Classics of sociology

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Classics of sociology - From Comte to Weber

The Sociology Subject Information Service (FID), funded by the DFG, focuses on improving the supply of scientific information and promoting research communication within sociology. In addition to current literature for cutting-edge research, this applies to sociological classics that are part of the standard canon but are not yet available in Open Access. In order to make these classics accessible to researchers, the publications in the public domain, mostly from the UCL's own SSG holdings - if possible in first editions - have been digitalised and can be searched by means of an OCR procedure in order to enable optimal research.

The decision regarding the works included in the collection was made on the basis of scientific expertise and taking copyright restrictions into account. The collection currently comprises a total of around 100 works. In addition to books in German, the collection also includes sociological classics in English, French and Italian original editions. The period covered ranges from 1826 to the late 20th century.

Among others, the following authors are represented: Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Karl Mannheim, George Herbert Mead, Franz Oppenheimer, Vilfredo Pareto, Georg Simmel, Herbert Spencer, Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber.

The collection is constantly expanded as new sources are made accessible through the expiration of copyrights. The aim is to provide researchers with original sources on the history of sociology on a permanent, non-local and comprehensive basis.

Special features of digitisation

Advice for the text search

The full text was generated by automatic text recognition (OCR = Optical Character Recognition). There was no manual correction of the result (so-called " polluted OCR "), therefore a certain error rate remains. The number of errors depends on the quality of the scans and cannot be specified in general.

In this procedure the full text only serves as a positive search, but not as a reliable text basis. A word not correctly reproduced by the automatic text recognition is not found during the search. If no hit is obtained, it cannot be concluded with certainty that the search word is not contained. Therefore, there is a danger that relevant passages will not be found and texts will be misinterpreted if they are not used conscientiously.

Tips for the full text search

The truncation character * replaces any number of letters,
Example: anti* finds both antique and antiquité.

This work (classic of sociology), identified by the University and City Library of Cologne is not subject to any known copyright restrictions.

If you use our digitised documents, we would be pleased about the citing of our name.

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This collection is marked with Open Access.

Open Access refers to the worldwide free access to scientific publications on the Internet, subject to copyright protection. No legal or financial barriers should stand in the way of the reader worldwide.

Open Access at the University and City Library of Cologne