Schelsky, Helmut (1912–1984)

Helmut Schelsky, born into a lower-middle-class family in Chemnitz, near the border of the current Czech Republic, joined the Nazi Party in the thirties. A pupil of Hans Freyer (1887–1969) and Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) at Leipzig University's Faculty of Philosophy, Schelsky wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in 1939. Although awarded a chair in sociology in 1943, he was prevented from teaching by the war, and it was only in 1949 that he took up posts at the universities of Hamburg, Münster, and Bielefeld.

In the 1950s, together with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and René König (1906–1992), Schelsky helped reinstate sociology in Germany. In the 1960s, he headed the Dortmund social research center, one of the largest in Europe. Here, he discovered Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), setting him on an academic career. During these years, he promoted and in 1967 helped found the University of Bielefeld, where he supported Luhmann's appointment to the chair of sociology. From 1973 to 1978, Schelsky held the chair of legal sociology at Münster University.

As a scholar, Schelsky carried out pioneering empirical research into changing family structures, sexuality, and the condition and prospects of German youth. Scholars acclaimed his works internationally and translated them into several languages. During these years, Schelsky began developing a law-and-order oriented sociological theory of institutions, taking his cue from the legal conception of Maurice Hauriou (1856–1929) and the anthropological theses of Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942).

For Schelsky, institutions embodied social experience and habitual behavior and were the most effective means of guaranteeing successful and meaningful action that satisfied people's primary needs and subsequent cultural requirements. As long as institutions met these requirements, they remained stable in spite of social change. Schelsky's sociology of law considered “social change through law” as part of an anthropological, person-oriented, and systemic model. Both the institutionalist and legal sociology approach highlighted the teleological aspect of action, which is successful to the extent that it conforms to the institutional and legal rules that, in turn, underpin—or indeed constitute—the “motivational conscience of the individual.”

Schelsky's conception of institutions and law intertwined with his view of the individual (Person) and education (Bildung). People are disoriented before an increasingly complex, rapidly changing postwar society, he believed; institutions and rules have the task of guiding people's behavior. For Schelsky therefore, the public sphere was the arena for conformist action in full compliance with the law. On the other side, the private sphere was the place of Bildung and critical reflection, where the individual, in solitude, may consider and appraise the human and social condition. For this reason, Schelsky came out against the student protest movement, led by philosophers and sociologists, which spread to German society at the end of the 1960s. He defined himself as an “anti-sociologist” and conservative defender of the liberal state.