Jürgen Kocka

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Jürgen Kocka (born April 19, 1941, in Haindorf) is a German historian.

A university professor and president of the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin, Kocka is a major figure in traditional Social History (Bielefeld School). He has focused his research on the history of employees in large German and American businesses, and on the history of European bourgeoisie. He gained his PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1968.

Inspired by the methods of Ernest Labrousse, he attempts to analyze social processes of German society from the perspective of modernisation, industrialization, and the creation of modern Europe. He participated in the German Historikerstreit in the late 1980s, alongside Jürgen Habermas in opposition to Ernst Nolte, and supported the Sonderweg explanation of a unique path of German history.

[edit] Select Bibliography

Kocka, Jürgen. (1980). White Collar Workers in America 1890–1940: A Social–Political History in International Perspective. Translated by Maura Kealey. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Kocka, Jürgen & A. Mitchell, eds. (1993). Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-century Europe.
Kocka, Jürgen. (1999) Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany. Berghahn Books, New York [etc.]
Kocka, Jürgen. Civil Society: Some remarks on the career of a concept, in: E. Ben-Rafael, Y. Sternberg (eds.): Comparing Modernities, pp. 141-148.