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.