ABSTRACT
There is an autobiographical side to the writing of autobiography. Sociologists with their claim to detachment ought to practice what they teach their students. Political agitation together with the importance of ideas led straightaway to the study of Marxism. It seemed urgent to clarify theoretical questions, because right action could follow only if the right answers were found. The personal sense of an individual’s action is a force in society, however it may be caused. Social scientists who neglect this part of the evidence abandon the legacies of the enlightenment as do those followers of Marx and Freud who fail to distinguish between caused and unavoidable behavior. In German, “society” is not simply synonymous with an aggregate of social groups, as it tends to be in English. The word Gesellschaft was often used to describe the grasping selfishness of the marketplace and the social isolation of the individual in a large city.
