Judging by the popularity of the term, the split in society should be imminent or already have occurred.

But what may be a plausible diagnosis in the United States may not be true elsewhere.

Opinions in the public and in the social sciences are divided as to whether a split is in the offing in a country like Germany and what reliable evidence would be.

The sociologist Steffen Mau has now presented an inventory that attempts to conceptually systematize and examines the empirical content of the polarization thesis.

The finding as such is not new: for classical analyzes of modern society, especially for Marxist class theory, the differentiation into large groups such as "proletarians" and "capitalists" is a central conflict axis.

Despite the undeniable relevance of this conflict for the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries, socio-structural developments were soon observed that defused or marginalized it.

In Germany, sociologists such as Theodor Geiger and Helmut Schelsky highlighted the role of the middle class as a "buffer zone" between capital and the working class.

Their relative increase in importance led to the controversial,

More of a hidden object than a class struggle

At the same time, party systems developed in many Western countries that reflected social lines of conflict – but not just one, but several: In addition to conflicts between capital and work, those between church and state or central power and regions were also reflected in parties with contrary positions.

This complex constellation, which still resulted in loyalties within individual large groups, became increasingly confusing as a result of the further pluralization and differentiation of the milieus - "more hidden object than class antagonism", according to Mau.

But since the late 1990s, a new line of conflict seems to have revived the antagonism: the mobile, academically educated beneficiaries of globalization and the locally rooted, traditionally oriented losers face off as “cosmopolitans” and “communitarians” or “somewheres” and “anywheres”. .

Some welcome diversity and openness, others homogeneous communities and borders - and both are bound by mutual dislike.

But do differences in attitudes and lifestyles related to socioeconomic status already polarize?

If attitudes were actually sorted in such a way that they created clearly distinguishable groups with corresponding attitude syndromes, the social conflict landscape would look like a bumpkin,

Friends of Europe who are against gendering

But there is much to suggest that we are dealing more with a distribution centered on the middle, which corresponds to the silhouette of a dromedary.

A sorting of attitudes along socio-economic categories can be determined just as little as clearly defined camps of opinion in which certain attitudes would be closely correlated with one another, for example in the form that friends of European integration would always also be asterisks for gender.

The empirical evidence for such a polarized population across multiple issues is weak.

The majority can neither be clearly assigned to one nor the other pole, but lies somewhere in between, with varying sympathies.

It should therefore be the exception that differences of opinion justify the break in social contacts.

The pluralistic orientation of the population does not rule out the possibility that individual issues can polarize strongly.

But whether this happens depends above all on how these issues are publicly addressed and charged.

According to Mau, with the diagnosis of the split, politicians and the mass media ultimately look in the mirror and see the consequences of their own simplification and staging of social conflicts.

In contrast, they will hardly recognize themselves in the less dramatic assessment of sociology.

Mau, Steffen (2022): Camel or Dromedary?

On the diagnosis of social polarization.

In: Merkur 76 (874), pp. 5-18.

Available online at https://volltext.merkur-zeitschrift.de/article/99.120210/mr-76-3-5.