Genetic foundation of social behaviour

This contribution was invited by the Editor, and translated by him from the German. Dr Schlegel is a leading exponent of the large group of German workers in the field of constitutional psychology and medicine. He lectured on these topics at the University of Hamburg before being forced to leave his post in the first half of the 1970s by militant students during the German equivalent of the Chinese “cultural revolution”. His work, which fits well into the new school of socio-biology, is relatively unknown in English-speaking countries and, in view of its originality and importance, should be more widely read. Dr Schlegel, in line with socio-biological thinking generally, has not confined himself to a narrow study of correlations between physique and personality, but has also tried to integrate his findings into a wider social context.