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.
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List of the most influential people in Sociology,
#2651
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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Zoltan I. Kertesz
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Zoltan I. Kertesz was a Hungarian-born, American food scientist who was involved in the early development of food microbiology and food chemistry. He was also an active member of the Institute of Food Technologists .
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Robert Morrison MacIver
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Robert Morrison MacIver was a sociologist and political scientist. Early life and family Robert Morrison MacIver was born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland on April 17, 1882, to Donald MacIver, a general merchant and tweed manufacturer, and Christina MacIver . His father was a Calvinist, specifically, Scottish Presbyterian. On 14 August 1911 he married Elizabeth Marion Peterkin. They had three children: Ian Tennant Morrison, Christina Elizabeth, and Donald Gordon.
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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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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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Julieta Kirkwood
1936 - 1985 (49 years)
María Julieta Kirkwood Bañados was a Chilean sociologist, political scientist, university professor and feminist activist. She is considered one of the founders and impellers of the Chilean feminist movement in the 1980s. She is considered the forerunner of Gender studies in Chile.
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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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Frederick German Detweiler
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Frederick German Detweiler was an American sociologist and expert on race relations, best known for his 1922 book The Negro Press in the United States, published by University of Chicago Press. At the time of his death he was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Denison University and a Fellow Emeritus of the American Sociological Association.
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Sabin Manuilă
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Sabin Manuilă was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian statistician, demographer and physician. A nationalist activist during World War I, he became noted for his pioneering research into the biostatistics of Transylvania and Banat regions, as well as a promoter of eugenics and social interventionism. As a bio- and geopolitician, Manuilă advocated the consolidation of Greater Romania through population exchanges, colonization, state-sponsored assimilation, or discriminatory policies.
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Floyd Schmoe
1895 - 2001 (106 years)
Floyd Wilfred Schmoe was a Quaker, pacifist, author, college professor, marine biologist, and park ranger living in the Seattle, Washington area for most of his life. He earned Japan's highest civilian honor for his peace activism and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times.
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Wilbert E. Moore
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Wilbert E. Moore was an American sociologist noted, with Kingsley Davis, for their explanation and justification for social stratification, based their idea of "functional necessity." Biography Moore took his Ph.D. at Harvard University's Department of Sociology in 1940. Moore along with Kingsley Davis, Robert Merton and John Riley were part of Talcott Parsons first group of PhD students. Moore is perhaps best known for Some Principles of Stratification . Moore and Davis wrote this paper while at Princeton University where he remained until mid-1960s. This was followed by a period at the Russ...
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Adolph Lowe
1893 - 1995 (102 years)
Adolph Lowe was a German sociologist and economist. His best known student was Robert Heilbroner. He was born in Stuttgart and died in Wolfenbüttel. Major publications of Adolph Lowe Arbeitslosigkeit und Kriminalität, 1914."Zur Methode der Kriegswirtschaftsgesetzgebung", 1915, Die Hilfe"Die freie Konkurrenz", 1915, Die HilfeWirtschaftliche Demobilisierung, 1916."Mitteleuropäische Demobilisierung", 1917, Wirtschaftszeitung der Zentralmächte."Die ausführende Gewalt in der Ernährungspolitik", 1917, Europäische Staats- und Wirtschaftszeitung"Die Massenpreisung im System der Volksernährung", 1917,...
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Johann Plenge
1874 - 1963 (89 years)
Johann Max Emanuel Plenge was a German sociologist. He was professor of political economy at the University of Münster. In his book 1789 and 1914, Plenge contrasted the 'Ideas of 1789' and the 'Ideas of 1914' . He argued: "Under the necessity of war, socialist ideas have been driven into German economic life, its organisation has grown together into a new spirit, and so the assertion of our nation for mankind has given birth to the idea of 1914, the idea of German organisation, the national unity of state socialism". To Plenge, as for many other German nationalists and socialists, organization meant socialism and a planned economy .
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Dimitrie Gusti
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Dimitrie Gusti was a Romanian sociologist, ethnologist, historian, and voluntarist philosopher; a professor at the University of Iaşi and the University of Bucharest, he served as Romania's Minister of Education in 1932–1933. Gusti was elected a member of the Romanian Academy in 1919, and was its president between 1944 and 1946. He was the main contributor to the creation of a new Romanian school of sociology.
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Émile Durkheim
1858 - 1917 (59 years)
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
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Georg Simmel
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was influential in the field of sociology. Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking what is society?—directly alluding to Kant's what is nature?—presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomen...
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Marcel Mauss
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous work is The Gift .
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William Graham Sumner
1840 - 1910 (70 years)
William Graham Sumner was an American clergyman, social scientist, and neoclassical liberal. He taught social sciences at Yale University—where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology—and became one of the most influential teachers at any other major school.
