The fourth lecture of our series America 250: Society, History, Politics. With Prof. Dr. Heiko Beyer.
Sociology understands itself as the science of civil society (“bürgerliche Gesellschaft”) — yet where and when does this object actually become available to observation? Standard histories of the discipline reach back to the French Revolution, occasionally to England’s Glorious Revolution. The American Revolution, by contrast, hardly appears at all. This lecture corrects that blind spot.
Drawing on my book Horizont der Moderne (Campus 2021), I argue that the three system‑parts of early sociology — the natural history of mankind (England), the science of founding (France) and the science of emancipation (Germany) — became thinkable, plausible and politically urgent only after they had been lived in North America. The frontier mythology, the practice of public freedom in town meetings and associations, and the constitutional act conceived as a novus ordo seclorum form the lifeworld horizon against which Comte, Marx and Spencer first articulate their sociological designs.
The American experience is transmitted not through textual influence alone, but through intermediaries who had crossed the Atlantic or read those who did: Saint‑Simon, who fought at Yorktown in 1781 before mentoring the young Comte; Tocqueville and Beaumont, whose reports Marx absorbs in his Paris years of 1843–44; and the English Dissenters around Birmingham and Derby, whose support for the American Revolution shaped Spencer’s evolutionary sociology in ways the late Spencer was at pains to disavow.
The genealogy is not merely of antiquarian interest. A sociology that does not know its own prehistory risks degenerating into the ideology of the very society it claims to analyze. Reconstructing the Atlantic horizon of the classics is therefore at the same time an exercise in disciplinary self‑clarification — and a reminder that the founding event of modern social thought lies, in part, west of the Atlantic.
Heiko Beyer is Heisenberg Professor of Sociology at Heinrich‑Heine‑Universität Düsseldorf. His research focuses on the sociology of ideology, antisemitism, populism, social movements, and the history of social theory.
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America 250: Society, History, Politics. This public lecture series explores the history of the United States from the precolonial age and early settlement through American Independence and the Civil War. Against the backdrop of the 250th anniversary of the United States, the series takes a historical perspective to better understand where the country stands today.
By examining key historical turning points, debates, and conflicts that shaped American society, politics, and identity, the lectures offer valuable insights into contemporary developments in the United States. Understanding America’s present through its past allows for a deeper and more nuanced view of current political, social, and cultural dynamics.
The lecture series is open to students and the general public and invites all interested audiences to engage in discussion and critical reflection on the history and present of the United States.
A cooperation between the Institute for American Studies Leipzig and the German-American Institute Saxony.
