His father, Wilhelm Lepsius (1890–1942) had a doctorate degree in law, and by the time Lepisus was born, was working for Schering AG, a large pharmaceutical company headquartered in Berlin.

[5] His mother, the daughter of a Munich judge, came from a middle class Protestant Franconian family, with a number of lawyers, doctors, and pastors among her ancestors.

[4] On May 8, 1945, his seventeenth birthday, Lepsius was in Munich when he witnessed the capitulation of the German army, marking the formal end to the Second World War.

In Cologne he was one of the so-called "young Turks"[5] drawn to the ideas of René König, and from this point his academic focus was almost exclusively on sociology.

[5] After this Friedrich Lütge offered him a post as seminar assistant in Economic History back at Munich, which made Lepsius and Knut Borchardt colleagues.

In 1955–56 Lepsius won a Fulbright scholarship which led to a year spent at Columbia University in New York, studying with Robert K. Merton, whom he found a "lucid teacher" and Paul Lazarsfeld as his "student advisor.

"[4] At the end of his year he was offered a position as a research assistant by Reinhard Bendix at Berkeley, but after a certain amount of soul searching decided to return to West Germany and participate in the postwar reconstruction of the country's academic base.

[4] Between 1957 and 1963 he worked for his former tutor Alfred von Martin as a research assistant at the newly established Munich University Institute for Sociology.

He played a central role both in the day-to-day teaching and as an administrator, working closely with the institute director Emerich K. Francis who, like Lepsius, had been persuaded by Alfred von Martin to return from the United States.

[5] In 1963 Lepsius received from Munich his habilitation (post-doctoral qualification) for a piece of work critiquing the Functionalist Theory of social organization.