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Vilfredo Pareto
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath . He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.
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C. Wright Mills
1916 - 1962 (46 years)
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "parti...
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Karl Mannheim
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
Karl Mannheim was an influential Hungarian sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He is a key figure in classical sociology, as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia , in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and propose a transformation of society.
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Thorstein Veblen
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.
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Florian Znaniecki
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
Florian Witold Znaniecki was a Polish and American philosopher and sociologist who taught and wrote in Poland and in the United States. Over the course of his work he shifted his focus from philosophy to sociology. He remains a major figure in the history of Polish and American sociology; the founder of Polish academic sociology, and of an entire school of thought in sociology. He won international renown as co-author, with William I. Thomas, of the study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America , which is considered the foundation of modern empirical sociology. He also made major contributi...
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Norbert Elias
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
Norbert Elias was a German sociologist who later became a British citizen. He is especially famous for his theory of civilizing/decivilizing processes. Biography Elias was born on 22 June 1897 in Breslau in Prussia's Silesia Province to Hermann Elias and Sophie Elias, née Gallewski . His father was a native of Kempen and a businessman in the textile industry. His mother was a native of the Jewish community of Breslau itself. After passing the abitur in 1915, Norbert Elias volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher, first at the Eastern front, then at the Western front.
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Albion Woodbury Small
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Albion Woodbury Small founded the first independent department of sociology in the United States at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, in 1892. He was influential in the establishment of sociology as a valid field of academic study.
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Magnus Hirschfeld
1868 - 1935 (67 years)
Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Historian Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights". He is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century.
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Jane Addams
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States. Addams co-founded Chicago's Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. In 1910, Addams was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the Amer...
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W. E. B. Du Bois
1868 - 1963 (95 years)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.
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Harriet Martineau
1802 - 1876 (74 years)
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist often seen as the first female sociologist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her work and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised "a focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She applied thorough analysis to women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant called her "a born lecturer and politician...
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Alfred Schütz
1899 - 1959 (60 years)
Alfred Schutz was an Austrian philosopher and social phenomenologist whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions. Schutz is gradually being recognized as one of the 20th century's leading philosophers of social science. He related Edmund Husserl's work to the social sciences, using it to develop the philosophical foundations of Max Weber's sociology, in his major work Phenomenology of the Social World. However, much of his influence arose from the publication of his Collected Papers in the 1960s.
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Helmut Schelsky
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Helmut Schelsky , was a German sociologist, the most influential in post-World War II Germany, well into the 1970s. Biography Schelsky was born in Chemnitz, Saxony. He turned to social philosophy and even more to sociology, as elaborated at the University of Leipzig by Hans Freyer . Having earned his doctorate in 1935 , in 1939 he qualified as a lecturer with a thesis on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes at the University of Königsberg. He was called up in 1941, so did not take up his first chair of Sociology at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg in 1944.
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Lester Frank Ward
1841 - 1913 (72 years)
Lester Frank Ward was an American botanist, paleontologist, and sociologist. He served as the first president of the American Sociological Association. In service of democratic development, polymath Lester Ward was the original American leader promoting the introduction of sociology courses into American higher education. His Enlightenment belief that institution-building could be scientifically informed was attractive to democratic intellectuals during the Progressive Era. To avoid anachronism and misinterpretation, it is crucial to understand that what "scientific" means, including scientists' own science concept, has long been contested.
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W. I. Thomas
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
William Isaac Thomas was an American sociologist, understood today as a key figure behind the theory of symbolic interactionism. Collaborating with Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki, Thomas developed and influenced the use of empirical methodologies in sociological research and contributed theories to the sociology of migration. Thomas went on to formulate a fundamental principle of sociology, known as the Thomas theorem , whereby he would contend that "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." This microsociological concept served as a theoretical foundation ...
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Robert Michels
1876 - 1936 (60 years)
Robert Michels was a German-born Italian sociologist who contributed to elite theory by describing the political behavior of intellectual elites. He belonged to the Italian school of elitism. He is best known for his book Political Parties, published in 1911, which contains a description of the "iron law of oligarchy." He was a friend and disciple of Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Achille Loria.
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Harry Benjamin
1885 - 1986 (101 years)
Harry Benjamin was a German-American endocrinologist and sexologist, widely known for his clinical work with transgender people. Early life and career Benjamin was born in Berlin, and raised in a German Lutheran home. After premedical education in Berlin and Rostock, he joined a regiment of the Prussian Guard. He received his doctorate in medicine in 1912 in Tübingen for a dissertation on tuberculosis. Sexual medicine interested him, but was not part of his medical studies. In a 1985 interview he recalled:
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Joan Woodward
1916 - 1971 (55 years)
Joan Woodward was a British professor in industrial sociology and organizational studies. Background Woodward was educated at Oxford University, where she gained a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1936, followed by an MA in medieval philosophy from Durham University in 1938, and a Diploma in Social and Public Administration from Oxford in 1939. During World War II she worked as a manager, rising to be Senior Labour Manager at ROF Bridgwater. She undertook her early research at South East Essex College of Technology, before joining Imperial College in 1957 as a part-time lecturer...
