Wolf Lepenies is a sociologist and German politist born with Allenstein (now Olzstyn, Poland) the June 11th 1941.

Lepenies grew with Coblentz where its family emigrated after the Second world war. After studies of Sociology and Philosophy to the University of Münster which it leaves graduate with mention in 1967, it obtains its accreditation to supervise research ( Privatdozent ) to the free university of Berlin in 1970. He travels abroad, initially with the Maison of the social sciences with Paris then with the Université of Princeton. In 1984, it joined Wissenschaftskollegs of Berlin before becoming professor of sociology to the free Université of Berlin. It accomplishes many stays with Princeton to undertake research to it. In 1986, it succeeds Peter Wapnewski as a president of Wissenschaftskollegs before Dieter Grimm takes its continuation in 2001. Under the impulse of Pierre Bourdieu which greeted the publication of the work the Three Cultures , it is invited in 1991 by the Collège de France to come to earlier occupy during one year the “European pulpit”, created two years. It will give to it a course entitled “the intellectuals and the policy of the spirit in the European history” whose inaugural lesson was published in 1992. In 2006 it becomes Professor emeritus.

It is in addition since 2004 member of the Reading panel of the publisher Axel Springer AG.

Its work the Three Cultures studies the consequences of the emergence of the Sociologie on literary space and the fight that Sociologie and Littérature was carried out to affirm their primacy in the knowledge of the social world. It explores in particular the resistances opposed by the nationalist right and catholic with Durkheim and its school-fellows in the conquest of an institutional position.