Alongside thinkers like Helmut Schelsky, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Dieter Claessens, and others he was one of those sociologists in post-war Germany who founded their sociological reflections on insights from Philosophical Anthropology, thus creating an alternative to the then dominant paradigms of the Frankfurt School and Cologne School (around René König).
He grew up in a bourgeois home, his father being the leading fiscal policy maker Johannes Popitz who was part of the resistance movement behind Graf Stauffenberg and was executed by the National Socialists in early 1945.
Heinrich Popitz died in Freiburg im Breisgau on 1 April 2002; his scientific estate is part of the Social Science Archive Konstanz.
Within this framework of a general sociological theory, four concepts were of outstanding significance for his thinking: power, norms, technology, and creativity.
(d) Creativity: Popitz was fascinated by the human capacity to create something new, to spontaneously modify the world in which we live and thus to become the originator of the own existence.