Hans Joas is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, and Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
He received his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in 1979 for a study on George Herbert Mead. The English edition is called G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (MIT Press, 1985, 1997). He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. In 2010, he received the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis (Niklas Luhmann Prize); in 2012, an honorary doctorate in Theology from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; in 2013, an honorary doctorate in Sociology from Uppsala University and the Hans Kilian Award; in 2015, the Max Planck Research Award; and in 2017 the Prix Paul Ricoeur.
Joas’ other books in English are Social Action and Human Nature, written with Axel Honneth (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Pragmatism and Social Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993); The Creativity of Action (University of Chicago Press, 1996); The Genesis of Values (University of Chicago Press, 2000); War and Modernity (Polity Press, 2003); Do We Need Religion? On Experiences of Self-Transcendence (Paradigm Publishers, 2008); The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2013); Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Stanford University Press, 2014); and The Power of the Sacred. An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment (Oxford University Press, 2021). Together with Wolfgang Knoebl he published Social Theory (Cambridge University Press. 2009) and War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2013). Together with Robert Bellah he edited The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Harvard University Press, 2011).
