Nielsen, Kurt Aagaard

Intellectual Horizon

Nielsen's intellectual orientations were shaped in the late sixties and seventies through his participation in the students' movement as part of the ‘new left’. He became one of the central figures in developing a sociological self-critique, questioning the established (and mostly undebated) ways of thinking and doing sociology, which in the Danish context at the time were strongly positivistic. The critical students wanted to reflect and question sociology in its societal relations and functions and in its historical-epistemological logics as well. Different forms of rereading of Karl Marx here played a crucial role. Among these different readings of Marx, a structural reading inspired by Louis Althusser was highly influential, but Nielsen instead turned to the tradition from critical theory (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) based, in the [Page 555]first place, on the German sociologist and philosopher Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's book Public Sphere and Experience, published in 1972. This is a tradition that is not well known to a primarily English reading public; to have an impression of this way of theoretical approach, therefore, one might look to a work such as Moishe Postone's 1993 book Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory, which could be said to take a similar stance to Negt's.

Negt in his writings focused on modern work seen in a societal and subjective, experience-based perspective, and he especially elaborated the constellation of ‘work and human dignity’ as a concrete utopian horizon within which all analyses of modern work should be elaborated. Nielsen grasped this thematic analysis, and in his doctoral thesis, he developed his theory of a (potential) social orientation as something inherent to modern work. Later on, he connected this critical theoretical way of analysis to a pragmatist approach as developed by Richard Sennett. In its empirical dimensions, this core area of his academic work was elaborated in close relation to his work with action research that took form through the 1980s and onwards, which also transcended the pure critical stance of his early work. The problematic nature of modern work thus remained a central interest of his, but his action research had a larger span.

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