Unsettled Affinities

Originally published in 1993, Unsettled Affinities was Reinhard Bendix's final work. It has a unique place in his writings, as it continues the themes contained in the two volumes of Embattled Reason and extends them in his consideration of the idea of community. For Bendix, our affinities are personally, socially, and politically unsettled and unsettling. From birth, each person goes through a life-cycle, buffeted by circumstance and uneasily suspended between the risks of individual opportunity and the need for psychological support from others. All of us stand at the intersection of many social groups formed by the family, social clubs, occupation, or given by the ethnic and national affiliation into which we are born. Bendix perceived these psychological and social groups as a source of strength as well as the source of the particularist drives that ultimately aim to serve universalist aspirations. It is in this series of paradoxes that political tasks arise: how to deal with the scarcity of goods and the inequality of life changes.

Unsettled Affinities explores the ethical paradoxes of personal affiliation, social universalism, and political unity in Western civilization. The work is divided into three parts: an initial, personal reflection on the author's emigration from Hitler's Germany; an extended examination of the social definitions of community in Western civilization; and a consideration of politics, civil society, and the legitimation, of power. In the social and political sections, special attention is given to Germany. The consideration of Germany in the post-Communist world was not completed. Using notes, letters, and lectures, John Bendix, the author's son, has provided an epilogue that gives indications of the direction Reinhard Bendix's thought was heading, and Rudolf von Thadden has contributed an appropriate final thought in his "Endangered Affiliations."

Reinhard Bendix (1916–1991) was a German-born political sociologist whose work focused on industrial relations, nation-building, the history of ideas, the role of the social sciences in society, and the transformation of political legitimacy over time and across nations. He drew his inspiration from the work of Max Weber, and was instrumental during the 1960s and 1970s in making Weber’s vast and complex work accessible to English-speaking scholars. Bendix was a key figure in what has come to be called the ‘first wave’ of historically and comparatively oriented sociology in the United States, together with Seymour Martin Lipset (with whom he collaborated extensively) and Barrington Moore.

He left behind lasting intellectual bridges between Germany and the United States that emphasized an awareness of historical contingency as well as of the demonstration effects nation-states exerted on one another, and of the caution that is needed when attempting to generalize.