theory building is the subject of the book “The Social Science of Citizen Society 2, The Nature of the Social Sciences—Sketches of a Critique”.

2 A “zombie science” is the social science thinking according to Beck, because it practices a “methodical nationalism”. This accusation of a “methodical nationalism” does not criticize nationalist thinking, but wants to say that thinking must be “cosmopolitan”, i.e., directed at the world beyond individual national societies, and this cosmopolitanism is perfectly compatible with nationalist thinking, yes, as we will see later, it is the more clever nationalism praised by Beck. (See also chapter 5 in this book) http://www.ulrichbeck.net-build.net/index.php?page=cosmopolitan.

3 It is not by chance that the social sciences in the imperial state that supervises all imperial states, the USA, make an exception here. Long before the discussions on the necessity of a globalization of the social sciences started, the social sciences in the USA knew about the world beyond their national society with the rise of their country to the global world power and developed the idea of “area studies” that do not make a big fuss about their imperial missions. The unworldly idea of a social world established as a world of states, of wanting to imagine itself as a social world of social units untouched by each other, is the privilege of the social sciences in the imperial states, which under the global supremacy of the USA practice their imperial policy above all as global economic policy, and which must therefore receive a wake-up call from their national science policy, to “internationalize” their science, after their economic policy had noticed that science had become a new lever in the global struggle of capital for markets.

4 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Monthly Review Press, New York 1972.