Values and the Changing of Values during the 20th Century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Rödder
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252051982

The research focus of historical value research is pursuing four central questions: When, how and why do social value systems, that means, fundamental orientational guidelines of collective speaking and acting that are generally accepted, change? Was there a basic change of the value system in Western industrial societies around 1970, the social sciences have postulated or are there alternative patterns of development? To what extent are moral values linked to coherences of specific social groups and which role do values play in processes of social negotiations and power struggles? What kind of meaning do values have in terms of the general socio-cultural change?To answer these questions, the project critically takes up contemporary socio-scientific research concepts and obtains a genuine historical perspective by extending those concepts methodically, thematically and conceptually, by focusing on the period since the late 19th century and relating moral values that are publicly communicated with social experience and institutional and socio-structural parameters. At the same time, the project builds up on questions and categories of the historical research of the bourgeoisie.The projects that will be depicted in the application should, in an empirical and conceptual way, complete and extend the studies on the values of the family and the labor in the 20th century. Methodically, those research purposes and their analyses of processes of value change are based on the historical discourse analysis. The first partial study will analyze the public debates on birth control, abortion, sterilization, which occurred at regular intervals since the end of the First World War in France and Germany, as scenes and indicators of social value change in a transnational perspective. The second project expands the thematic canon of the subject area of education and will analyze the meaning of the humanistic educational idea as well as the consequent value shift between the Republic of Weimar and the German Federal Republic. The third partial study focuses on the aspect of migration and thereby makes use of the discourses on migration as a source for the discussion on labor values in the German Federal Republic between 1950 and 2000. The empirical results of all partial projects, new thematic examinations as well as additionally historical and interdisciplinary reflections should be combined in a final study with the working title Values and Value Change in the 20th Century.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants