Interview, Revue de la régulation, July 29, 2016

What kind of topics and scholars exerted the heaviest influence on you in your formative years both in Germany (Frankfurt) and the US (New York Columbia University)?

I cannot claim that my intellectual development was straightforward. Also, I always was an intellectual omnivore, and I was and remained for a long time unable to make up my mind on whether I was more interested in social science or in the practice of politics. In Frankfurt it took me a while to find my first set of topics, which was political organizations, interest associations, in particular trade unions, and industrial sociology, especially the study of worker participation and co-determination. Apart from this, I read social theory, in particular Marx, Weber and Parsons, and attended classes taught by Adorno, Habermas, Offe and others. I also spent a lot of time, with hindsight perhaps too much time, in radical politics, at least as much in the Social-Democratic Party and in IG Metall as on campus. (…) Continue