Current research
Forms of social cohesion which are based neither on mutual economic and political interests nor on shared strong normative expectations are of special interest in sociology. They can be called sociations of taste. As I have tried to prove, for instance, in my book
The Sociology of Taste, these forms are aesthetic. They were an important problem to Immanuel Kant in his 'third critique',
The Critique of the Judgment Power, as well as in Friedrich Schiller's well-known program for aesthetic education. Modern consumption offers many good examples of these aesthetic forms of sociation. I have studied, among others, various forms of modern food consumption in the Nordic states. Fashion, as a totally irrational but socially extremely important phenomenon is an important meadiator between the individual and the society. It allows for individual expressions of his or her individuality and is, at the same time, socially binding. The importance of fashion as a 'modernity phenomenon' per se has only increased since the times Georg Simmel wrote his classical analyses of fashion.
I have applied these theoretical insights in my historical studies of the consumption in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In my new book
Caviar with Champagne I have analysed in detail, with the help of previously totally unknown archival sources, the formation of a specific Soviet culture of consumption with its ideals of good life and luxury under Stalin's times. These ideals did not only remain empty slogans. The Party and the Soviet government made many efforts, with greater or lesser success, to realize them in practice. Even though the economic reality under which most Soviet citizens lived often differed quite drastically from these ideals they had, nevertheless a great impact on the formation of the Soviet citizen, or the 'New Socialist Man'. Even in today's rapidly changing Russian society one can find many traces and remnants of this, once very potent, model of Soviet consumption.
