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,
#151
Frances Fox Piven
#3338
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Frances Fox Piven is an American professor of political science and sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. Piven is known equally for her contributions to social theory and for her social activism. A public advocate of the war on poverty and subsequent welfare-rights protests both in New York City and on the national stage, she has been instrumental in formulating the theoretical underpinnings of those movements. Over the course of her career, she has served on the boards of the ACLU and the Democratic Socialists of America, and has als...
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Erik Homburger Erikson
#32867
Overall Influence
#153
Susan Carland
#18492
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Susan Janet Carland is an Australian academic, author and television presenter best known for her ongoing media presence speaking on her academic speciality of women in Islam. Early life and education Carland grew up in Forest Hill in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. She attended public schools. She has stated that one of her favourite recreational pursuits in childhood was ballet, which she pursued from the age of seven.
Go to Profile#154
Charles Wright Mills
#33068
Overall Influence
#155
Otis Dudley Duncan
#14579
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Otis Dudley Duncan was "the most important quantitative sociologist in the world in the latter half of the 20th century", according to sociologist Leo Goodman. His book The American Occupational Structure, which received the American Sociological Association's Sorokin Award, documented how parents transmit their societal status to their children. Duncan compiled his thoughts on the major issues of the field into Notes on Social Measurement, which he considered his greatest work.
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Jean-Claude Passeron
#5700
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Jean-Claude Passeron is a French sociologist and leader of social science studies. As part of a mixed interdisciplinary team involving sociologists, historians, and anthropologists, he led the magazine Enquêtes.
Go to Profile#157
Craig Calhoun
#7451
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Craig Jackson Calhoun is an American sociologist who currently serves as the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a strong advocate for applying social science to address issues of public concerns. Calhoun served as the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from September 2012 until September 2016 and continues to hold the title of Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE.
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Roland Robertson
#10400
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Roland Robertson was a sociologist and theorist of globalization who lectured at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Formerly, he was a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1988 he was the President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.
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Richard Cloward
#5523
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Richard Andrew Cloward was an American sociologist and activist. He influenced the Strain theory of criminal behavior and the concept of anomie, and was a primary motivator for the passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the "Motor Voter Act". He taught at Columbia University for 47 years.
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Sal Restivo
#4528
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Sal Restivo is a sociologist/anthropologist. Work Restivo is a leading contributor to science studies and in particular to the sociology of mathematics. His current work focuses on the sociology of mind and brain, and the sociology of god and religion. He has also done work in the sociology of social and sociable robotics. He helped launch the ethnographic study of science in the 1970s, and is a founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science. He was a founding member of the Association for Humanist Sociology, and was also involved with Science for the Peo...
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David Morgan
#12271
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
David Hopcraft John Morgan , known as David Morgan, was a British sociologist, who was President of the British Sociological Association and editor of the association's journal Sociology. His research focused on family sociology, gender studies and especially men's studies.
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Orlando Patterson
#3493
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Horace Orlando Patterson is a Jamaican-American historian and sociologist known for his work on the history of race and slavery in the United States and Jamaica, as well as the sociology of development. He is currently the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Patterson's 1991 book Freedom in the Making of Western Culture won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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Teodor Shanin
#6792
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Teodor Shanin was a British sociologist who was for many years Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He was credited with pioneering the study of Russian peasantry in the West, and is best known for his first book, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia, 1910–25 . After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Shanin moved to Russia where, with funding from The Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation and others, he founded the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences in 1995. Shanin was President of the Moscow School, Profess...
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Edward Shils
#4651
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Edward Albert Shils was a Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in Sociology at the University of Chicago and an influential sociologist. He was known for his research on the role of intellectuals and their relations to power and public policy. His work was honored in 1983 when he was awarded the Balzan Prize. In 1979, he was selected by the National Council on the Humanities to give the Jefferson Lecture, the highest award given by the U.S. federal government for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
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Marcello Truzzi
#8123
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Marcello Truzzi was a professor of sociology at New College of Florida and later at Eastern Michigan University, founding co-chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal , a founder of the Society for Scientific Exploration, and director for the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research.
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John Law
#8115
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Law , is a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar, currently on the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. Law coined the term Actor-Network Theory in 1992 when synthesising work done with colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation.
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Barrie Thorne
#15692
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Barrie Thorne is a professor of sociology and of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the sociology of gender, feminist theory, the sociology of age relations, childhood, and families, and ethnographic methods. She is perhaps best known as author of the widely read book Play: Girls and Boys in School which has been cited in over 170 books and over 500 publications.
