Helmut Schelsky (14 October 1912 – 24 February 1984) was a Germansociologist, the most influential in post-World War II Germany, well into the 1970s.
Schelsky was born inChemnitz,Saxony. He turned tosocial philosophy and even more to sociology, as elaborated at theUniversity of Leipzig byHans Freyer (the "Leipzig School"). Having earned his doctorate in 1935 (thesis [tr.]:The theory of community in the 1796natural law byFichte), in 1939 he qualified as a lecturer ("Habilitation") with a thesis on the political thought ofThomas Hobbes at theUniversity 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 theThird Reich in 1945, Schelsky joined theGerman Red Cross and formed its effectiveSuchdienst (service to trace down missing persons). In 1949 he became a professor at theHamburg "Hochschule für Arbeit und Politik", in 1953 atHamburg University, and in 1960 he went to theUniversity of Münster. There he headed what was then the biggest West German centre for social research, inDortmund.
In 1970, Schelsky accepted the position of a professor of sociology at the newly foundedBielefeld University, which created the only German full "Faculty of Sociology", as well as the "Centre of Interdisciplinarian Research" ("Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung" [ZiF] atRheda), 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 Schelsky returned to Münster in anger in 1973 and stayed there for another five years. He wrote several more books, against theUtopian way to approach Sociology, as fostered by theFrankfurt School, and on theSociology of Law.
He died inMünster in 1984.
The "Leipzig School" (the social philosopherHans Freyer, the anthropologistArnold Gehlen, the philosopherGotthard 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-HitlerianFerdinand Tönnies (University of Kiel) and toLeopold von Wiese (University of Cologne), and to the émigrés (e. g. toKarl Mannheim, and to the up-and-comingRené König,Paul Lazarsfeld,Norbert Elias,Theodor Adorno,Rudolf Heberle, andLewis A. Coser). Freyer's ambitions failed miserably, theNazi power elite monopolizing ideology, but helped the talented student Schelsky in his first career steps.
After the Second World War, Schelsky became a star ofapplied sociology, due to his great gift of anticipating social and sociological developments. He published books on the theory ofinstitutions, onsocial stratification, on the sociology of family, on the sociology of sexuality, on the sociology of youth, onIndustrial Sociology, on the sociology of education, and on the sociology of the university system. InDortmund, he made the Social Research Centre (″Sozialforschungsstelle″) 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 createadherents. 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 remigrantsRené König (Cologne) andOtto Stammer (Berlin) - theFrankfurt School starting to be of influence only after 1968.
Schelsky was able to designBielefeld 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.
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