Lecture
Eigen-Sinn in Contexts. Reasoning about the Historicity and Topicality of a Socio-Anthropological Concept of Power and Agency

Approximately four decades ago, the German historian Alf Lüdtke (1943–2019) published his first articles on "Eigen-Sinn” – sense-of-one’s-own, quant-à-soi, krnąbrność, puron, … – a concept designed to understand the behaviors, attitudes, and motivations of individuals operating within specific power relations and structures of domination. This framework avoids reducing individuals to mere functions of systemic or ideological constraints or to “representatives” of supra-individual collectivities such as class, nation, or ethnicity. While Lüdtke originally developed this concept to study industrial workers and ‘ordinary people’ in Germany from the Kaiserreich through the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and communist East Germany, its broad international reception has sparked numerous creative transfers and applications in other historiographical fields. This paper will explore the opportunities and limitations of such adaptations, including the applicability of “Eigen-Sinn” in analyzing power dynamics within liberal-democratic societies and – perhaps most notably – its unsettling relevance in an era of emerging neo-autocracies.

The presentation contributes to the panel "Everyday Life" of the international conference "Historical Anthropology — From Research Practices to Historical Subdiscipline", taking part at the 30th to 31st May 2025 at Jagiellonian University.