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,
#51
Henri Lefebvre
#627
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectical materialism, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Espaces et Socié...
Go to Profile#52
Richard Sennett
#2013
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.
Go to Profile#53
Luc Boltanski
#5218
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Luc Boltanski is a French sociologist, Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, and founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale, known as the leading figure in the new "pragmatic" school of French sociology. His work has significantly influenced sociology, political economy and social history.
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Chizuko Ueno
#7710
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Chizuko Ueno is a Japanese sociologist and Japan's "best-known feminist". Her work covers sociological issues including semiotics, capitalism, and feminism in Japan. Ueno is known for the quality, polarizing nature, and accessibility of her work. She was married to historian Daikichi Irokawa.
Go to Profile#55
Paul DiMaggio
#5307
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#56
William Julius Wilson
#1220
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Go to Profile#57
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
#5733
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty, a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, has argued for the inclusion of a transnational approach in exploring women’s experiences across the world. She is author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity , and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures , Feminism and War: Confronting U.S.
Go to Profile#58
Johan Galtung
#832
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#59
Kingsley Davis
#8135
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Kingsley Davis was an internationally recognized American sociologist and demographer. He was identified by the American Philosophical Society as one of the most outstanding social scientists of the twentieth century, and was a Hoover Institution senior research fellow.
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Harry Collins
#2771
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Harry Collins, FLSW , is a British sociologist of science at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
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Sidney Tarrow
#4259
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sidney George Tarrow is an emeritus professor of political science, known for his research in the areas of comparative politics, social movements, political parties, collective action and political sociology.
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Philip Selznick
#2920
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Philip Selznick was professor of sociology and law at the University of California, Berkeley. A noted author in organizational theory, sociology of law and public administration, Selznick's work was groundbreaking in several fields in such books as The Moral Commonwealth, TVA and the Grass Roots, and Leadership in Administration.
Go to Profile#63
Sara Ahmed
#4780
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory.
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Peggy McIntosh
#3306
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Peggy McIntosh is an American feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and senior research scientist of the Wellesley Centers for Women. She is the founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum . She and Emily Style co-directed SEED for its first twenty-five years. She has written on curricular revision, feelings of fraudulence, hierarchies in education and society, and professional development of teachers.
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Nancy Chodorow
#2194
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
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Earl Babbie
#7355
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Earl Robert Babbie , is an American sociologist who holds the position of Campbell Professor Emeritus in Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University. He is best known for his book The Practice of Social Research , currently in its 15th English edition, with numerous non-English editions.
Go to Profile#67
Alejandro Portes
#10635
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Alejandro Portes is a Cuban-American sociologist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and of the Board of Trustees and the Scientific Council at the IMDEA Social Sciences Institute. He also served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1999. His academic studies have focused on immigration to the United States and factors affecting the fates of immigrants and their children. He has also done work on shack settlements in Latin America. His work is highly cited in the sub-fields of economic sociology, cultural sociology a...
Go to Profile#68
Shmuel Eisenstadt
#4324
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt was an Israeli sociologist and writer. In 1959 he was appointed to a teaching post in the sociology department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 1990 until his death in September 2010 he was professor emeritus. He held countless guest professorships, at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Zurich, the University of Vienna, the University of Bern, Stanford and the University of Heidelberg, among others. Eisenstadt received a number of prizes, including the Balzan prize and the Max-Planck research prize. He was also the 2006 winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize.
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Piotr Sztompka
#8388
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Piotr Sztompka is a Polish sociologist known for his work on the theory of social trust. He is professor of sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and has also frequently served as visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Columbia University in New York City.
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Saskia Sassen
#2604
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#71
David Riesman
#2505
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
David Riesman was an American sociologist, educator, and best-selling commentator on American society. Career Born to a wealthy German Jewish family, Riesman attended Harvard College, where he graduated in 1931 with a degree in biochemistry. He attended Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review. Riesman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis between 1935 and 1936. He also taught at what is now the University at Buffalo Law School and at the University of Chicago.
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William Richard Scott
#3757
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
William Richard Scott is an American sociologist, and Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, specialised in institutional theory and organisation science. He is known for his research on the relation between organizations and their institutional environments.
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Ronald C Kessler
#22225
Overall Influence
#74
Amitai Etzioni
#1995
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Amitai Etzioni was a German-born Israeli-American sociologist, best known for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. He founded the Communitarian Network, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to supporting the moral, social, and political foundations of society. He established the network to disseminate the movement's ideas. His writings argue for a carefully crafted balance between individual rights and social responsibilities, and between autonomy and order, in social structure. In 2001, he was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic c...
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Charles C. Ragin
#7910
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Charles C. Ragin is Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Biography Born , Ragin graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in May 1972. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at age 22 in 1975.
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Jonathan H. Turner
#5304
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan H. Turner , is a professor of sociology at University of California, Riverside. Biography After receiving his PhD from Cornell University in 1968, since the academic year 1969–1970 he has been at UCR. He has been Faculty Research Lecturer at UCR, and in the profession, he has been president of the Pacific Sociological Association and California Sociological Association. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has lectured widely all over the world, and he has been a visiting professor at Cambridge University, UK, Universitat Bremen, Germany, ...
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Jane Jacobs
#383
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
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Erik Olin Wright
#2493
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
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Carol Gilligan
#560
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice , which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
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Barry Wellman
#3788
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Barry Wellman is an American-Canadian sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D.
Go to Profile#81
Margaret Archer
#3840
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Margaret Scotford Archer was an English sociologist, who spent most of her academic career at the University of Warwick where she was for many years Professor of Sociology. She was also a professor at l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She is best known for coining the term elisionism in her 1995 book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. On 14 April 2014, Archer was named by Pope Francis to succeed former Harvard law professor and US Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and served in this p...
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Michel Maffesoli
#5205
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michel Maffesoli is a French sociologist. He is a former pupil of Gilbert Durand and Julien Freund, and an emeritus professor at Paris Descartes University. His work touches upon the issue of community links and the prevalence of "the imaginary" in the everyday life of contemporary societies, through which he contributes to the postmodern paradigm.
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Bob Jessop
#5271
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Bob Jessop is a British academic who has published extensively on state theory and political economy. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster. Work Jessop's major contribution to state theory is in treating the state not as an entity but as a social relation with differential strategic effects. This means that the state is not something with an essential, fixed property, such as a neutral coordinator of different social interests, an autonomous corporate actor with its own bureaucratic goals and interests, or the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie", as often described by pluralists, elitists/statists, and conventional Marxists, respectively.
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Jean Baudrillard
#150
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction , Simulacra and Simulation , , and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place . His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.
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Herbert J. Gans
#5877
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Herbert J. Gans is a German-born American sociologist who taught at Columbia University from 1971 to 2007. One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and has sometimes described his scholarly work as an immigrant's attempt to understand America. He trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with David Riesman and Everett Hughes, among others, and in social planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation was supervised by Martin Meyerson.
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William Foote Whyte
#4506
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
William Foote Whyte was an American sociologist chiefly known for his ethnographic study in urban sociology, Street Corner Society. A pioneer in participant observation, he lived for four years in an Italian community in Boston while a Junior Fellow at Harvard researching social relations of street gangs in Boston's North End.
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Scott Lash
#5973
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lash obtained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Michigan, an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, and a PhD from the London School of Economics . Lash began his teaching career as a lecturer at Lancaster University and became a professor in 1993. He moved to London in 1998 to take up his present post as Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College.
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Gerhard Lenski
#3871
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Gerhard Emmanuel "Gerry" Lenski, Jr. was an American sociologist known for contributions to the sociology of religion, social inequality, and introducing the ecological-evolutionary theory. He spent much of his career as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, 1969–72, and as chair of the Division of Social Sciences, 1976-78.
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John Goldthorpe
#10681
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
John Harry Goldthorpe is a British sociologist. He is an emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. His main research interests are in the fields of social stratification and mobility, and comparative macro-sociology. He also writes on methodological issues in relation to the integration of empirical, quantitative research and theory with a particular focus on issues of causation.
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René König
#9241
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
René König was a German sociologist. He was very influential on West German sociology after 1949. Born in Magdeburg, he 1925 took up Philosophy, Psychology, Ethnology, and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. He gained his doctorate 1930 at the Berlin University. As an enemy of the Nazis, he could not obtain his post-doctoral degree in the Reich, so he emigrated to Switzerland in 1937 and passed the examination at the university of Zürich, 1938. By then, he was strongly influenced by Émile Durkheim, Maurice Halbwachs, and Marcel Mauss. 1949, he was called to the chair o...
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Emanuel Schegloff
#4630
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Emanuel Abraham Schegloff is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Along with his collaborators Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff is regarded as the creator of the field of Conversation Analysis.
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Charles Perrow
#6293
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Charles B. Perrow was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books and many articles on organizations, and was primarily concerned with the impact of large organizations on society.
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Rosabeth Moss Kanter
#4391
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School. She co-founded the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative and served as Director and Founding Chair from 2008-2018. She was the top-ranking woman—No. 11 overall—in a 2002 study of Top Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. She was named one of the "50 most powerful women in Boston" by Boston Magazine and one of the "125 women who changed our world" over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping magazine in May 2010.
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George Ritzer
#4587
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#95
Michel Crozier
#3459
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Michel Crozier was a French sociologist and member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques from 1999 until his death. He also was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a laureate of the Prix Alexis de Tocqueville .
Go to Profile#96
Lev Gudkov
#6246
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Lev Dmitrievich Gudkov is a Russian sociologist, director of the analytical Levada Center and editor-in-chief of the journal The Russian Public Opinion Herald. Scientific activity Gudkov studied journalism, sociology and philology at the Lomonosov Moscow State University and graduated in 1971. He continued his post-graduate studies at the Institute for philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences until 1977. His dissertation concerned the Max Weber's concept of the methodology of social sciences and the German tradition of the understanding sociology. In 1995 Gudkov did his doctor in philoso...
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William Sims Bainbridge
#3185
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
William Sims Bainbridge is an American sociologist who currently resides in Virginia. He is co-director of Cyber-Human Systems at the National Science Foundation . He is the first Senior Fellow to be appointed by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bainbridge is most well known for his work on the sociology of religion. Recently he has published work studying the sociology of video gaming.
Go to Profile#98
Everett M. Rogers
#26398
Overall Influence
#99
Gary Alan Fine
#3472
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gary Alan Fine is an American sociologist and author. Life and career The son of Bernard David Fine and Bernice Estelle Tanz, Fine grew up in Manhattan and went to the Horace Mann School. He studied psychology at the University of Pennsylvania . He attended graduate school at Harvard University from 1972 to 1976 and received his PhD from Harvard in social psychology. His dissertation advisor was the eminent small group theorist Robert F. Bales.
Go to Profile#100
Annette Lareau
#7643
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Annette Patricia Lareau is a sociologist working at the University of Pennsylvania. She has completed extensive field work studying the daily lives of African-Americans and European-Americans. She is also credited with the creation of the term concerted cultivation. This concept refers to middle class child rearing practices. She says that this differs from the parents of children in working-class families, who attribute much of their child raising tactics to the accomplishment of natural growth.
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