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.
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List of the most influential people in Sociology,
#2651
Charles A. Ellwood
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Charles Abram Ellwood was one of the leading American sociologists of the interwar period, studying intolerance, communication and revolutions and using many multidisciplinary methods. He argued that sociology should play a role in directing cultural evolution through education of society.
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F. Stuart Chapin
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Francis Stuart Chapin was an American sociologist and educator; he was a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota from 1922 to 1953. Background He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1909, as well as his PhD from the same school in 1911.
Go to Profile#2653
A.K. Nazmul Karim
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Abul Khair Nazmul Karim was a Bangladeshi sociologist and academic. He was posthumously awarded Ekushey Padak for his contribution to education by the government of Bangladesh in 2012. Personal life Karim was born in the Noakhali/Comilla area, now known as Lakshmipur. His parental residence was at Falgoonkora village in the Comilla District. He was the seventh of eight children of Abu Rashid Nizamuddin Mahmood Ahmed and Mossammat Shamsun Neda Khatun. He came from an educated family of school inspectors, private tutors, diwans, and magistrates. His mother came from a zamindari family.
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William Z. Ripley
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
William Zebina Ripley was an American economist, lecturer at Columbia University, professor of economics at MIT, professor of political economy at Harvard University, and racial anthropologist. Ripley was famous for his criticisms of American railroad economics and American business practices in the 1920s and 1930s, and later for his tripartite racial theory of Europe. His work of racial anthropology was later taken up by racial physical anthropologists, eugenicists, white supremacists, Nordicists, and racists in general, and it was considered a valid academic work at the time, although today...
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Muriel Rukeyser
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
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Achille Ouy
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Achille Ouy was a French philosopher and sociologist. Ouy taught philosophy at various lycees, and was involved with the Mercure de France. "A follower of René Worms and Gaston Richard, Ouy "performed many day-to-day tasks that held the R.I.S. and IIS together from 1919 to 1940."
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Gunnar Landtman
1878 - 1940 (62 years)
Gunnar Landtman was a Finnish philosopher as well as a sociology and philosophy professor. A pupil of Edvard Westermarck, he graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1905. He later became an associate professor there from 1910 to 1927 and then a temporary professor until his death in 1940. At the university, Landtman was a member of the Prometheus Society, a student society promoting freedom of religion. Landtman was the first modern sociological anthropologist. His most important journey was a two-year trip to Papua New Guinea where he lived with the Kiwai Papuans from 1910 to 1912. He w...
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Olgerd Bochkovsky
1885 - 1939 (54 years)
Olgerd Ipolyt Bochkovsky – Ukrainian sociologist, journalist, diplomat and political activist whose political writings were published in Ukrainian newspapers in Canada, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries. His selected writings have recently appeared in a three-volume edition. Born in a Polish-Lithuanian family in Dolynska village, Kherson Gubernia , he studied in St. Petersburg, where he was involved in the socialist movement. After the revolution in 1905 he emigrated to Austro-Hungary and settled in Prague. In 1909 he graduated from Charles University . At that time he was involved i...
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Viola Klein
1908 - 1973 (65 years)
Viola Klein was a sociologist in Great Britain. Her work demonstrated that objective ideas about women's attributes are socially constructed. Although her early training was in psychology and philosophy, her most prolific research engagements concerned women's social roles and how these changed after the Industrial Revolution. She was one of the first scholars to bring quantitative evidence to bear on this socio-economic topic. Her research not only illuminated the changing roles of women in society, but she also wrote and lectured on concrete social and political changes that would help faci...
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Annie Marion MacLean
1869 - 1934 (65 years)
Annie Marion MacLean was a pioneering American sociologist of the women's Chicago School, and is sometimes referred to as the "mother of contemporary ethnography". She was one of the first women to pursue a professional career in sociology.
