KOIGEN, DAVID

KOIGEN, DAVID (1879–1933), philosopher and sociologist. He was born in Wachniaki, Ukraine, and studied in European universities. He lived in Germany until 1912, then returned to Russia, and in 1921 was appointed professor of philosophy and sociology at the Ukrainian University in Kiev. He wrote an autobiographical work, Der apokalyptische Reiter (1925), about these years in Russia. He returned to Germany, working mainly on Jewish problems and cultural sociology. From 1925 to 1927 he edited the quarterly Ethos. His first writings were on socialism, beginning with his thesis on the Young Hegelians (1901), followed by Die Kulturanschauung des Sozialismus (1903). He further developed his cultural-sociological approach in Ideen zur Philosophic der Kultur (1910) and Die Kultur der Demokratie (1912). In 1922 he published Der moralische Gott, a study of the relationship of religion and culture, and in 1929 his main work on sociology, Der Aufbau der sozialen   Welt im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft. After his death, some of his Jewish writings appeared, entitled Heimat Israels (1939). Koigen tried to delineate the peculiarity of Jewish experience in history and culture, pointing to the difficulty the Jew has in gaining normal historical experience. Using methods like max weber 's, he attempted to specify the elements involved in Jewish existence in historical processes. (Richard H. Popkin)