Leopold von Wiese

Leopold von Wiese (1876 to 1969) was a German sociologist and economist who held the first chair of sociology in Germany. Born in Glatz in Silesia, the son of a Prussian officer, he studied the social sciences at the University of Berlin, took his doctorate in 1902 and held posts at Posen, Hanover and Düsseldorf before joining the Cologne school of commerce, which became the University of Cologne in 1919. There he directed the Research Institute for Social Sciences and in 1921 co-founded the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. He took the task of sociology to be the systematic study of the social process, the network of relations between people and the structures that crystallize from them, an approach known as Beziehungslehre, the doctrine of relationships, and with Georg Simmel he is considered a founder of formal sociology. He was secretary of the German Society for Sociology until its closure in 1934, spent a year in the United States, and chaired the revived society from 1946 to 1955.