Fate and Utopia in German Sociology provides a lucid introduction to a major sociological tradition in Western thought. It is an intellectual history of five scholars -- Ferdinand Tonnies, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Georg Lukacs -- who created modern German sociology over the course of fifty years, from 1870 to 1923.

Liebersohn portrays his subjects as thinkers who were deeply immersed in the politics and poetry of their time, and whose sociology benefited in unexpected ways from sources as diverse as medieval mysticism and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. He...