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During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War,
the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values
and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist
attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. Theodor
W. Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, who returned in 1949
from the United States, were skeptical. They held that standardized
polling was an inadequate and superficial method for exploring such
questions. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate
of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public
concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with
prevailing attitudes and ideas "in the air." In Group Experiment,
edited by Friedrich Pollock, they published their findings on their
group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of
opinion formation. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick make a
case that these experiments are an important missing link in the
ontology and methodology of current social-science survey research.
Beginning in 1949, Theodor W. Adorno and other members of the
reconstituted Frankfurt Institute for Social Research undertook a
massive empirical study of German opinions about the legacies of
the Nazis, applying and modifying techniques they had learned
during their U.S. exile. They published their results in 1955 as a
research monograph edited by Friedrich Pollock. The study's
qualitative results are published here for the first time in
English as Guilt and Defense, a psychoanalytically informed
analysis of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms with which
postwar Germans most often denied responsibility for the Nazi past.
In their editorial introduction, Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J.
Perrin show how Adorno's famous 1959 essay "The Meaning of Working
through the Past," is comprehensible only as a conclusion to his
long-standing research and as a reaction to the debate it stirred;
this volume also includes a critique by psychologist Peter R.
Hoffstater as well as Adorno's rejoinder. This previously
little-known debate provides important new perspectives on postwar
German political culture, on the dynamics of collective memory, and
on Adorno's intellectual legacies, which have contributed more to
empirical social research than has been acknowledged. A companion
volume, Group Experiment and Other Writings, will present the first
book-length English translation of the Frankfurt Group's
conceptual, methodological, and theoretical innovations in public
opinion research.
In this groundbreaking book, sociologist Andrew Perrin shows that
rules and institutions, while important, are not the core of
democracy. Instead, as Alexis de Tocqueville showed in the early
years of the American republic, democracy is first and foremost a
matter of culture: the shared ideas, practices, and technologies
that help individuals combine into publics and achieve
representation. Reinterpreting democracy as culture reveals the
ways the media, public opinion polling, and changing technologies
shape democracy and citizenship. As Perrin shows, the founders of
the United States produced a social, cultural, and legal
environment fertile for democratic development and in the two
centuries since, citizens and publics use that environment and
shared culture to re-imagine and extend that democracy. American
Democracy provides a fresh, innovative approach to democracy that
will change the way readers understand their roles as citizens and
participants. Never will you enter a voting booth or answer a poll
again without realizing what a truly social act it is. This will be
necessary reading for scholars, students, and the public seeking to
understand the challenges and opportunities for democratic
citizenship from Toqueville to town halls to Twitter.
When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine
activities like voting, letter-writing, and paying attention to the
news spring to mind. But, in "Citizen Speak", Andrew J. Perrin
argues that these activities play only a small part in democratic
citizenship - a form of citizenship that requires creative
thinking, talking, and acting. For "Citizen Speak", Perrin met with
labor, church, business, union, and sports organizations and
proposed to them four fictive scenarios: what if your senator is
involved in a scandal, or your police department is engaged in
racial profiling, or a local factory violates pollution law, or
your neighborhood is going to be the site of a new airport? The
conversations these scenarios inspire, Perrin shows, require
imagination. And, what people can imagine doing in response to
those scenarios depends on what's possible, what's important,
what's right, and what's feasible. By talking with one another, an
engaged citizenry draws from a repertoire of personal and
institutional resources to understand and reimagine responses to
situations as they arise. Building on such political discussions,
"Citizen Speak" shows how a rich culture of association and
democratic discourse provides the infrastructure for a healthy
democracy.
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