The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Sociology,
#2651
Hornell Hart
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Hornell Norris Hart was an American professor of sociology and parapsychologist. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and raised as a Quaker. In 1921, he obtained a Ph.D. from the Iowa State University.
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Irene Barnes Taeuber
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.
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Alfred Kinsey
1894 - 1956 (62 years)
Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American sexologist, biologist, and professor of entomology and zoology who, in 1947, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as for the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s, and has continued to provoke controversy decades after his death.
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Mildred Parten Newhall
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Mildred Bernice Parten Newhall was an American sociologist, a researcher at University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 1929. In it she developed the theory of six stages of child's play, which led to a series of influential publications.
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Ruth Shonle Cavan
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Ruth Shonle Cavan was an American sociologist based at the University of Chicago. She specialized in deviance and criminology and was a leader of the Chicago school of sociology. According to Moyer :Ruth Shonle Cavan is recognized by most current criminologists as an extraordinary writer with analytical skills and the ability to synthesize the research in the field. One of the major strengths of her writings is her ability to build on the theoretical perspectives and methodologies of the Chicago School and to use other perspectives and methodologies when appropriate....[M]ost current crimino...
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Oliver Cox
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-Americann sociologist. Cox was often misconceived as a Marxist due to his focus on class conflict and capitalism, however, Cox fundamentally disagreed with Marx's analysis of Capitalism. While Marx and other classical economists viewed foreign trade as trade in surpluses, Cox felt that foreign trade was the primary driving force in capitalist development. For Cox, capitalist systems were not isolated, but rather there was an interconnected network of global capitalist systems.
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Robert Staughton Lynd
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Robert Staughton Lynd was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, New York City. He is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with his wife, Helen Lynd; as the coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts ; and a pioneer in the use of social surveys. He was also the author of Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture . In addition to writing and research, Lynd taught at Columbia from 1931 to 1960. He also served on U.S. gover...
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Fred W. Tanner
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Fred Wilbur Tanner was an American food scientist and microbiologist who involved in the founding of the Institute of Food Technologists and the creation of the scientific journal Food Research . Academic career Tanner joined at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1923, where he was chair of the Bacteriology Department until 1948. His work focused on food safety issues, specifically pasteurization and meat curing. Tanner remained as professor until his retirement in 1956. Tanner's research in food science and technology would also lead to the establishment of the food technolo...
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Frank H. Hankins
1877 - 1970 (93 years)
Frank Hamilton Hankins was an American sociologist and anthropologist who was the president of the American Sociological Society in 1938. He wrote the book The Racial Basis of Civilization which was critical of racial theories such as Aryanism, Gobinism, Celticism, Anglo-Saxonism and Nordicism.
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Talcott Parsons
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department. Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard.
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Theodor W. Adorno
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Le...
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Paul Lazarsfeld
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-American sociologist. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds". He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology.
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Robert E. Park
1864 - 1944 (80 years)
Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist who is considered to be one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology. Park was a pioneer in the field of sociology, changing it from a passive philosophical discipline to an active discipline rooted in the study of human behavior. He made significant contributions to the study of urban communities, race relations and the development of empirically grounded research methods, most notably participant observation in the field of criminology. From 1905 to 1914, Park worked with Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute. After...
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George C. Homans
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
George Caspar Homans was an American sociologist, founder of behavioral sociology, the 54th president of the American Sociological Association, and one of the architects of social exchange theory. Homans is best known in science for his research in social behavior and his works The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, his contributions to exchange theory, and the different propositions he developed to explain social behavior. He is also the third great grandson of the second President of the United States, John Adams.
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Emory S. Bogardus
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Emory Stephen Bogardus was a prominent figure in the history of American sociology. Bogardus founded one of the first sociology departments at an American university, at the University of Southern California in 1915.
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Bernard Berelson
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Bernard Reuben Berelson was an American behavioral scientist, known for his work on communication and mass media. He was a leading proponent of the broad idea of the "behavioral sciences", a field he saw as including areas such as public opinion. In Chapter 14 of Voting , he enunciated what has become known as Berelson's paradox on democracy: while classical theories of its success assume voters committed to interest in public life, this fails to correspond with practical politics, while the system itself functions.
