The Double Defensive

Engineers represent the (industrial) modern age like no other profession. In the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, however, the enormous numerical expansion of the profession was contrasted by comparatively unfavorable working conditions and incomes. This was particularly true of the graduate engineers, whose academization failed to meet industrial requirements. Can the völkisch-rechtskonservative political radicalization of many technical experts on the eve of the 'Third Reich' actually be fully explained by these professional-social frictions?Data on the professional-social situation, consumption, leisure time and political behaviour of engineers in the higher and academic professions, which have been made available for the first time, already reveal the contours of late-modern, contemporary society in the period under consideration. This makes more complex explanatory approaches necessary and enables general insights into the dynamics of social crises.This study of (historical) professional, inequality, and political sociology is published in its third, fully revised edition.