Soziologie – Corona – Kritik

The COVID-19 pandemic does not herald a new social era. Rather, the mechanisms of dealing with the pandemic, as far as they can be identified at this point, bear testimony to the structural socio-economic and socio-political crisis that must be regarded as the signature of democratic capitalism. Nor should the prevailing crisis management be misunderstood as a “politics of life” which (at least temporarily) suspends the capitalist logic of accumulation and of profit: as it is only certain lives that the governments of the democratic-capitalist industrialized countries are committed to saving and protecting. This means that any adoption of the life-coaching semantics of “crisis as an opportunity” should be treated with caution. However, for sociology itself the current circumstances could indeed offer an opportunity: that is, if it would finally stop denying that its own practice is inextricably enmeshed in (trans-)formative social processes and is never unideological, nor value-free, nor politically neutral.