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Enrique Leff
#6038
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Enrique Leff is a Mexican economist, environmental sociologist and environmentalist. He has written 25 books and 180 articles on political ecology, environmental sociology, environmental economics, environmental epistemology and environmental education. He is regarded as one of the key environmental thinkers in Latin America.
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Tatyana Zaslavskaya
#5563
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya was a Russian economic sociologist and a theoretician of perestroika. She was the prime author of the Novosibirsk Report and several books on the economy of the Soviet Union and in sociology of the countryside. She was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992 and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zaslavskaya was the founder of RPORC and also its director in the years from 1987 to 1992. In 2000 she was the Laureate of the Demidov Prize and the honorary president of the Levada Center.
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Richard Florida
#1001
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Richard L. Florida is an American urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory. He is a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow at NYU's School of Professional Studies.
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Klaus Hurrelmann
#6684
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Klaus Hurrelmann is professor of public health and education at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Klaus Hurrelmann was born on 10 January 1944 in Gdynia and studied sociology, psychology and education in Berkeley , Freiburg and Münster.
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John Skvoretz
#18263
Overall Influence
John Skvoretz is an American social scientist, focusing on theoretical methods, group processes and social psychology, and network analysis and modeling, currently at University of South Florida.
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Lann Hornscheidt
#22816
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Lann Hornscheidt is a German academic active in the fields of gender studies and linguistics. Hornscheidt is non-binary. Academic career Lann Hornscheidt obtained a PhD degree at the University of Kiel. From 2007 to 2016, Hornscheidt was professor for Gender Studies and Language Analysis at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Hornscheidt has had visiting professorships and periods of research at the universities of Örebro, Lund, Turku, Uppsala, Graz, Innsbruck and Södertörn . Hornscheidt received the habilitation in Scandinavian Linguistics at...
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Richard Swedberg
#8675
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#175
Harriet Zuckerman
#5559
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Harriet Anne Zuckerman is an American sociologist and professor emerita of Columbia University. Zuckerman specializes in the sociology of science. She is known for her work on the social organization of science, scientific elites, the accumulation of advantage, the Matthew effect, and the phenomenon of multiple discovery.
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Shinji Miyadai
#12972
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
is a Japanese sociologist and professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University. He has a PhD from the University of Tokyo for his research on Mathematical sociology. Using the method of game theory, he analyzed how the power of the state works in society. He is one of the most outspoken sociologists in Japan, and is currently working on the strategy the Japanese government should adopt for the 21st century.
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Morrie Schwartz
#12958
Overall Influence
1916 - 1995 (79 years)
Morris S. Schwartz was an American professor of sociology at Brandeis University and an author. He was the subject of the best-selling book Tuesdays with Morrie, written by Mitch Albom, a former student of Schwartz. He was portrayed by Jack Lemmon in the 1999 television film adaptation of the book.
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Angela McRobbie
#6263
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Angela McRobbie is a British cultural theorist, feminist, and commentator whose work combines the study of popular culture, contemporary media practices and feminism through conceptions of a third-person reflexive gaze. She is a professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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Aaron Antonovsky
#6853
Overall Influence
1923 - 1994 (71 years)
Aaron Antonovsky was an Israeli American sociologist and academic whose work concerned the relationship between stress, health and well-being . Biography Antonovsky was born in the United States in 1923. After completing his PhD at Yale University, he emigrated to Israel in 1960. For a time he held positions in Jerusalem at the Israeli Institute for Applied Social Research and in the Department of Medical Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this period his early work emphasized social class differences in morbidity and mortality.
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John Urry
#10757
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
John Richard Urry was a British sociologist who served as a professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility. He wrote books on many other aspects of modern society including the transition away from "organised capitalism", the sociology of nature and environmentalism, and social theory in general.
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Karin Knorr Cetina
#8187
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Karin Knorr Cetina is an Austrian sociologist well known for her work on epistemology and social constructionism, summarized in the books The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science and Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge . Currently, she focuses on the study of global microstructures and Social studies of finance. Knorr Cetina is the Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
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Fatema Mernissi
#3966
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Fatema Mernissi was a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist. Biography Fatema Mernissi was born on 27 September 1940 in Fez, Morocco. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate. In 1957, she studied political science at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Brandeis University in the US, where she gained her doctorate in 1974.
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Aaron Cicourel
#11228
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Aaron Victor Cicourel, was an American sociologist. A Professor of sociology who spent much of his career at the University of California, San Diego, he specialized in sociolinguistics, medical communication, decision-making, and child socialization. He was intellectually influenced greatly by Alfred Schutz, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel.
