Fatalismus. Über eine vernachlässigte Stütze sozialer Ordnung

Most sociological explanations tacitly assume that contemporary social orders are based on the propensities of active, purpose-driven entities. These explanations underestimate the stabilizing effects of fatalistic patterns which make members accept even those social arrangements that they do not appreciate, and prevent discontent from being translated into a critique of society. This kind of fatalism cannot only be found among the utterly powerless. There also is a fatalism of the privileged (which sometimes takes the form of “positive thinking”), as well as a kind of fatalism particular to social elites. This elite fatalism also demonstrates how fatalism, since it eases the burden of thinking about alternatives, has action-enabling effects (which are part of this stabilizing mechanism). In order to analyze these order-sustaining mechanisms, this paper first reconstructs a self-critique of sociological normativism going from Durkheim to Bourdieu and to Boltanski to then take up classical pragmatist ideas that help us to understand fatalism as a particular type of socially mediated reflexivity.