Helmut Schelsky e la sociologia come "storiografia sociale del presente"”

In the first part of the essay, the Author discusses the reasons why the relationship between sociology and history may be advantageous for both disciplinary fields. In the second part, he wonders in which sense, between the fifties and the seventies, empirical social research could be taken by Helmut Schelsky as a kind of "social history of present times": This formula, he stresses, was at that time interpreted as a sympton of a rigidly positivistic view of social phenomena. Agreeing, in the third part, with such criticism, in view of the technocratic position held by Schelsky in the mentioned period, the Authorgoes on, in the final section of the article, to conclude that no true consideration for history has ever taken place in Schelsky's sociological conception.