Kurt Heinrich Wolff

Kurt Heinrich Wolff (May 20, 1912 – September 14, 2003) was a German-born American sociologist. A major contributor to the sociology of knowledge and to qualitative and phenomenological approaches in sociology, he also translated from German and from French into English many important works by Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim and Karl Mannheim. While carrying out anthropological field research in the 1940s in a small community in the southwestern United States, Wolff initially discovered, and began to articulate and to advocate, a new qualitative methodological approach for the study of human society. The approach later proved applicable in any field of inquiry or area of human endeavor. He called it "Surrender and Catch". For more than 60 years, Wolff taught and wrote about this new approach.

Karl Mannheim was Wolff's main intellectual influence, yet Wolff was certainly open to a variety of intellectual currents other than Mannheimian sociology. Wolffean thought can be traced to a number of different sources in world sociology, philosophy and anthropology. Like many Central European polymaths he was fluent in a number of languages including English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.