[2] After completing his secondary education in Marienbad, he enrolled in the University of Hamburg to study economics and social sciences.
Stark's training and scholarship encompassed history, philosophy, political science, law, economics, literature, art, music, and sociology.
He stayed at Fordham until his mandatory retirement in 1975, when he returned to Europe, holding an honorary professorship at the University of Salzburg, Austria, until his death there in 1985.
He believed that modern intellectuals had been strongly affected by post-Renaissance rationalism, resulting in "a super-rationalism which tends to blind them towards many non-rational values, for instance, those of tradition, of religion, and even of art" (The Sociology of Knowledge, Routledge, 1958).
The Social Bond (6 volumes, Fordham University Press, 1976-1987) is considered by some critics to be definitive in establishing his intellectual legacy.