ABSTRACT
Though belatedly, sociology is entering Germany's official consciousness. Unofficial, uninvited, an intruder, it had long been present, but rather as an outsider to ordinary thought, most of the time no more than the bearer of social opposition. In Germany the new sociology arose at an hour when the economy broadened into a world economy, when nations and countries were brought closer, but also were ranged against one another, when the occident broke into the orient in order definitively to decompose it in its traditional form—but what became questionable at the same time was one's own position. In Germany the late emerging sociology, born out of this convergence, became an instrument for the enlargement of consciousness and soul and, inevitably in the process, a radical revision of all those particular possibilities of existence which had previously posed as absolute.
