Hans Freyer

Hans Freyer (1887 to 1969) was a German sociologist and philosopher associated with the conservative revolutionary movement. He began studying theology, national economics, history and philosophy at Greifswald in 1907, moved to Leipzig the next year, gained his doctorate in 1911 and became a professor at Kiel in 1922. In 1925 he moved to the University of Leipzig, where he founded the sociology department and led it until 1948, developing a strongly historical branch of sociology known as the Leipzig School. His early works on the philosophy of life, Antaeus (1918) and Prometheus (1923), influenced the German youth movement, and in Der Staat (1926) he described history as a circle of faith, style and state. His thinking drew on Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. He supported the Nazi movement, signed the 1933 professors' vow of allegiance to Hitler and pushed Ferdinand Tönnies out of the leadership of the German sociological society, and from 1938 to 1944 he headed the German Institute for Culture in Budapest. After the war he worked for the Brockhaus publishers and taught at Münster from 1953; his Theory of the Present Era of the 1950s developed a conservatism suited to the industrial age.