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Hans Freyer
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Hans Freyer was a German conservative revolutionary sociologist and philosopher. Life Freyer began studying theology, national economics, history and philosophy at the University of Greifswald in 1907, with the aim of becoming a Lutheran theologian. A year later he moved to Leipzig, where he initially took the same courses, but then gave up the theological parts. He gained his doctorate in 1911. His early works on the philosophy of life had an influence on the German youth movement. In 1920 he qualified as a university lecturer, and in 1922 he became a professor at the university of Kiel.
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Roger Bastide
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Roger Bastide was a French sociologist and anthropologist, specialist in sociology and Brazilian literature. He was raised as a Protestant and studied philosophy in France, developing at the same time an interest for sociological issues. His first sociological field research, in 1930–31, was about immigrants from Armenia to Valence, France. As scholars later noticed, already in his first works about the Armenians he was interested in how the memory of a different culture survives when a group of people moves to a faraway land, a theme that will become crucial in his studies of African populat...
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Charles Horton Cooley
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Charles Horton Cooley was an American sociologist. He was the son of Michigan Supreme Court Judge Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan. He was a founding member of the American Sociological Association in 1905 and became its eighth president in 1918. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the looking-glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. Cooley's health began to deteriorate in 1928. He was diagnosed with an unidentified form o...
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Edvard Westermarck
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. Biography Westermarck was born in 1862 in a well-off Lutheran family, part of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland. His father worked at the University of Helsinki as a bursar, and his maternal grandfather was a professor at the same university. It was thus natural for Edvard to study there, obtaining his first degree in philosophy in 1886, but developing also an interest in anthropology and reading the works of Charles Darwin. His thesis, The History of...
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Theodor Geiger
1891 - 1952 (61 years)
Theodor Julius Geiger was a German socialist, lawyer and sociologist who studied Sociology of Law, social stratification and social mobility, methodology, and intelligentsia, among other things. He was Denmark's first professor of sociology, working at the University of Aarhus .
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Maurice Halbwachs
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory. Halbwachs also contributed to the sociology of knowledge with his La Topographie Legendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte; study of the spatial infrastructure of the New Testament.
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Franklin Henry Giddings
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Franklin Henry Giddings was an American sociologist and economist. Biography Giddings was born at Sherman, Connecticut. He graduated from Union College . For ten years he wrote items for the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican and the Daily Union. In 1888 he was appointed lecturer in political science at Bryn Mawr College; in 1894 he became professor of sociology at Columbia University. From 1892 to 1905 he was a vice president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
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Leopold von Wiese
1876 - 1969 (93 years)
Leopold Max Walther von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau was a German sociologist and economist, as well as professor and chairman of the German Sociological Association. Biography Leopold von Wiese was the only son of a prematurely deceased Prussian officer and received his education at the cadet schools in Wahlstatt and Lichterfelde. After leaving the cadet corps, he then studied economics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin where he got his Ph.D. in 1902. Subsequently, he was scientific secretary of the "Institute for the common good" in Frankfurt. In 1905, he was Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Berlin.
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Harvey Sacks
1935 - 1975 (40 years)
Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of conversation analysis. His work has had significant influence on fields such as linguistics, discourse analysis, and discursive psychology.
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Edward Alsworth Ross
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Edward Alsworth Ross was a progressive American sociologist, eugenicist, economist, and major figure of early criminology. Early life He was born in Virden, Illinois. His father was a farmer. He attended Coe College and graduated in 1887. After two years as an instructor at a business school, the Fort Dodge Commercial Institute, he went to Germany for graduate study at the University of Berlin. He returned to the U.S., and in 1891 he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in political economy under Richard T. Ely, with minors in philosophy and ethics.
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Alvin Gouldner
1920 - 1980 (60 years)
Alvin Ward Gouldner was an American sociologist, lecturer and radical activist. Early life Goulder was born in New York City. He earned a B.B.A. degree from the Baruch College of the City University of New York and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.
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Dorothy Swaine Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Dorothy Swaine Thomas was an American sociologist and economist. She was the 42nd President of the American Sociological Association, the first woman in that role. Life and career Thomas was born on October 24, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland to John Knight and Sarah Swaine Thomas.
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Antonio Gramsci
1891 - 1937 (46 years)
Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937.
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