Theodor Julius Geiger (9 November 1891 in Munich, Germany – 16 June 1952) was a German socialist, lawyer and sociologist who studied Sociology of Law, social stratification and social mobility, methodology, and intelligentsia, among other things. He was Denmark's first professor of sociology, working at Aarhus University (1938–1940).
Life
Geiger grew up in Landshut, Bavaria, showing an interest in Scandinavia and a talent in Scandinavian languages from an early age. The son of a gymnasium teacher, Geiger studied law and political science, first at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1910 to 1912, then from 1912 to 1914 at the University of Würzburg, where he received his doctorate in law. In the same year he became an assistant at the Statistischer Reichsamt, the statistics office, in Munich, working in the trade statistics department from 1924 to 1933. His home, however, was in Berlin, where he published the magazine Fremde Presse (Foreign Press), with news on the Reich ministry for the army from 1920 to 1929. At the same time he edited the information magazine of the newly founded Berlin Volkshochschule (adult education centre) where he had begun to work as a teacher.
Geiger taught at Volkshochschule during a time when the institution was largely for the basic academic and cultural education of working class adults. Here he used the opportunity to focus on the social and political consequences of adult education by promoting critical thinking and intellectualism in his students. here he lived until 1943, even obtaining Danish citizenship. In 1939, he wrote Sociologi, which was for several decades an important textbook.
Geiger analysed the institutionalisation of the class struggle, which he called democratisation, and he considered it interconnected with corporativism.
Geiger published more than 160 works, but only a few have been translated to English thus far. The Danish body of Geiger's work has been translated (commented version) to German by Gert J. Fode of the University of Aarhus, edited by Prof. Klaus Rodax (University of Erfurt, Germany).
Methodology
Geiger made many significant contributions to methodology of the social sciences.
Geiger stressed the importance of supporting inductive research with empirical data but also the importance of theory in the analysis of empirical evidence.