René König was a German sociologist. He was very influential on West German sociology after 1949.

Born in Magdeburg

Magdeburg

Magdeburg , is the largest city and the capital city of the Bundesland of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Magdeburg is situated on the Elbe River and was one of the most important medieval cities of Europe....

, he 1925 took up Philosophy, Psychology, Ethnology, and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. He gained his doctorate (Dr. phil.) 1930 at the Berlin University. As an enemy of the Nazis, he could not obtain his post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) in the Reich, so he emigrated to Switzerland in 1937 and passed the examination at the University of Zürich

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

, 1938. By then, he was strongly influenced by Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...

, Maurice Halbwachs

Maurice Halbwachs

Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory.Born in Reims, Halbwachs attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson, who influenced him greatly. He aggregated in Philosophy in 1901...

, and Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...

. 1949, he was called to the chair of Sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

 at Cologne University, where he built up what was to be known later as the "Cologne School" (Kölner Schule) and established the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie

The Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie is the most important scientific journal for sociology in German language.- History :...

. He never left this university, in spite of several calls, and became Professor Emeritus in 1974, dying at Cologne

Cologne

Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...

 1992.

He never gave up cultural studies writing the first sociology of fashion, but at the same time he was a German pioneer of empirical methods, as against the ideological biases of many contemporal colleagues. He played as well an important rôle in the International Sociological Association

International Sociological Association

International Sociological Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to scientific purposes in the field of sociology and social sciences...

.

Besides, he was en engaged liberal writer and essayist, and translated the novelist Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Carmelo Verga was an Italian realist writer, best known for his depictions of life in Sicily, and especially for the short story "Cavalleria Rusticana" and the novel I Malavoglia .-Life and career:The first son of Giovanni Battista Catalano Verga and Caterina Di Mauro,...

from the Italian into German.

The René König Society (René-König-Gesellschaft) is publishing a complete edition of his writings.