Abstract

The present notes sketch Claessens' intellectual biography on the basis of both his still unpublished largest, ultimate autobiographical profile and the author's long-time acquaintance with Claessens' professional life and scientific production. The main thread is Claessens' discovery of sociology as a discipline for individual and collective conceptual elaboration of the historical traumas lived by the German .lost generation. Claessens belonged to. In this light the author explains Claessens' skeptical and eclectic way of thinking, which made him open to empirical social research and Enlightenment values, as well as his interests for topics such as status incongruence and the riskiness and instability of human nature.