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Theodore Fred Abel
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Theodore Fred Abel was an American sociology professor who collected the largest single archive of first person accounts from people who joined Hitler's National Socialist movement. The collection of men's accounts was published in 1938 in a book titled Why Hitler Came to Power. The women's accounts were set aside to publish at a later date. Those accounts were lost and then rediscovered in the archives of the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto, after which three Florida State University professors arranged to have them transcribed, translated and digitized. This collection of first person account...
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Max Horkheimer
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason , Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, suppo...
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Morris Janowitz
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
Morris Janowitz was an American sociologist and professor who made major contributions to sociological theory, the study of prejudice, urban issues, and patriotism. He was one of the founders of military sociology and made major contributions, along with Samuel P. Huntington, to the establishment of contemporary civil-military relations. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago and held a five-year chairmanship of the Sociology Department at University of Chicago. He was the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
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Samuel A. Stouffer
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Samuel Andrew Stouffer was a prominent American sociologist and developer of survey research techniques. Stouffer spent much of his career attempting to answer the fundamental question: How does one measure an attitude?
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Mary Frank Fox
Mary Frank Fox is Dean's Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a pioneer and leader in the study of women and men in academic and scientific occupations and organizations. Her work has introduced and established the ways that participation and performance in science reflect and are affected by complex social-organizational processes. Fox's research is published in over 60 different scholarly and scientific journals, books, and collections, including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Sociology of Edu...
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Nicholas Timasheff
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Nicholas Sergeyevitch Timasheff was a Russian sociologist, professor of jurisprudence and writer. Biography Timasheff "came from an old family of Russian nobility"; his father was Minister of Trade and Industry under Nicholas II. In St. Petersburg, where he was born, he attended a classical high school; he went on to attend the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the University of Strasbourg, and the Saint Petersburg State University . At the latter university he met the Polish-Russian jurist Leon Petrazycki, who was a significant influence on him throughout his life. Two years later he began teaching sociological jurisprudence at the University of Petrograd.
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Thorsten Sellin
1896 - 1994 (98 years)
Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology. Biography Sellin was born in Örnsköldsvik in Västernorrland County, Sweden and came to Canada with his parents when he was 17 years old. He received his bachelor's degree from Augustana College in Illinois when he was 19. He went on to receive a master's degree and doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1922 until becoming Professor Emeritus in 1967.
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E. Franklin Frazier
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Edward Franklin Frazier , was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States ; it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
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George A. Lundberg
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
George Andrew Lundberg was an American sociologist. Background Lundberg was born in Fairdale, North Dakota. His parents, Andrew J. Lundberg and Britta C. Erickson, were immigrants from Sweden. Lundberg received his bachelor's degree from the University of North Dakota in 1920, a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1922, and a doctorate in 1925 from the University of Minnesota, where he studied under and F. Stuart Chapin.
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Maynard A. Joslyn
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Maynard Alexander Joslyn was a Russian Empire-born, American food scientist who involved in the rebirth of the American wine industry in California following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Joslyn was also involved in the development of analytical chemistry as it applied to food, leading to the advancement of food chemistry as a scientific discipline.
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Willard Waller
1899 - 1945 (46 years)
Willard Walter Waller was an American sociologist. Much of his research concerned the sociology of the family, sociology of education and the sociology of the military. His The Sociology of Teaching was described as an "early classic" in the field of the sociology of education. Before his sudden death, he was recognized as one of the most prominent scholars in the field of sociology.
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Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett is a British sociologist who has held academic positions in the United Kingdom and Australia. His work focusses on cultural studies and cultural history. Early life and education Bennett was born in Manchester and earned a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University in 1968 and a PhD in sociology at Sussex University in 1972.
