This article outlines the history of sociology in Germany from 1842 onwards. As in France and England, the decisive social and intellectual processes that contributed to the emergence of sociology in Germany took place in the middle of the nineteenth century. Society was now no longer understood in terms of contract theory, that is, as something that first had to be produced by individuals, as was the case in early bourgeois political philosophy (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke). Rather, society came to be conceived as something that already existed, characterised either dynamically as a social movement, or more statically, as a social fact, and thus had to be “discovered”. The central pioneers of sociology in Germany were Lorenz von Stein and Robert von Mohl, as well as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For them, society was a phenomenon governed by its own logic and therefore became an object of knowledge in its own right. Around 1850, the most important contexts of social thought were historicism, Hegel’s philosophy of history and in particular the “sciences of the state”. Later on, it was historicism as well as the philosophy of Dilthey, Neo-Kantianism, Nietzsche, Folk psychology, and Darwinism. The “social question”, and, at the turn of the century, the “cultural question”, which became increasingly pressing, especially among members of the educated middle classes, marked the beginning of the development of sociology in Germany. The article traces the development of sociology from the mid-nineteenth century throughout the German Reich to the interwar period, and concludes with a brief outlook on the post-war phase after 1945 in West and East Germany up to the 1990s.