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Yasuma Takada
1883 - 1972 (89 years)
Yasuma Takata was an influential sociologist and economist and is most widely known for his power theory of economics. A fruit - the Yasuma - was named after him after he discovered it on one of his many trips to Greece.
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Lawrence D. Bobo
1900 - Present (125 years)
Lawrence D. Bobo is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and the Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of social psychology, social inequality, politics, and race.
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Georges Gurvitch
1894 - 1965 (71 years)
Georges Gurvitch was a Russian-born French sociologist and jurist. One of the leading sociologists of his times, he was a specialist of the sociology of knowledge. In 1944 he founded the journal Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie. He held a chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. An outspoken advocate of Algerian decolonization, Gurvitch and his wife were the victim of terrorist attack by the far-right nationalist group, L'O.A.S on June 22, 1962. Their apartment was destroyed by a bomb, and they took refuge for a time at the house of painter Marc Chagall.
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E. Wight Bakke
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Edward Wight Bakke was an American sociology and economics professor at Yale University who achieved prominence in the field of industrial relations. He was a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest level of academic rank, and served as director of the Yale Labor and Management Center from its founding in 1945 until its dissolution in the late 1950s. The author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, Bakke made major contributions to the study of unemployment and organizational theory.
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Reuben Hill
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Reuben Lorenzo Hill Jr. was an American sociologist. He specialized in the sociology of the family. He was the seventh president of the International Sociological Association . He has been called "the founding father of family sociology".
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Peter A. Munch
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Peter Andreas Munch was a Norwegian-born sociologist, educator, and writer. In 1948, he immigrated to the United States as a post-doctoral research fellow studying Norwegian-American rural sociology in the Midwest. He ended his professional career at Southern Illinois University, with a focus on graduate studies and sociological research based on trips to the remote South Atlantic island Tristan da Cunha.
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Graham K. Rand
#2668
Friedrich Albert Lange
1828 - 1875 (47 years)
Friedrich Albert Lange was a German philosopher and sociologist. Biography Lange was born in Wald, near Solingen, the son of the theologian, Johann Peter Lange. He was educated at Duisburg, Zürich and Bonn, where he distinguished himself in gymnastics as much as academically. In 1852 he became a schoolmaster at Cologne; in 1853 Privatdozent in philosophy at Bonn; and in 1858 schoolmaster at Duisburg, resigning when the government forbade schoolmasters to take part in political activities.
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Aryeh Tartakower
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Aryeh Tartakower was a Polish-born Israeli political activist, historian and sociologist. He was the Director of the Department of Relief and Rehabilitation of the World Jewish Congress during World War II. He was the Chair of the Department of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of many books about Jewish refugees and Israel.
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Book Reviews Book Reviews
#2671
Herbert Hyman
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Herbert Hiram Hyman was an American sociologist and expert on opinion polling. He taught at Columbia University from 1951 to 1969 and at Wesleyan University from 1969 to 1985. He died in Canton, China on December 18, 1985, four days after suffering a heart attack. He had been in China to deliver a series of lectures at Zhongshan University on sociology in developing countries.
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Yasunosuke Gonda
1887 - 1951 (64 years)
Yasunosuke Gonda was a Japanese sociologist and film theorist who played an important role in the study of popular entertainment and helped pioneer statistical studies of everyday life in Japan. Career Born in the Kanda area of Tokyo, Gonda was early attracted to the socialism of Isoo Abe, and his early political activities earned expulsion from Waseda High School. He later studied at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Tokyo University where he was influenced by German statistical sociology. His first book, The Principles and Applications of the Moving Pictures , was published in 1914, and was the first full-length monograph in Japan studying the medium of cinema.
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Paul Barth
1858 - 1922 (64 years)
Ernst Emil Paul Barth , known simply as Paul Barth, was a German sociologist and philosopher. Biography He edited the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie , and was extraordinary professor in the University of Leipzig. He wrote on philosophical subjects, but is known above all for his Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie , the first volume of which appeared in 1897. This book is one of the most authoritative historical sketches of the development of sociological theory which had been published in Germany.
