Works
In Der Staat (1926), Freyer identified three stages of history which repeated themselves in a cycle: Glaube, Stil and Staat (belief, style, the state). These were partly, although not openly, based on Ferdinand Tönnies' Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (community and society). The last stage, Staat, was the ideal state for society: "the essential quality of the state (...) was its ability to forge living humanity with all its forces into a unity".
In 1929 Freyer wrote Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (Sociology as a "Science of Reality") (using Max Weber's term). This looked into the origins of sociology, saying that it came from the philosophy of history; that it had emerged from people's attempts to understand the connections between the past and the present. In Freyer's view, sociology was needed as a science to understand why changes in society had happened and, based on these findings, to help transform society.
Freyer's 1931 article Die Revolution von Rechts studied freedom, saying that people should only be free if they were part of a common will; that individual freedom should be limited for the sake of the community.
Read more about this topic: Hans Freyer
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“‘Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works and days were offered us, and we took works.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Great works constructed there in nature’s spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Nature is so perfect that the Trinity couldn’t have fashioned her any more perfect. She is an organ on which our Lord plays and the devil works the bellows.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)