Christoph Butterwegge (born 26 January 1951) is a German political scientist and poverty researcher. From 1998 to 2016 he was Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Comparative Education and Social Sciences at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Cologne and is a member of the Research Center for Intercultural Studies (FiSt).
Long active in political circles, Butterwegge was a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 1970 to 1975 and again from 1987 to 2005. After leaving the SPD, he has openly praised Die Linke but has never joined the party. On 21 November 2016, Die Linke nominated him as a candidate in the 2017 federal presidential election. Butterwegge received 128 votes on 12 February 2017, coming in second place to former Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the SPD.
Life
Christoph Butterwegge graduated from the Max Ludwig Planck grammar school in Dortmund in 1970 and studied social science, philosophy, law, and psychology and Ruhr-University Bochum. In 1975 he graduated with a degree in social science and in 1978 with an MA in philosophy. In 1980, he joined Detlev Albers at the University of Bremen with the dissertation SPD und Staat heute ("SPD and state today").
Butterwegge took lectures for sociology and social and political science in various universities and technical colleges in Duisburg, Fulda, Magdeburg, and Münster. From 1987 to 1989, he worked as a scientific employee at the Department of Education and Society at the University of Bremen. He also lectured at the academy for Labor and Politics as well as at the Research and Education Center for the History of the Workers Movement in the State of Bremen.
In 1990, at the University of Bremen, Butterwegge habilitated in the field of political science with a study on the theory and practice of Austrian social democracy. From 1991 to 1994, he worked as a research assistant at the Bremen Foundation for Arms Conversion and Peace Research. From 1994 to 1997, he represented a C-3 professorship for social policy at the Department of Social Sciences at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, where he was awarded a C-4 professorship for political science. Since 2011, Butterwegge has been the managing director of the Institute for Comparative Education and Social Services at the University of Cologne. Prominent former students of Butterwegge include Kemal Bozay, Thomas Gesterkamp, Gudrun, Hentges, Michael Klundt, and Samuel Salzborn.
Since May 2013, Butterwegge has written guest columns for FOCUS Online in addition to articles for ZEIT, Die Tageszeitung ("taz"), Frankfurter Rundschau, Freitag, the Mittelbayerische Zeitung, The Young World, and the Federal Center for Political Education.
He is married to social scientist and Die Linke politician Carolin Butterwegge. The couple have two children.
Work
Butterwegge's work focused on the history of German social democracy as well as questions on the theory of state and democracy. At the beginning of the 1980s, Butterwegge began writing on Friedenspolitik (peace policy) and disarmament. He attempted to make use of the Zeitunsansatz in Bremen for political education, and linked it with concepts of "research learning" in the sense of a "search for a trace" as well as a local and regional historiography "from below", which was then related to oral history.
Since 1990, Butterwegge has focused on the subjects of right-wing extremism, racism, youth violence, violence prevention, and migration policy. Other areas of work are globalization, neoliberalism, the welfare state, demographic change, poverty - particularly child and elderly poverty - as well as generational justice. For many years, Butterwegge has been publicly featured on various topics and has been interviewed by various newspapers, radio stations, and television station.
Butterwegge has argued that both globalization and demographic change have been abused to justify profound market-driven changes in society, such as the dismantling of the welfare state and a largely antisocial reform policy. In emphasizing the benefits of people, Butterwegge sees the danger of "ethnicizing social conflicts". The concept of location nationalism goes back to Butterwegge, which, in contrast to the well-known Volkisch nationalism of the far-right, means an over-identification with Germany as a business location.