Jens Beckert

Jens Beckert is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. He was Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School in New York and a Fellow at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris. In 2018 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his work reinvigorating the social sciences with an interdisciplinary perspective, especially at the intersection of sociology and economics. His research focuses on the fields of economic sociology, sociology of inheritance and more recently on issues of climate change. His most recent book: How we sold our future. The failure to fight climate change was published with Polity Press in 2025.