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Carl R. Fellers
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Carl R. Fellers was an American food scientist and microbiologist who was involved in the pasteurization of dried foods and canning Atlantic blue crab. Early life and career A native of Hastings, New York, Fellers worked in research for the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Canners Association , and the University of Washington before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst department of horticulture manufacturing on December 1, 1925.
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Ellsworth Faris
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Ellsworth Faris was an influential sociologist of the Chicago school. Faris was born in 1874 in Salem, Tennessee. He studied at Texas Christian University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1894 and master's degree in 1896. From 1897 to 1904, he spent time in Belgian Congo as a missionary. When he returned from Africa, Faris earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and was hired into the department.
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Kimball Young
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Kimball Young was the president of the American Sociological Association in 1945. Young was the grandson of Brigham Young. He was born in Provo, Utah, and graduated from Brigham Young University in 1915. However, Kimball Young himself was not a believer in the Latter-day Saint faith, and spoke condescendingly of those who were. He then taught high school for a year in Arizona before going to study at the University of Chicago for sociology. His decision to study at Chicago was largely due to advice from William J. Snow. After studying there, he went to study at Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D.
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Rose Marie Pangborn
1932 - 1990 (58 years)
Rose Marie Valdes Pangborn was a Mexican-American food scientist, food technologist, professor, and a pioneer in the field of sensory analysis of food attributes. She worked as a sensory scientist in the Experiment Station, Step VIII, served for 35 years at the University of California, Davis. She co-founded the Association for Chemoreception Sciences , and the Sensory Reception Scholarship Fund .
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Carle C. Zimmerman
1897 - 1983 (86 years)
Carle Clark Zimmerman was an American sociologist, and an inaugural member of Harvard University's Department of Sociology. Zimmerman's masterpiece was Family and Civilization. His work was not widely accepted in the discipline of sociology and is largely forgotten. Zimmerman's contribution to the field of sociology has been the stages of decline, corruption and social disintegration associated with the collapse of civilization. Zimmerman also showed that they appear in the family structure and what appearing in the family structure can mean.
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Ira De Augustine Reid
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Ira De Augustine Reid was a prominent sociologist, who wrote extensively on the lives of black immigrants and communities in the United States. He was also influential in the field of educational sociology. He held faculty appointments at Atlanta University, New York University, and Haverford College, one of very few African American faculty members in the United States at white institutions during the era of "separate but equal" and the first to be awarded tenure at a prestigious Northern institution .
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William Vere Cruess
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
William Vere Cruess was an American food scientist who pioneered the use of fruits to produce fruit-juice beverages, fruit-based concentrates and syrups. He was one of the first investigators in the United States to use freezing storage for preservation of fruits and fruit products. Cruess's research also proved beneficial in the rebirth of the wine industry in California after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
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Arthur C. Dahlberg
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Arthur Chester Dahlberg was an American food scientist specializing in the dairy industry. His research helped to improve the methods of processing milk and milk products. He was Professor and Professor Emeritus of Dairy Industry at Cornell University. He received the 1944 Borden Award for excellence in research in dairy manufacturing.
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Leo Löwenthal
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Leo Löwenthal was a German sociologist and philosopher usually associated with the Frankfurt School. Life Born in Frankfurt as the son of assimilated Jews , Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. He joined the newly founded Institute for Social Research in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Heterodox and independent Marxists, open to new intellectual currents such as psychoanalysis, and predominantly Jewish, the institute's members swiftly fled Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
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Helen Lynd
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Helen Merrell Lynd was an American sociologist, social philosopher, educator, and author. She is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with her husband, Robert Staughton Lynd; as the coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts ; and a pioneer in the use of social surveys. She was also the author of England in the 1880s: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom , Shame and the Search for Identity , and essays on academic freedom. In addition to writing and research, Lynd was a lectu...
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Roy Wallis
1945 - 1990 (45 years)
Roy Wallis was a sociologist and Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the Queen's University Belfast. He is mostly known for his creation of the seven signs that differentiate a religious congregation from a sectarian church, which he created while researching the Church of Scientology. He introduced the distinction between world-affirming and world-rejecting new religious movements.
