Bio: (1941-) German sociologist, political scientist, and anthropologist. Wolf Lepenies studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Münster, where he received his doctorate in 1967 with the thesis Melancholie und Gesellschaft. He was a professor at the Free University in Berlin from 1970 to 1986 and head of the European Department at the Collège de France in Paris during 1991 and 1992. Since 1982, he has been a permanent member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. He was the director of the Berlin Scientific College (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) from 1986 to 2001, and during his tenure, this institution became a center of rich scientific communication.

Lepenies is an engaged intellectual who deals with various topics, especially sociology and its history, cultural anthropology, sociology of culture, and history of science. Among his books, the most significant are: The End of Natural History (1976), a study on the historicization of the natural sciences and the change in their self-determination in the 18th and 19th centuries; the four-volume History of Sociology (1981) edited by Lepenies, collecting studies on the cognitive, social and historical identity of this discipline; Three Cultures: Sociology Between Literature and Science (1985), the history of the constitution of sociology in France, England and Germany and its role in the world of industrial civilization; Behavior and cognition (1997), analysis of the crisis of European democracy; Culture and Politics: Stories from Germany (2006), a discussion of the influence of German culture on politics, its role in the birth of Nazism, and the necessity of intellectual engagement in the context of the inherent threat to democracy.

Main works

Melancholie und Gesellschaft (1969);

Orte des wilden Denkens: Zur Anthropologie von Claude Levi-Strauss (1970);

Soziologische Anthropologie: Materialien (1971);

Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten (1976);

Geschichte der Soziologie, 4 vol. (1981);

Die drei Kulturen: Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft (1985); 

Autoren und Wissenschaftler im 18. Jahrhundert: Linné - Buffon - Winckelmann - Georg Forster - Erasmus Darwin (1988);

Gefährliche Wahlverwandtschaften: Essays zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (1989);

Folgen einer unerhörten Begebenheit: Die Deutschen nach der Vereinigung (1992);

Aufstieg und Fall der Intellektuellen in Europa (1992);

Sainte-Beuve: Auf der Schwelle zur Moderne (1997);

Benimm und Erkenntnis (1997);

Sozialwissenschaft und sozialer Wandel: Ein Erfahrungsbericht (1999);

Kultur und Politik: Deutsche Geschichten (2006);

The Seduction of Culture in German History (2006).