Abstract
This short contribution explores alternative conceptions of classical sociology and continuities and discontinuities in its history, with particular attention to the German and Austrian context and the sociological diaspora resulting from European fascism.
Highlights
Taking the year of Max Weber’s death in 1920 as a cut-off point provides a parsimonious conception of classical sociology
With Lukács (1923), Korsch (1923) and the later emergence of Frankfurt critical theory in the early 1930s
Weber’s interpretive sociology was radicalised by Schütz (1932) in his first major work, and the sociology of knowledge, inaugurated by a largely forgotten figure, Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854-1923), was consolidated by Mannheim and Scheler. It was Jerusalem who formulated the idea of what he called soziale Verdichtung, the gradual reinforcement of beliefs and memories. (Huebner, 2013: 436). This anticipated the idea of the social construction of reality, formulated by Berger and Luckmann (1966), which in turn really took off much later with the vogue of postmodernism and was reinvented by Searle (1995)
Summary
Taking the year of Max Weber’s death in 1920 as a cut-off point provides a parsimonious conception of classical sociology. Mannheim (1929b) argued that the institutional recognition of sociology in the 1920s was a belated response to the achievements of the previous generation, and in particular to the work of ‘Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch and Max Scheler (to name here only those already dead).
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