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Henri Lefebvres mehrbandige Analyse erweitert die Analyse kapitalistischer Vergesellschaftungsweise hin zu dem Alltagsleben und damit zu den Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen der Mitglieder der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund changierender Entwicklungen des Alltagslebens, vor allem dessen Degeneration zur „Alltaglichkeit“ im Konsumkapitalismus, dabei die Kategorie der „Ambiguitat“ analytisch nutzend, rekonstruiert Lefebvre Prozesse des Zugriffs des Kapitals auf Raum und Zeit sowie Bewusstseinsformen, um Perspektiven der Uberwindung von Entfremdung, Verdinglichung in einer emanzipatorischen Qualitat fur das Leben aller Menschen jeweils historisch-konkret auszuloten.

From the early Frankfurt School through to the work of Manuel Castells, there has been a rich body of work on the cleavage between technological and social developments of the twentieth century in ...

Am Ende ihres gemeinsamen Schlusskapitels des Buches „Does Capitalism have a Future?“ aus dem Jahre 2013 – auf deutsch 2014 unter dem Titel „Stirbt der Kapitalismus?“ erschienen – schreiben die historischen Makrosoziologen I. Wallerstein et al., eine Demokratisierung in den letzten zweihundert Jahren sei wichtig fur die Sicherung „grostmoglicher“ Massenloyalitat der Menschen dem Kapitalismus gegenuber gewesen, habe aber mindestens drei Systemleistungen erfordert: „eine langjahrige Bildung, eine feste, gutbezahlte Beschaftigung und eine Altersversorgung“, erganzt durch „ein Dach uber dem Kopf“ (Wallerstein et al. 2014, S. 214).

Conditions of children's political socialisation and education have more than ever in the last 40 years to deal with questions of social inclusion and exclusion. This is a result of social cleavages which are pertinent for children's lives and experiences. This article deals with this question while favouring an approach which shows that a strengthening of children's rights – based on an emancipatory concept of politics of childhood – could support the struggle against these cleavages in the interest of establishing a really democratic society. A central starting point for an improvement of the situation of all children could be a new connection between communal life and childhood policies. Therefore the article shows different approaches which work on this level and argues for their generalisation. When the future of mankind is at stake, only a democratisation of society/ies – based on enlisting the competencies of all citizens (including children) – can be useful. This is the major challenge for political education.

This article examines diverse approaches claiming to analyse new modes of connecting knowledge and society: to depict the rise of the knowledge society or dealing with the social analysis of a new type of capitalism in the shape of informational capitalism. Against these backgrounds it highlights the possible role of education in overcoming the capitalist mode of societalisation, making use of a critical social knowledge for establishing a democratic society.

This article deals with central issues in the field of sociology and politics of education after the publication of the outcomes of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study for Germany. These outcomes serve to remind us of the old debate on politics of education in the 1960s. The main topic since then remains the reproduction of social inequality via education. Critical educational theory shows an alternative in conceptualizing education for all and in overcoming the three-tier system in Germany. This is necessary in the interest of a real democracy based on the abilities and competencies of an educated society.

Knowledge as we know it from the famous phrase of Francis Bacon – coined some four hundred years ago at the beginning of the period of modernity and capitalism – is power. Using different frames of reference – social theory, social policy and social history – to learn about the history of the knowledge question, we have to study scholarly works like Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: the hidden agenda of modernity (1990), Burke’s A Social History of Knowledge (1997) and Kintzinger’s Wissen wird Macht. Bildung im Mittelalter (2003) (Knowledge becomes power. Bildung in medieval times). One strand of these discourses, today, we find in Foucault’s talk of ‘truth regimes’; another in Chomsky’s ‘pedagogy of lies’ (2000). This shows that the knowledge question has not gone away, but accompanies us in societies and education. Moreover, knowledge, we are told by the press, politicians and institutions like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Union, the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation, and researchers, is much more relevant than ever before in the history of mankind. It is maintained that there should be a real development to a new type of society, the knowledge society. Therefore we have to deal with the problem of the ‘knowledge gap’, resulting from what is called the ‘digital divide’ (Castells, 2002). This is not only a problem for education but for social policy, too. And we have to deal with the problem of knowledge and international economic competitiveness – it may be that this is really grounded in (some) processes of globalisation. It could be that there is a transformation within the capitalist society, from Fordism to post-Fordism (Jessop 2005), to be reflected by sociological analysis (Therborn, 2000). There are many weighty allegations that do not admit easy answers. But it seems clear that social scientists and educators face some new challenges connected with questions of the status and the state of the art of knowledge today. This requires differentiations like the following, aiming at knowledge and society, knowledge production, knowledge distribution, knowledge and education, and knowledge and capitalism (cf. Postone, 1996; Peters, 2003; Gorz, 2004; Kincheloe, 2004