In this lucid historical introduction to a major tradition in Western thought, Harry Liebersohn discusses five scholars-Ferdinand Tonnies, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Georg Lukacs---who were responsible for the creation of modern German sociology. This tradition has generally been interpreted as having a tragic, 'fatalistic' perspective on modern society; Liebersohn argues that this sense of fate was matched by an underlying utopian hope for an end to fragmentation, rooted for all of his subjects in the Lutheran idea of community.