Helmut Schelsky

Helmut Schelsky (14 October 1912 – 24 February 1984), was a German sociologist, the most influential in post-World War II Germany, well into the 1970s.

Schelsky was born in Chemnitz, Saxony. He turned to social philosophy and even more to sociology, as elaborated at the University of Leipzig by Hans Freyer (the "Leipzig School"). Having earned his doctorate in 1935 (thesis [tr.]: The theory of community in the 1796 natural law by Fichte), in 1939 he qualified as a lecturer ("Habilitation") with a thesis on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes at the University of Königsberg. He was called up in 1941, so did not take up his first chair of Sociology at the (then German) Reichsuniversität Straßburg in 1944.

After the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, Schelsky joined the German Red Cross and formed its effective Suchdienst (service to trace down missing persons). In 1949 he became a Professor at the Hamburg "Hochschule für Arbeit und Politik", in 1953 at Hamburg University, and in 1960 he went to the University of Münster. There he headed what was then the biggest West German centre for social research, in Dortmund.

In 1970, Schelsky was called to be a professor of sociology at the newly founded Bielefeld University (creating by the way the only German full "Faculty of Sociology", and the "Centre of Interdisciplinarian Research" ("Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung" [ZiF] at Rheda), planned to be a 'German Harvard'). However, his new university changed very much, due to the years of student unrest all over Europe and North America, so he returned to Münster in anger, in 1973, for another five years. Having been a busy and successful publisher and editor all his life, he wrote several more books, against the Utopian way to approach Sociology, as fostered by the Frankfurt School, and on the Sociology of Law, but died a broken man in 1984.

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