Peter Heintz was born in Davos (Switzerland) on November 6, 1920 and studied economics and social sciences in Paris, Cologne, and Zurich. He received his PhD in economics (Dr.oec.publ.) from the University of Zurich in 1943 and his habilitation (on “The authority problem in the work of P.-J. Proudhon”, published in 1956) under the leadership of René König from the University of Cologne, Germany. As an expert for UNESCO Peter Heintz spent from 1956 to 1965 several years in South America, where he had contributed to the institutional development of sociological research and teaching in several countries, notably at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Santiago de Chile and at the Bariloche Foundation in Argentina. This experience in the Global South strongly influenced his work as can be seen in his macro-sociological, developmentalist (structural theoretical) approach and in his emphasis on intercultural and comparative analyses, but also in his interest in sociological teaching and public sociology (see notably his Curso de sociología, 1960, Santiago de Chile, Un paradigma sociológico del desarollo con especial referencia a América Latina, Buenos Aires 1970, and The Future of Development, Bern 1973). In 1966 Peter Heintz had been appointed as a full professor of sociology at the University of Zurich, where he established the Sociological Institute, which became, under his guidance, one of the most important centers of empirical social research in Switzerland. The work of Peter Heintz includes more than 20 books and about 100 articles in social sciences journals, encyclopedias, and volumes. After informally introducing his concept of world society in the early 1970s ("The world society and its citizens," National-Zeitung am Wochenende, 8.7.1972) Peter Heintz increasingly used the topic of world society in his research and teaching (see for instance his special issue of the International Social Science Journal (no. 34/1, 1982) on Images of World Society and his last book Events in the Mirror of World Society (Diessenhofen 1982, in German).

Bibliographie