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Leila Ahmed
#3725
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian-American scholar of Islam. In 1992 she published her book Women and Gender in Islam, which is regarded as a pioneering historical analysis of the position of women in Arab Muslim societies. She became the first professor of women's studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003. She was later awarded the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020.
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Alex Inkeles
#8354
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Alex Inkeles was an American sociologist and social psychologist. One of his main areas of research was the culture and society of the Soviet Union. His career was mostly spent at Harvard University and Stanford University. In addition to being the founding editor of the Annual Review of Sociology, some of his recognitions included membership in the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.
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William Chambliss
#10775
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
William Joseph Chambliss was an American criminologist and sociologist. He was a professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at The George Washington University for over 20 years. He was a pioneer of the conflict theory which concluded, among other things, that conflict between different social classes is the fundamental force in capitalist societies. In addition to his transformative scholarly contributions, he was a teacher-scholar and mentor to many of today’s leading criminologists and sociologists.
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Doug McAdam
#14548
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Doug McAdam is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of over a dozen books and over fifty articles, and is widely credited as one of the pioneers of the political process model in social movement analysis. He wrote one of the first books on the theory in 1982 when analyzing the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency 1930-1970. His other book Freedom Summer won the C. Wright Mills Award in 1990. He served as the director of the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences between 2001 and 2005.
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Duncan J. Watts
#3485
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Duncan James Watts is a sociologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was formerly a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, and is known for his work on small-world networks.
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Stanley Aronowitz
#4307
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Stanley Aronowitz was an American sociologist, trade union official, and political activist. A professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center, his longtime political activism and cultural criticism was influential in the New Left movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. He was also an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook Universi...
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John Levi Martin
#16975
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#191
Charles Y. Glock
#13238
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Charles Young Glock was an American sociologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion and survey research. Biography and academic background Charles Glock was born in the Bronx, New York in 1919. He earned a B.S. degree in marketing at New York University in 1940 and an Master of Business Administration at Boston University in 1941. He served in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1946 where he became a major. After serving in the army, Glock earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University. Glock was professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley, California. He was twice appointed chair of the department.
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Jean Ziegler
#2102
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jean Ziegler is a Swiss former professor of sociology at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne, Paris, and former vice-president of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations Human Rights Council. He was previously Member of the Swiss Parliament for the Social Democrats from 1981 to 1999. He has also held several positions with the United Nations, especially as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2000 to 2008, and as a member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council from 2008 to 2012. Ziegler has authored numerous works, is a lecturer, and is well known for this...
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Peter Hedström
#31046
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peter Hedström is one of the founders of the field of analytical sociology. He has made contributions to the analysis of social contagion processes and complex social networks, as well as to the philosophical and meta-theoretical foundations of analytical sociology. He is one of the key contributors to the literature on social mechanisms.
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Robert Castel
#8727
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Robert Castel was a French sociologist and researcher at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Academic career Castel was born in Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon, now part of Brest. He initially studied philosophy in the late 1950s. In the late 1960s, he met Pierre Bourdieu and began working with him in sociology. His initial work dealt with psychology and psychiatry, establishing a critical sociology of these issues and linking this work to Michel Foucault, particularly to his 'genealogical approach'. He further dealt with exclusion, or rather what he called the 'disaffiliation', which...
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Ralph Miliband
#3714
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Ralph Miliband was a British sociologist. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.
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Eliseo Verón
#4316
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Eliseo Verón was an Argentine sociologist, anthropologist and semiotician, and professor of communication sciences at Universidad de San Andrés. His work is known mainly in Spanish and French-speaking countries.
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
#278
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
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Michael Mann
#6544
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Mann FBA is a British-born emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the University of Cambridge. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships.
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Sylvia Walby
#14957
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sylvia Theresa Walby is a British sociologist, currently Professor of Sociology, Director of the Violence and Society Centre at the City University of London. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Queen's University Belfast for distinction in sociology. She is noted for work in the fields of the domestic violence, patriarchy, gender relations in the workplace and globalisation.
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Melvin Tumin
#16747
Overall Influence
1919 - 1994 (75 years)
Melvin Marvin Tumin was an American sociologist who specialized in race relations. He taught at Princeton University for much of his career. Early life Tumin was born and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. His mother, Rose Yawitz Tumin, raised him and his two brothers on her own after the death of his father when Tumin was in his very early teens. He was the middle brother; Edward Tumin was his younger brother, and Israel Tumin was his older brother. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1939. He received his Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology from Northwestern University in 1944.
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