Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. France: 1. The transformations of Auguste Comte: science and literature in early positivism; 2. Agathon and others: literature and sociology in France at the turn of the century; Part II. England: 3. Facts and culture of the feelings: John Stuart Mill; 4. The unwritten novel: Breatrice Webb; 5. The utopian novel as a substitute for sociology: H. G. Wells; 6. Concealed sociology: English literary criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Part III. Germany: 7. Prologue: artisan and poet too: W. H. Riehl; 8. Hostility to science and faith in poetry as a German ideology; 9. A German speciality: poetry and literature in opposition; 10. Disciplines in competition: sociology and history; 11. Remoteness from society and hostility towards sociology in Stefan George's circle; 12. Stefan George, Georg Simmel, Max Weber; 13. Weberian motifs in the work of Thomas Mann; 14. The German spirit in peril: E. R. Curtius, Karl Mannheim and T. S. Eliot; 13. Epilogue: sociology in National Socialist Germany and afterwards; Bibliography; Index.

"Lepenies offers us an historical record. He does not evaluate the contributions of literature and sociology, or of literary sociology, to public exegesis. The book is a spectacular record of the internecine strife among exegetes. The author's international erudition is remarkable, control of materials masterly, his method careful and thorough, and his writing dramatic." Samuel Z. Klausner, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences