The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Sociology,
#1
Robert K. Merton
#60
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Robert King Merton was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He served as the 47th president of the American Sociological Association. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.
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Jürgen Habermas
#4
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher mostly associated with the influential Frankurt School in Germany, part of the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt, and historically an important center for research on social theory and critical philosophy. Habermas, now 90, earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bonn in 1954. Habermas is a famed philosopher who has taught a number of influential philosophers, including Hans Joas at the University of Chicago. Habermas is known for his work on communicative rationality, a position that place emphasis on rational...
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Anthony Giddens
#64
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities. He has academic appointments in approximately twenty different universities throughout the world and has received numerous honorary degrees.
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Peter L. Berger
#281
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Peter Ludwig Berger was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theoretical contributions to sociological theory.
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James Samuel Coleman
#743
Overall Influence
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
James Samuel Coleman was an American sociologist, theorist, and empirical researcher, based chiefly at the University of Chicago. He served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1991–1992. He studied the sociology of education and public policy, and was one of the earliest users of the term social capital. He may be considered one of the original neoconservatives in sociology. His work Foundations of Social Theory influenced countless sociological theories, and his works The Adolescent Society and "Coleman Report" were two of the most cited books in educational sociology.
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Anselm Strauss
#790
Overall Influence
1916 - 1996 (80 years)
Anselm Leonard Strauss was an American sociologist professor at the University of California, San Francisco internationally known as a medical sociologist and as the developer of grounded theory, an innovative method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work, and organizational studies. He also wrote extensively on Chicago sociology/symbolic interactionism, sociology of work, social worlds/arenas theory, social psychology and urban imagery. He published over 30 books, chapters in over 30 other books, and over 70 journal articles.
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Niklas Luhmann
#298
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory. Biography Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Free State of Prussia, where his father's family had been running a brewery for several generations. He entered the Gymnasium Johanneum at Luneburg in 1937. In 1943, he was conscripted as a Luftwaffenhelfer in World War II and served for two years until, at the age of 17, he was taken prisoner of war by American troops in 1945. After the war Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, where he obtained a law degree, and then began a career in Lüneburg's public administration.
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Randall Collins
#1258
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#9
Seymour Martin Lipset
#501
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. He was the president of the American Political Science Association. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
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Mark Granovetter
#994
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#11
Raewyn Connell
#1343
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#12
Howard S. Becker
#1154
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Howard Saul Becker was an American sociologist who taught at Northwestern University. Becker made contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. Becker also wrote extensively on sociological writing styles and methodologies. Becker's 1963 book Outsiders provided the foundations for labeling theory. Becker was often called a symbolic interactionist or social constructionist, although he did not align himself with either method. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Becker was considered part of the second Chicago School of Sociology, which also inclu...
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Thomas Luckmann
#948
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Thomas Luckmann was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany. Born in Jesenice, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Luckmann studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck. He married Benita Petkevic in 1950. His contributions were central to studies in sociology of communication, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science. His best-known titles are the 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge , The Invisible Religion , and The S...
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Immanuel Wallerstein
#352
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach. He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019.
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Harrison White
#1646
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#16
Patricia Hill Collins
#794
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#17
Harold Garfinkel
#946
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Harold Garfinkel was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology, he is probably best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology , a collection of articles. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program. Moreover, during his time at University of Newark, which became Rutgers University, and enrolled in Theory of Accounts, a course that covered accounting and bookkeeping procedures.
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Zygmunt Bauman
#623
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-born sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
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Manuel Castells
#317
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.
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Peter Blau
#2824
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Peter Michael Blau was an American sociologist and theorist. Born in Vienna, Austria, he immigrated to the United States in 1939. He completed his PhD doctoral thesis with Robert K. Merton at Columbia University in 1952, laying an early theory for the dynamics of bureaucracy. The next year, he was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1953 to 1970. He also taught as Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in Great Britain, as a senior fellow at King's College, and as a Distinguished Honorary professor at Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences which he helped to establish.
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Allan Schnaiberg
#4468
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Allan Schnaiberg was an American sociologist known especially for his contributions to environmental sociology. At the time of his death, Schnaiberg was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
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John Bellamy Foster
#1042
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#23
Reinhard Bendix
#2431
Overall Influence
1916 - 1991 (75 years)
Reinhard Bendix was a German-American sociologist. Life and career Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1916, he briefly belonged to Neu Beginnen and Hashomer Hatzair, groups that resisted the Nazis. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He received his B.A. , M.A. , and PhD from the University of Chicago, and subsequently taught there from 1943 to 1946. He then taught for a year in the Sociology Department of the University of Colorado before moving to the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1947 where he remained for the rest of his career.
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Travis Hirschi
#1190
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Travis Warner Hirschi was an American sociologist and an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. He helped to develop the modern version of the social control theory of crime and later the self-control theory of crime.
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Stuart Hall
#499
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. Hall — along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams — was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
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David Bloor
#1603
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Bloor is a British sociologist. He is a professor in, and a former director of, the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh. He is a key figure in the Edinburgh school and played a major role in the development of the field of science and technology studies. He is best known for advocating the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge, most notably in his book Knowledge and Social Imagery.
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Richard Hoggart
#814
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Herbert Richard Hoggart was an English academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture. Early life Hoggart was born in the Potternewton area of Leeds, one of three children in an impoverished family. His father, Tom Longfellow Hoggart , the son of a boilermaker, was a regular infantry soldier and housepainter who died of brucellosis when Hoggart was a year old, and his mother Adeline died of a chest illness when he was eight. He grew up with his grandmother in Hunslet, and was encouraged in his education by an aunt.
