Born in Bucharest to a family of Alsatian and French-Swiss ancestry, he was the son of Henri Stahl (a promoter of stenography), as well as the younger brother of the sociologist and Social Democratic Party activist Șerban Voinea [no], and of the novelist Henriette Yvonne Stahl.
Joining the staff of the Department of Sociology, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters and Philosophy (where he later became a professor emeritus), Stahl first assisted Gusti and Gheorghe Vlădescu-Răcoasa in the vast interdisciplinary enterprise of creating monographs dedicated to Romanian villages.
A member of the Criterion society, he made himself known for supporting Austromarxist positions, and, around 1932, was involved in a polemic with the Leninist Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu.
[4] He contributed to Dreapta, a nationalist magazine, but left it after the latter attacked Nicolae Iorga, and cited a conflict in political opinions.
[6] After World War II and the onset of the communist regime, Stahl was involved in projects to revive the sociology field; he was successful only after 1960, when he began working on Miron Constantinescu's staff at the Romanian Academy's Bibliotheca Historica Romaniae.