Albert Salomon (sociologist)

Albert Salomon (1891 to 1966) was a German-Jewish sociologist, born in Berlin and dying in New York City, and a nephew of the social work pioneer Alice Salomon. He studied art history, the history of religions and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg and Heidelberg, where he came into contact with Max Weber and Georg Lukács, and took his doctorate in 1921 with a study of the cult of friendship in Germany. From 1926 he worked at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin and wrote on Max Weber for the journal Die Gesellschaft, which he later edited and in which he introduced young writers such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Dismissed in 1933 because he was Jewish, he emigrated with his family to the United States in 1935 and taught at The New School for Social Research until his death. His books include The Tyranny of Progress (1955), reflections on the origins of sociology, and In Praise of Enlightenment (1963).