Schelsky’s popular conservatism won audiences by rejecting reflexivity and high ideals
Evidence
The writings of Schelsky in particular, the youngest and least compromised of the three conservative critics, were aimed at a wider public. Free of methodological and epistemological concerns, specialist limitations and mathematical-statistical dryness, Schelsky’s work represented a kind of popular positivism. Schelsky presented himself as a representative of down-to-earth humanity, as an advocate of an anti-ideological need for reality and fresh orientation in post-war German society, as an ally in the fight against the excessive demands being made of his contemporaries by high-flown ideals and would-be educators’ demands for awareness and self-reflectiveness. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2462
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the rhetorical strategy of contemporary anti-woke/anti-elite populism resisting demands for self-reflection; parallels Boltanski’s and Fassin’s work on anti-intellectual sentiment. — connects to: Counter-Enlightenment conservatism won postwar German mass audiences through popular positivism; Counter-Enlightenment conservatism reached mass audiences through popular positivism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 612
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far does Schelsky’s positioning anticipate today’s ‘common sense’ anti-expert populism as a deliberate intellectual posture rather than mere ignorance?