International Institute for Sociology

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The International Institute of Sociology (IIS) ( French Institut International de Sociologie ; English: International Institute of Sociology ) was founded by René Worms in Paris in 1893 and is the oldest sociological professional association. The current IIS President is Craig Calhoun ( London School of Economics and Political Science ) (as of 2016), the IIS Secretariat is at Uppsala University in Sweden . The only German IIS president from 1993 to 1997 was Erwin K. Scheuch .

History of the IIS

Well-known IIS members before the Second World War were: Franz Boas , Roger Bastide , Lujo Brentano , Theodor Geiger , Gustave Le Bon , Karl Mannheim , William Fielding Ogburn , Pitirim Sorokin , Georg Simmel , Werner Sombart , Ludwig Stein , Gabriel Tarde , Richard Thurnwald , Ferdinand Tönnies , Thorstein Veblen , Lester Frank Ward , Sidney Webb , Max Weber , Leopold von Wiese and Florian Znaniecki .

The continued existence of the IIS beyond the Second World War was questioned because the last IIS president before the end of the war, the Frenchman René Maunier , was deposed in 1944 for collaboration with National Socialism and at the same time relieved of his teaching post. The Italian Corrado Gini , a former leading fascist theorist, postulated a continued existence and reactivated the IIS in 1949 in competition with the International Sociological Association (ISA) founded in the same year . In the 1950s, the IIS, headed by Gini as President, was at the center of a so-called "civil war of sociology" that Gunther Ipsen had declared in 1951.

Sociologists who had also been active as such under Nazi rule founded a national section of the IIS against the German Society for Sociology (DGS), which had joined the ISA and which they accused of “Americanism”. Its spokesman was Hans Freyer , who had acted as the "leader" of the DGS after 1933 and was accepted back into the DGS in 1951 by the first post-war chairman of the DGS, Leopold von Wiese . Other members of the German IIS section included Ipsen, Wilhelm Brepohl , Arnold Gehlen and Karl Valentin Müller (he became Secretary General of the IIS in 1954). Helmut Schelsky had taken part in the founding meeting of the German IIS section on April 21 and 22, 1951 in Wiesbaden , but had not joined it. Some of the German members, like Freyer, were also organized in the DGS at the same time.

According to Stefan Kühl , the IIS was the “organizational retreat base” for German sociologists after the Second World War, “who were discredited by many of their colleagues because of their commitment to National Socialism.” The institute's scientific course was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Years of IIS presidents Corrado Gini and Karl Valentin Müller, who wanted to disseminate their "anthrosociological, biological research approach" via the IIS.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The International Institute of Sociology (IIS) , there "History"
  2. ↑ Johannes Weyer , The "Civil War in Sociology". The West German Sociology between Americanization and Restoration, in: Sven Papcke (ed.), Order and Theory. Contributions to the history of sociology in Germany , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1986, ISBN 3-534-09098-5 , pp. 280–304, here p. 288, PDF , accessed on January 6, 2015
  3. ↑ Carola Dietze: Nachgeholtes Leben: Helmuth Plessner 1892-1985 , Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0078-1 , p. 470.
  4. ↑ Johannes Weyer, The "Civil War in Sociology". The West German Sociology between Americanization and Restoration, in: Sven Papcke (ed.), Order and Theory. Contributions to the history of sociology in Germany , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1986, ISBN 3-534-09098-5 , pp. 280–304, here pp. 289 f., Online version , PDF, accessed on January 6, 2015
  5. ↑ Stefan Kühl : The International of Racists. Rise and Fall of the International Eugenic Movement in the 20th Century , 2nd updated edition, Campus, Frankfurt am Main, New York 2014, ISBN 978-3-593-39986-7 , pp. 291 f.