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Rose Hum Lee
1904 - 1964 (60 years)
Rose Hum Lee was a first generation Chinese-American who became the first woman and the first Chinese-American to head a United States university sociology department. Biography Daughter of Hum Wong Long and Lin Fong, Hum was born the second of seven children and raised in Butte, Montana. She attended Butte High School and trained to become a secretary.
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Clifford Shaw
1895 - 1957 (62 years)
Clifford Robe Shaw was an American sociologist and criminologist. He was a major figure in the Chicago School of sociology during the 1930s and 1940s, and is considered to be one of the most influential figures in American criminology. His work on juvenile delinquency with Henry D. McKay, conducted in the late 1920s, played a pivotal role in moving the study of such delinquency toward the discipline of sociology, and away from psychology and psychiatry. Shaw and McKay's work spanned three general areas: studying geographic variation in rates of juvenile delinquency, the study of autobiographi...
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Isacque Graeber
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Isacque Graeber was a sociologist, Jewish historian, and writer. He wrote several books and numerous papers ranging in subject matters from Jewish-Gentile relations to Jewish Education. He studied at Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania. During his long career he served as director of the College of Jewish Studies in Kansas City, and Director of Education to the Jewish community of Akron, Ohio.
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Mike Mitka
#2678
Clara Zetkin
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, communist activist, and advocate for women's rights. Until 1917, she was active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She then joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and its far-left wing, the Spartacist League, which later became the Communist Party of Germany . She represented that party in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933.
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Olive Stone
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Olive "Polly" Matthews Stone was a sociologist whose interests focused on human welfare, race relations, and southern American farmers. Throughout her life, she was actively involved in several Marxist reading groups and financially contributed to union organizing in the black belt region.
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Bogdan Kistyakovski
1868 - 1920 (52 years)
Bohdan Oleksandrovych Kistyakivsky was a Ukrainian philosopher, jurist, and sociologist. He reached prominence with his Gesellschaft und Einzelwesen published in Berlin in 1899. Philosophically he defended transcendental idealism. In 1902 he contributed to Problems of Idealism , edited by Pavel Novgorodtsev. In 1909 he contributed the essay "In Defense of Law" to the anthology Vekhi .
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Anna Howard Shaw
1847 - 1919 (72 years)
Anna Howard Shaw was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was also a physician and one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers in the United States. Early life
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Randolph Blackwell
1927 - 1981 (54 years)
Randolph T. Blackwell was an American activist of the Civil Rights Movement, serving in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, amongst other organizations. Coretta Scott King described him as an "unsung giant" of nonviolent social change.
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Roswell Hill Johnson
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Roswell Hill Johnson was an American eugenics professor in the early twentieth century. Born in Buffalo, New York in 1877 and educated at Brown University, Harvard, and the University of Chicago and University of Wisconsin–Madison, Johnson conducted research at the Anatomical Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin and at the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution. He joined the Carnegie staff in July 1905 as an assistant to Charles Davenport, the nation's most influential eugenicist in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Johnson's early work involved ladybugs, whose short life cycle made them ideal for studying evolution.
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Charles Zueblin
1866 - 1924 (58 years)
Charles Zueblin was an American sociologist and promoter of civic reform. Biography Zueblin was born in Pendleton, Indiana in 1866. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, Yale, and the University of Leipzig.
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Barbara Bodichon
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was an English educationalist and artist, and a leading mid-19th-century feminist and women's rights activist. She published her influential Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women in 1854 and the English Woman's Journal in 1858. Bodichon co-founded Girton College, Cambridge . Her brother was the Arctic explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith.
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James Chaney
1943 - 1964 (21 years)
James Earl Chaney was an American civil rights activist. He was one of three Congress of Racial Equality civil rights workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. The others were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City.
