The Decline of the German Mandarins by American historian Fritz Ringer (1934 – 2006) was widely acclaimed as soon as it appeared in 1969. Today, its importance has not diminished. It is at once a meticulous, uncompromisingly complex social history of the academic community, an institutional history of science, a study of the evolution of teaching practices and an examination of their end product — late 19th and early 20th century German philosophy and spiritual thought. Ringer showed the historically determined, ever evolving connections between these areas with such convincing clarity, that nowadays research in this field would seem impossible without his ideas. The study of the ‘mandarins’ ideology played an important role in the development of the well-known sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s research into the field of science, and into Heidegger. Bourdieu and Ringer worked together for many years. The vital role of this book in shaping the nature and style of modern research in the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, and Germanics, is hard to overestimate.