Helmut Schelsky - Schelsky and German Sociology

Schelsky and German Sociology

The "Leipzig School" (the social philosopher Hans Freyer, the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, the philosopher Gotthard Günther), rich in the talents of a first generation, was of strong theoretical influence on Schelsky. But Freyer also dreamt of building up a sociological think tank for the Third Reich - quite differently to most other sociologists, e. g. to the (outspoken) anti-Hitlerian Ferdinand Tönnies (University of Kiel) and to Leopold von Wiese (University of Cologne), and to the émigrés (e. g. to Karl Mannheim, and to the up-and-coming René König, Paul Lazarsfeld, Norbert Elias, Theodor Adorno, Rudolf Heberle, and Lewis A. Coser). Freyer's ambitions failed miserably, the Nazi power elite monopolizing ideology, but helped the talented (and former Nazi) student Schelsky in his first career steps.

After the Second World War, no longer a National Socialist, Schelsky became a star of applied sociology, due to his great gift of anticipating social and sociological developments. He published books on the theory of institutions, on social stratification, on the sociology of family, on the sociology of sexuality, on the sociology of youth, on Industrial Sociology, on the sociology of education, and on the sociology of the university system. In Dortmund, he made the Social Research Centre a West German focus of empirical and theoretical studies, being especially gifted in finding and attracting first class social scientists, e.g. Dieter Claessens, Niklas Luhmann, and many more.

It helped that Schelsky was an outspoken liberal professor, without any ambition to create adherents - a rare bird among German mandarins. He helped another 17 sociologists qualify as lecturers (outnumbering in this any other professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences) and anticipated the boom in sociological chairs at German universities. Manning them, he was professionally even more successful than the outstanding remigrants René König (Cologne) and Otto Stammer (Berlin) - the Frankfurt School starting to be of influence only after 1968.

Schelsky was able to design Bielefeld University as an innovative institution of the highest academic quality, both in research and in thought. But the fact that his own university had moved away from his ideas hit him hard. His later books, criticizing ideological sociology (very much acclaimed now by conservative analysts) and on the sociology of law (quite influential in the Schools of Law) kept up his reputation as an outstanding thinker, but fell out of grace with younger sociologists. Moreover, his fascinating analyses, being of highest practical value, went out of date for the same reason; only by 2000 did new sociologists start to read him again.