Alexander von Schelting

Alexander von Schelting (born March 14, 1894 in Odessa , † November 4, 1963 in Montreux ) was a sociologist .

Life

Alexander von Schelting comes from a Dutch family who emigrated to Russia and held influential positions in the tsarist administration there. He studied law in Kiev until the summer of 1914 . Surprised in Germany by the outbreak of World War I and arrested as a hostile civilian internee , he resumed studies in Heidelberg from 1918/19 . He graduated in economics , the philosophy , the general theory of the state and of constitutional law in the summer of 1922 with a dissertation on Max Weber from.

Soon afterwards (until 1932) he published the leading sociological journal Archive for Social Sciences and Social Policy , together with Emil Lederer , Werner Sombart , Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred Weber . Shortly after his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1933 with a thesis on "The Limits of the Sociology of Knowledge", he emigrated to the USA . There he studied American sociology as a research fellow in 1934/35 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation . From the fall of 1936 to the summer of 1938 he taught at Columbia University in New York . Together with Edward Shils , Talcott Parsons and AM Henderson he contributed to the translation of the first part of Max Weber's key work "Economy and Society", which appeared in 1947 (Max Weber: The Theory of Social and Economic Organization ). Schelting stayed in Switzerland during the Second World War . From 1948 to 1953 he was a research associate at UNESCO . From 1953/54 he taught sociology at the University of Zurich and. He died in 1963.

His interest was mainly directed towards the methodology of the social sciences and in particular the sociology of knowledge . During his time in Zurich, von Schelting concentrated on Russian intellectual history, which can be seen in connection with his biography. His work was only recognized late in the sociological specialist public.

Works

• The logical theory of historical cultural studies by Max Weber and his concept of the ideal type . In: Archive for Social Science and Social Policy , Volume 49, pp. 623–767. (Dissertation)
• Introduction to the methodology of political economy ( 1925 )
• Max Weber's science theory . JCB Mohr, Tuebingen, 1934.
• Russia and Europe in Russian historical thinking . A. Francke, Bern, 1948; New edition: edition tertium, Ostfildern, 1997; ISBN 3930717417

literature

• Roland Aegerter (1998): Swiss Science and Eastern Europe. On the history of Slavic and Eastern European studies. Bern: Peter Lang (dissertation).

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander von Schelting in the catalog of the German National Library