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Edison Uno
1929 - 1976 (47 years)
Edison Tomimaro Uno was a Japanese American civil rights advocate, best known for opposing laws used to implement the mass detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and for his role in the early stages of the movement for redress after the war. To many Japanese American activists, Uno was the father of the redress movement.
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Doris R. Entwisle
#2689
Eleanor Roosevelt
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States. Through her travels, public engagement, and advocacy, she largely redefined the role of First Lady. Roosevelt then served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and in 1948 she was given a standing ovation by the assembly upon their adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Eugeniu Sperantia
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Eugeniu Sperantia was a Romanian poet, aesthetician, essayist, sociologist and philosopher. He was born in Bucharest to folklorist Theodor Speranția and his wife Elena , a relative of poet Mihail Cruceanu. He attended primary and high school in his native city, graduating in 1906. That year, he made his published debut, in Ovid Densusianu's Vieața Nouă. Prior to that, he had frequented Alexandru Macedonski's circle. In 1910, he graduated from the philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest. Two years later, he received a doctorate in literature and philosophy; his thesis dealt with pragmatic apriorism.
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Jay Lovestone
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
Jay Lovestone was an American activist. He was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL–CIO and various unions within it.
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Dwight Sanderson
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Ezra Dwight Sanderson was an American entomologist and sociologist who worked in the US Department of Agriculture on pest management in cotton before becoming a professor of sociology. He published two textbooks in entomology and wrote several books on rural sociology.
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Arne Runeberg
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Sven Arne Runeberg was a Finnish anthropologist and linguist, best known for his studies on magic, witchcraft, and sociolinguistics. Arne Runeberg was born in Helsinki into the Swedish-speaking cultural family Runeberg; his great grandfather was Finland's national poet J. L. Runeberg. Arne Runeberg attained his B.A. degree at the University of Helsinki in 1939, but World War II made a stop to his postgraduate studies. In 1947, however, he was the first student to defend his doctoral thesis, Witches, Demons and Fertility Magic, at the new Faculty of Social Sciences in Helsinki University.
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Balthasar H. Meyer
1866 - 1954 (88 years)
Balthasar Henry Meyer was an American government official and professor of economics and sociology. He served for 28 years as a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Early life Meyer was born near Mequon, Wisconsin, the son of Henry and Louise Meyer. He attended Oshkosh State Normal School, receiving his bachelor's degree, and then took two degrees, including his doctorate in 1897, from the University of Wisconsin, after doing graduate work at the University of Berlin in 1894–95.
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Willem Bonger
1876 - 1940 (64 years)
Willem Adriaan Bonger was a Dutch criminologist and sociologist. He is considered an early Marxist criminologist which through his work, criminology stood out as an autonomous science, making its interrelationship with sociology more evident according to a scientific approach.
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Harvey Warren Zorbaugh
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Harvey Warren Zorbaugh was Professor of Educational Sociology, at New York University. he was born in East Cleveland, Ohio and educated in sociology at the University of Chicago. He married Geraldine Elizabeth Bone on September 7, 1929, and they had two children: a son, Harvey Jr., and a daughter, Harriet. His classic text, first published in 1929, was The Gold Coast and the Slum, a book based on his PhD thesis completed under the direction of Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago.
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Richard Fritz Behrendt
1908 - 1972 (64 years)
Richard Fritz Behrendt was a German sociologist.
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Georges Sorel
1847 - 1922 (75 years)
Georges Eugène Sorel was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, and later journalist. He has inspired theories and movements grouped under the name of Sorelianism. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson , and later William James. His notion of the power of myth in collective agency inspired socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and fascists. Together with his defense of violence, the power of myth is the contribution for which he is most often remembered.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas
1890 - 1998 (108 years)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass , which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring .
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Andrej Sirácky
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Andrej Sirácky was a Slovak sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and communist official. Biography After graduating from the grammar school in Vrbas in 1921, he applied to study philosophy at Charles University in Prague, which he finished with a doctorate in 1926.
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