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Theda Skocpol
#2253
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
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Ulrich Beck
#1670
Overall Influence
1944 - 2015 (71 years)
Ulrich Beck was a German sociologist, and one of the most cited social scientists in the world during his lifetime. His work focused on questions of uncontrollability, ignorance and uncertainty in the modern age, and he coined the terms "risk society" and "second modernity" or "reflexive modernization". He also tried to overturn national perspectives that predominated in sociological investigations with a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the interconnectedness of the modern world. He was a professor at the University of Munich and also held appointments at the Fondation Maison des Sciences d...
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Dorothy E. Smith
#2270
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Dorothy Edith Smith was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith was also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
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Rodney Stark
#1447
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Rodney William Stark was an American sociologist of religion who was a longtime professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, co-director of the university's Institute for Studies of Religion, and founding editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion.
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Robert N. Bellah
#2126
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Robert Neelly Bellah was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.
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Loïc Wacquant
#1207
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#34
Josh Whitford
#4298
Overall Influence
Josh Whitford is an American sociologist and an associate professor at Columbia University. He writes on economic sociology and organizations. Biography Whitford was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the son of University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School Professor William Whitford. Whitford attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received a B.A. in math and Italian in 1993, an M.A. in sociology in 1998 with a thesis "Dewey, Parsons, and means-to-ends", and a Ph.D. in sociology in 2003. In 2003 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. In 2004...
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G. William Domhoff
#2021
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
George William "Bill" Domhoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and research professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a founding faculty member of UCSC's Cowell College. He is best known as the author of several best-selling sociology books, including Who Rules America? and its seven subsequent editions .
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Jeffrey C. Alexander
#5960
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jeffrey Charles Alexander is an American sociologist, and a prominent social theorist. He is the founding figure in the school of cultural sociology he refers to as the "strong program". Career He was born May 30, 1947, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Alexander gained his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1969 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978. He was originally interested in Marxist sociology and followed the work of Fred Block and debates in the journal Socialist Revolution, but evolved to a democratic socialist, then left li...
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Daniel Bell
#497
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Daniel Bell was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He has been described as "one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era". His three best known works are The End of Ideology, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
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Neil Smelser
#4122
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Neil Joseph Smelser was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."
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Michel Callon
#1787
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#40
Barney Glaser
#2606
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Barney Galland Glaser was an American sociologist and one of the founders of the grounded theory methodology. Glaser was born on February 27, 1930, in San Francisco, California, and lived in nearby Mill Valley. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Stanford University in 1952. He pursued academic studies at the University of Paris where he studied contemporary literature. He also studied literature at University of Freiburg for two years during off-hours from his military service.
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Igor Kon
#4816
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Igor Semyonovich Kon was a Soviet and Russian philosopher, psychologist, and sexologist. His scientific publications have been translated into many languages, such as English, German, and French. Biography Kon was born in Leningrad . He was evacuated during the Siege of Leningrad and returned after the lifting of the blockade in 1944. He graduated from Herzen State Pedagogical University with a degree in history in 1947 and was awarded a candidate of sciences degree by the same university in 1950. He was awarded the doctor of sciences degree by Leningrad State University in 1959.
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S. Barry Barnes
#3769
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
S. Barry Barnes was Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. Barnes worked at the 'Science Studies Unit' at the University of Edinburgh with David Bloor from the 1970s through the early 1990s, where they developed the strong programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. He moved to the sociology department in Exeter in 1992. Barnes is known for his naturalistic approach to science, a view elaborated in his book Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory . He advocated a post-Kuhnian approach to scientific knowledge, and suggested that philosophers, historians and other rese...
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Michael Burawoy
#3994
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#44
Alain Touraine
#1229
Overall Influence
1925 - 2023 (98 years)
Alain Touraine was a French sociologist. He was research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he founded the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux. Touraine was an important figure in the founding of French sociology of work after World War II and later became an internationally-renowned sociologist of social movements, particularly the May 68 student movement in France and the Solidarity trade-union movement in communist Poland.
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M. N. Srinivas
#2379
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas was an Indian sociologist and social anthropologist. He is mostly known for his work on caste and caste systems, social stratification, Sanskritisation and Westernisation in southern India and the concept of 'dominant caste'. He is considered to be one of the pioneering personalities in the field of sociology and social anthropology in India as his work in Rampura remains one of the early examples of ethnography in India. That was in contrast to most of his contemporaries of the Bombay School, who focused primarily on a historical methodology to conduct research, mainly in Indology.
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Audre Lorde
#522
Overall Influence
1934 - 1992 (58 years)
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet," who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions".
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Everett Rogers
#1230
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Everett M. "Ev" Rogers was an American communication theorist and sociologist, who originated the diffusion of innovations theory and introduced the term early adopter. He was distinguished professor emeritus in the department of communication and journalism at the University of New Mexico.
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James G. March
#1390
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
James Gardner March was an American political scientist, sociologist, and economist. A professor at Stanford University in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Education, he is best known for his research on organizations, his seminal work on A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, and the organizational decision making model known as the Garbage Can Model.
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Steven Lukes
#1816
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Steven Michael Lukes is a British political and social theorist. Currently he is a professor of politics and sociology at New York University. He was formerly a professor at the University of Siena, the European University Institute and the London School of Economics.
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Irving Louis Horowitz
#3415
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Irving Louis Horowitz was an American sociologist, author, and college professor who wrote and lectured extensively in his field, and his later years came to fear that it risked being seized by left-wing ideologues. He proposed a quantitative index for measuring a country's quality of life, and helped to popularize "Third World" as a term for the poorer nations of the Non-Aligned Movement. He was considered by many to be a neoconservative, although he maintained that he had no political adherence.
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