Becker’s activities from the 1890s until his death in 1933 can be summarized under two headings as an Orientalist and as a cultural politician (Essner & Winkelhane, 1988). The essential point regarding the current study is Becker’s efforts at transferring his experiences as an Orientalist academician into the policies he wanted to develop as a cultural politician. In 1916, Becker was appointed as an expert in the Prussian Ministry of Education, after which he gained importance as a cultural politician. After being appointed undersecretary in the same ministry in 1919, he then became Minister of Education in 1921 but soon returned to his previous position. Between 1925-1930, he again held the position of Prussian Minister of Education. During all these periods, he did not lose his academic interest and continued his studies until his death in 1933 (Essner & Winkelhane, 1988, p. 154). In particular, Becker should be emphasized to have held office independently of all political parties at a time of political polarization. Becker in his own words carried out all these activities as a “member of the education party” (as cited in Essner & Winkelhane, 1988, p. 159).

Becker’s importance as a cultural politician was also reflected in his being considered the third reformer of the German education system, after Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and Friedrich Althoff (1839-1908). Becker’s role as a cultural politician after 1918 can be observed in his proposals to reform the education system from the ground up; ensuring unity in the higher education system; redesigning educational content within the framework of the current cultural-spiritual requirements; creating courses and chairs that showed the synthetic approach for areas such as sociology, political science, and studies on foreign societies (Auslandstudien); appropriately staffing the newly created courses and chairs; reshaping education in terms of the requirements of mass society; abolishing status differences between academicians; and involving students in the educational process.

One of the topics that Becker emphasized the most as a cultural politician was political education (i.e., citizenship education), which is intended to pave the way for individuals to understand themselves as part of a whole (i.e., as part of the people) and which would also ultimately enable to a cultural awareness to actually be sharpened. In fact, the educational institutions that Becker proposed or initiated to open involved the structures in which political education would be imparted to individuals. Two examples of such institutions were the German High School of Politics (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik) and the German High School of Physical Education (Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen). In addition to all these and in terms of the importance carried for this study, Becker was one of the most important people to support the inclusion of sociology as a course and chair in German universities as of 1919 (Essner & Winkelhane, 1988, p. 163). Becker hired academicians who could work in the field of sociology or who could contribute to the forming of sociology chairs (Müller, 1991, p. 349). 

Becker also tried to establish the intellectual foundations for institutionalizing sociology as a synthetic science at that time. In his writings in the 1920s, Becker pointed to the need for synthetic science in response to the current cultural crisis in Germany. As was already mentioned, Becker didn’t limit the need for synthetic science to sociology; still, sociology stood out among the many other synthetic sciences as the field that could most clearly respond to this need in the relevant debates.

Becker’s thoughts can be read most comprehensively in his series of articles “Gedanken zur Hochschulreform” [Reflections on Higher Education Reform]. Becker’s primary problem with the issues experienced in the field of culture was the prevailing particularism and individualism in Germany (Becker, 1997a, pp. 184–185). The problem Becker noted with particularism and individualism was that each part gained importance and strength within a whole, but the power that was inherent in each part could not be extended to the whole. Becker observed this problem in two areas: society in general and education in particular. With regard to society, the issue is about the inability to form a national identity that encompasses all Germans. On the other hand, the particularistic education according to Becker seemed to have revealed a crisis of culture in Germany. The corporate logic that made collective work possible disappeared at the university. The unity of teaching and research within the university had also suffered as a result. This was largely because academicians acted more as researchers trying to specialize more and more in their own professions rather than as teachers educating out of a sense of social responsibility. This situation led to different scientific fields diverging more and more from each other. In addition to universities, polytechnic schools had also emerged to meet the needs of industry and the market, which, as explained above, dissolved the unity of teaching and research. As a result of the disintegration of unity and the inability to produce a general societal outlook, knowledge had gradually gained an encyclopedic nature (Becker, 1997a, pp. 193–198). This meant that, while knowledge was increasing, a holistic and general view of society could not be obtained.

Becker also tried to offer a solution to the existing problems. Firstly, serious reforms needed to be carried out in universities and the connection of science with life needed to be restored. Higher education reform could be tackled on two levels: technical and content-related. The main purpose at the technical level was to ensure unity in education and to abandon different institutionalizations beyond universities that would lead to the separation of research and teaching. Universities also needed to be redesigned as institutions that train researchers, enable professions, and above all, provide citizenship education as the main framework of higher education (Becker, 1997a, p. 204).

However, one important step toward achieving these goals involved the creation of courses that would address these goals in terms of content. Becker (1997a, p. 202) stated the need to exist for courses that would give students an overview of society. To do this, he drew attention to the need to design these synthetic courses in a way that would be fed from many disciplines. He stated that the primary task here fell to philosophy, but that philosophy needed to also not confine itself to an area that only experts could understand. Again, studies on foreign societies were capable of responding to the need, since these were not fed from a single discipline and dealt with entire peoples through their psychological characters and social structures. Becker stated that this field could produce a sociological view if it were wellstructured. As far as his views on sociology, Germany had lagged in this area because sociology was based on the synthetic approach that did not fit the German way of thinking. However, “sociological courses are an urgent need at all universities” because “spiritual habits can only be created in the intellectual sphere through a sociological perspective that later becomes political opinion when it is transferred to the ethical realm” (Becker, 1997a, pp. 189–190).

The harshest criticism of Becker’s assessment of sociology came from the German historian Georg von Below (1920). Von Below was skeptical of Becker’s portrayal of sociology as a synthetic science, and his criticisms gathered around two points: The first is the potential sociology has to be used as a tool for popularizing socialism. To von Below, sociology was the battering ram of socialism. The second point involves how von Below assessed sociology as a typical French science reflecting positivism (Stöltung, 2006, p. 9). If one looks at the issue through the antagonism of Becker and von Below, this situation is indeed seen to be a reflection of the modernist-conservative/ traditionalist split among German academicians of the time (Ringer, 1990, p. 276). A considerable number of German academicians during the Weimar period had developed a conservative reaction similar to von Below’s. The collapse of the Reich in 1918 and the replacement of the Weimar Republic undoubtedly had the greatest influence on this. However, this situation can be accepted to reflect the ailments that had arisen in the rapidly changing society since the 1880s. Industrialization, urbanization, and population growth had had serious impacts on education that led to the shattering of traditional notions and statuses (Kleine, 1989, p. 9).

Meanwhile, Becker was one of the intellectuals who were known at the time as reasonable republicans (Vernunftrepublikaner). He believed the need existed to act actively in the face of the changing societal conditions and to find solutions to current problems. In his eyes, universities should become independent of the determinants of the market and state control. On one hand, universities should preserve their old elite position in society, while on the other they should respond to the cultural needs of the time by taking the changing society into account. This was the driving force behind Becker’s emphasis on sociology as a synthesis. Becker’s expectation of sociology was that it should provide political education. As previously stressed, Becker had pointed out the main problems of the Germans to be particularism and individualism. Politically, single German states could not develop into a unified state. On the basis of all these lay the fact that German individuals could not develop their relations with the state on the basis of citizenship. Therefore, the importance of sociology for Becker, who set the goal of strong individual and national unity, was also related to its capacity for providing citizenship education (Müller, 1991, p. 253).