Alfred Vierkandt

Alfred Vierkandt (1867 to 1953) was a German sociologist, ethnographer, social psychologist, social philosopher and philosopher of history. Born in Hamburg, he first studied mathematics, physics, geography, Völkerpsychologie and philosophy at Leipzig University and qualified as a lecturer in geography at the Technische Hochschule Brunswick. He then moved to the University of Berlin as a lecturer in ethnology and became professor of sociology there in 1913. He was one of the founders of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie in 1909 and is known for a broad, phenomenological theory of society developed in the 1920s and for his formal, or pure, sociology; his programme for a formal theory of society appeared in 1921 and his Gesellschaftslehre in 1923. He directed the first German Concise Dictionary of Sociology, published in 1931. Barred from lecturing on his retirement in 1934, he resumed teaching in Berlin after the war, chaired the Kant Society from 1945 and died in Berlin at the age of 85.