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Fred C. Blanck
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Fred C. Blanck was an American food scientist who was involved in the founding of the Institute of Food Technologists which was involved in the publishing of food and nutrition articles and books. IFT founding A charter member of IFT when it was founded in 1939, Blanck proposed at the last session of the meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to have the new society dealing with food science in the United States be called the Institute of Food Technologists. He would serve as president of IFT in 1944-45 and would be named the first winner of the Stephen M. Babcock Award, now th...
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Emil J. Walter
1897 - 1984 (87 years)
Emil Jakob Walter was a Swiss sociologist. Walter was professor at the Handelshochschule St. Gallen. As a positivist, Walter tried to apply the methods of natural science to sociological and psychological issues. Walter also wrote for scientific as well as social democratic periodicals .
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Richard Thacker Morris
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Richard Thacker Morris was a professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the author of The Two-Way Mirror: National Status in Foreign Students' Adjustment , as well as The White Reaction Study , an important work on urban race relations.
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Hans Speier
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Hans Speier was a German-American sociologist who worked with the United States Government as a Germany expert both during and after World War II. He also published several books on German politics and culture throughout the middle half of the 20th century.
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Peter Heintz
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Peter René Heintz was a Swiss professor of sociology and doctor of political science that notably impacted on the extensive academic development within Latin America and greater Europe. Life Heintz was born on November 6, 1920, as the son of a merchant in Davos, Switzerland. After many years of adolescence in Spain and scientific studies in Paris, Cologne and Zurich, Heintz obtained his doctorate of Political Science in 1943 from the University of Zurich. While on campus, a chance encounter with German-born sociologist René König was particularly important for his interest in sociology, leadi...
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Carey D. Miller
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Carey Dunlap Miller was an American food scientist and a University of Hawaii at Manoa food and nutrition professor and department chair from 1922-1958. Early life and education Miller was born to immigrant parents that owned a ranch in Idaho. She graduated from Boise High School in 1912. She received her bachelor's degree with honors from the University of California, Berkeley and later her master's degree at Columbia University.
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M. S. A. Rao
1926 - 1985 (59 years)
Madhugiri Shamarao Anathapadmanabha Rao was a professor of sociology who had been a founder-member in 1959 of the Department of Sociology at the University of Delhi, India. He wrote and edited extensively on subjects such as the social aspects of nutrition, both urban and rural sociology, the sociology of migration, and social dominance. He conducted much fieldwork as a part of his researches.
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George Edmund Haynes
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
George Edmund Haynes was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918. A graduate of Fisk University, he earned a master's degree at Yale University, and was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Columbia University, where he completed one in sociology.
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Carl F. Kraenzel
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Carl Frederick Kraenzel was an American sociologist. Most of Kraenzel's work focuses on the people of the Great Plains, covering a range of topics including quality of life, power relations, resource use, and mental health. Kraenzel has been widely published in a variety of professional journals, monographs, research bulletins, special reports, and books in the fields of rural sociology, Great Plains sociology, and natural resource sociology. His best known work, The Great Plains in Transition, describes the challenges of social life and connections to the natural environments in the North American semiarid region located between the 98th meridian and the Rocky Mountains.
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Ruth Glass
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Ruth Glass was a German-born British sociologist, urban planner and founder of the Centre for Urban Studies at University College London . Life She was born in Berlin on 30 June 1912, the daughter of Eli Lazarus, who was Jewish, and Lilly Leszczynska. She left Germany in 1932, studying at the London School of Economics. After spending two years from 1941 at the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, she returned to the United Kingdom in 1943. She concentrated on town planning and social planning.
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Julian Hochfeld
1911 - 1966 (55 years)
Julian Hochfeld was a Polish sociologist. His family originated of German Polish ethnicity, but preferred to stay in new Poland and then assimilated as Polish since the end of World War I. Professor of the University of Warsaw, he is remembered as a major contributor to theories of Polish communism, Marxism and socialism. In his last years he worked for UNESCO. He was a proponent of Open Marxism.
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