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Hans Joas (; ; born November 27, 1948) is a German sociologist and social theorist.
Since 2014, Hans Joas has been Ernst Troeltsch Professor CV – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Faculty of Theology, Ernst-Troeltsch-Honorarprofessur, access date: 16 April 2022. for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2011 until 2014, he was a Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS); from 2002 until 2011, he was the Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. Since 2000, he has also been Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Thought and a Member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Hans Joas is Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
From 1979 to 1983, Hans Joas served as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin. During this period, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen from 1980 to 1981. In 1981, he completed his habilitation.
Between 1984 and 1987, Joas was awarded the Heisenberg Fellowship by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). In 1985, he spent the spring quarter as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. The following year, in the summer quarter of 1986, Joas was a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Sociology.
From 1987 to 1990, he held a Professor of Sociology position at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 1990, Joas joined the Free University of Berlin as a Professor of Sociology, where he remained until 2002. In 1993, Joas was appointed Executive Director of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, a position he held until 1995. During this time, he was also a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and a Visiting Professor at the University of Uppsala in the spring of 1992. Later, in the fall semester of 1994, he was a Fellow at the Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study in Bloomington, Indiana.
In 1996, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall semester. The following year, in 1997, he served as the Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, offering his expertise in sociology. During 1998, he continued his teaching and research as a Visiting Professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and again at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall semester.
Between 1999 and 2000, Joas was again a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden. In 2000, he became a Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
From 2002 to 2011, Joas served as the Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt in Germany. In 2002, he was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna’s Department of Sociology during the fall semester. The following year, from 2004 to 2005, Joas held the prestigious Ernst Cassirer Professorship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden.
In 2005 to 2006, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. The spring semester of 2007 saw him as a Visiting Professor at both the University of Vienna’s Department of Sociology and Faculty of Catholic Theology. Joas returned to Sweden in 2010 as a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala.
In 2011, Joas was a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and was also a Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at the University of Freiburg, Germany, from 2011 to 2014. During the spring semester of 2014, he was a Fellow at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, holding the Torgny Segerstedt Professorship. In 2012, Joas was the first scholar to be Visiting Professor of the Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedikt XVI. Foundation at the University of Regensburg. The topic of his lectures was "Sacralization and Secularization".
Since 2014, Joas has held the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Faculty of Theology at Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2017, he returned to Stellenbosch for another term as a Fellow at STIAS in the spring semester and later that year in May, became a Fellow at Peking University’s Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2022, Joas was appointed the International Jakob Fugger Visiting Professorship at the University of Augsburg in Germany.
A particular focus of Joas' research is the emergence of values. To this end, he elaborated a theory of the affirmative genealogy of values, especially of human rights. According to Joas, values emerge in experiences of self-formation and self-transcendence. To this end, he developed a phenomenology of the experience of self-transcendence "from individual prayer to collective ecstasy in archaic rituals or in nationalistic enthusiasm for war"; "it includes moral feelings, the opening of the self in conversation, and in the experience of nature." Joas emphasizes that his consideration of the contingency of the emergence of values should in no way be understood "as a plea against the claims of a universalistic morality."
In a three-volume work, Joas attempts to develop the outline of a global history of moral universalism from these premises. In the first volume, published in 2017, "The Power of the Sacred. An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment," he presented a detailed critique of the historical narrative, going back to Max Weber, of a world-historical process of disenchantment that has been advancing since the Hebrew prophets, and a sketch of an alternative to it. In the second volume, published in 2020, "Im Bannkreis der Freiheit. Religionstheorie nach Hegel and Nietzsche", published in 2020 (English translation forthcoming), is concerned in parallel with overcoming the historical image of a history of religion culminating in Protestant Christianity and its constitutive significance for the constitution of modern political freedom, which goes back to Hegel. In portraits of important philosophical, sociological and theological thinkers on religion, the approaches to an alternative are further substantiated. In the third volume currently in progress (working title "Universalismus. Weltherrschaft und Menschheitsethos"), this alternative is being broadly elaborated historically and sociologically. His most recent book (2022), "Warum Kirche? Selbstoptimierung oder Glaubensgemeinschaft" relates the debates about a new understanding of church and about church reform to this history of moral universalism.
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