König, René

Born July 5, 1906, in Magdeburg. German sociologist (Federal Republic of Germany).

König emigrated to Switzerland in 1937. He became a professor at the University of Zürich in 1947 and professor at the University of Cologne in 1949. Since 1953 he has been the director of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Cologne. In 1955 he became the publisher of the journal Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (Cologne Journal for Sociology and Social Psychology). From 1962 to 1966 he served as president of the International Sociological Association.

König’s sociological views took shape under the influence of the structural-functional school in non-Marxist sociology and the ideas of neopositivism. He has written works on general sociology, the methodology and technique of research, the sociology of the family, social psychology, and problems in mass communication. According to him the basic difficulty in obtaining knowledge in sociology is the researcher’s involvement in the social process. As a way out he looks to various types of control that would be applied in the process of an experiment (his works on the methodology of sociological research are of interest). König’s methodological tendency toward the elimination of Weltanschauung and ideological elements from sociological theory has been subjected to criticism in Marxist literature.