Leopold von Wiese

Leopold von Wiese was the only son of a prematurely deceased Prussian officer and received his education at the cadet schools in Wahlstatt and Lichterfelde.

In 1912, he became director of studies at the Academy for Local Government (Akademie für kommunale Verwaltung) in Düsseldorf, and in 1915 a professor at the Graduate School of Cologne (Handelshochschule Köln).

An academic journal he co-founded in 1921, the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, still exists today.

After the forced closure of the DGS by Hans Freyer and the Research Institute for Social Sciences by the Nazis in 1934 Wiese went for a year to the United States.

He tried to establish the presence of sociology as an independent social science, divorced from history, psychology and philosophy.