ISA Past Presidents

Biography

Education

• 1925-6 University of Vienna (Philosophy, Psychology and Islamic Languages).
• 1926-9 Berlin University (Philosophy, Romance Languages and Ethnology), PhD. (Thesis title: Die naturalistische Aesthetik in Frankreich und ihre Auflösung. [The naturalistic aesthetic in France and its resolution]).
• 1938 Habilitation, University of Zürich (Thesis title: Kritik der historisch-existentialistischen Soziologie: Ein Beitrag zur Begründung einer objektiven Soziologie’ [Critique of historical and existential sociology: A contribution to the creation of an objective sociology]).

Posts held

• 1938-1953 University of Zürich [paid as a privatdozent, but doing the work of a professor].
• 1949-1974 Professor, University of Köln.

ISA participation, main roles

• 1948 member, preparatory committee for the foundation of the ISA.
• 1948-53, 1956-9, member of EC.
• In 1950 he acted as local organiser for the first World Congress, in Zürich; at the 1956 Amsterdam Congress he was on the Programme Committee, and gave the introductory paper for a session on ‘The Western family’; he was also on the Programme Committee for Washington in 1962, and gave a paper on ‘The nature and problems of sociological theories’. He gave papers at the 1953 Liège Congress (on his experience of research techniques in Switzerland and Germany, arguing that there are both respondent resistances and linguistic problems which make anglo-saxon style survey interviewing difficult there), and the 1959 Stresa Congress (‘On some recent developments in the relation between theory and research’).
• 1959-62 Vice-President.
• 1962-66 President.

Participation in other settings

International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation^[1]

Intellectual and ISA career

König’s biography shows remarkable levels of cosmopolitanism – some arising from external circumstances, some a matter of personal choice. As his name reflects, he had a French mother and a German father, and he was brought up bilingually. His father worked as an engineer for the League of Nations and in the booming sugar industry, with the result that he lived as a child in Italy, Spain and Poland, and he also had relatives who spoke Russian; he learned their languages by osmosis. At school, he studied English, Latin, Greek and ancient Hebrew, then he took Oriental languages for his minor field at university in Vienna, where he learned Turkish, and acquainted himself more superficially with Arabic, Persian, modern Hebrew, Chinese and Aztec.^[2] He then worked in Paris, Switzerland^[3] and the USA before ending in Germany, but with frequent trips abroad, which included research in Britain and the USA (some of the latter on Navaho reservations).

His period of work in Paris was to research French ethnology for his Berlin teacher Thurnwald; he also made the acquaintance of the second generation of the Durkheim school, and became deeply interested in his Durkheim’s ideas, though not with the political connotations that they then had for the French. He had planned a Berlin habilitation in order to teach there, but a book of his was banned by the Nazis, so the political situation meant that he qualified in Zürich instead. (König 1973) He remained an exile there until the war was over.

His sociological interests and work were broad; he published textbooks on empirical research methods as well as on theoretical topics, and his substantive work included some on the family^[4], fashion, and youth. Hartmann (1992: 481) calls it his life-project:
to build a new German sociology based on empirical grounds; a sociology distinct from the historical and socio-philosophical traditions of German social sciences, and a critical reflection on their own theories and methods.

He took over and from 1955-1985 edited the important Köln departmental journal, the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. There he introduced the practice of having special issues (‘sonderhefte’), giving an overall view of a particular topic area. He also edited an encyclopaedic work in a number of volumes appearing in the 1960s, the Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung, which brought together theories and tested them against the latest research as well as covering empirical methods; he regarded this as the final stage in the establishment of sociology.

Hartmann, a former student of his, describes his impact as due as much to his personality and presence as to the quality of his written work; he was a fascinating lecturer, involved his students in many interesting projects and held open house for them. He was well loved, and in the sixties, when students were attacking their professors, the students organised a demonstration to prevent him leaving Köln.

As the list above of ISA activities shows, he was undoubtedly one of its founding fathers, and his biography immediately makes clear how his range of experience and talents led him to the role of president.

References, other sources of information, related work

• Hartmann, Jürgen (1992) ‘Portrait: In memoriam René König’, International Sociology 4: 481-483.
• König, René (1935) Das Wesen der deutschen Universität (The Nature of the German University)  [banned in Germany by the Nazis].
• König, René (1946) Materialien zur Soziologie der Familie.
• König, René (1949) Soziologie Heute [translated into Dutch, Italian,Spanish and Japanese].
• König, René (1952) Das Interview [7th edition 1972].
• König, René (1973) ‘Sketches by a cosmopolitan German sociologist’. International Social Science Journal 25: 55-70.

Presidential address

None given.