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,
#2701
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.
Go to Profile#2702
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.
Go to Profile#2703
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.
Go to Profile#2704
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.
Go to Profile#2705
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.
Go to Profile#2706
Jan Stanisław Bystroń
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Jan Stanisław Bystroń was a Polish sociologist and ethnographer. Professor of University of Poznań, University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, member of Polish Academy of Science.
Go to Profile#2707
Alfred Vierkandt
1867 - 1953 (86 years)
Alfred Vierkandt was a German sociologist, ethnographer, social psychologist, social philosopher and philosopher of history. He is known for a broad and phenomenological Gesellschaftslehre promulgated in the 1920s, and for his formal sociology.
Go to Profile#2708
Vilhelm Aubert
1922 - 1988 (66 years)
Johan Vilhelm Aubert was an influential Norwegian sociologist. He was a professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo from 1963 to 1971 and at the Department of Sociology from 1971 to 1988. He co-founded the Norwegian Institute for Social Research already in 1950, and has been labelled the "father of Norwegian sociology". In his early life he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance group XU, and while later involved on the radical wing of the Labour Party, he edited the newspaper Orientering.
Go to Profile#2709
Franz Oppenheimer
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Franz Oppenheimer was a German Jewish sociologist and political economist, who published also in the area of the fundamental sociology of the state. Life and career After studying medicine in Freiburg and Berlin, Oppenheimer practiced as a physician in Berlin from 1886 to 1895. From 1890 onwards, he began to concern himself with sociopolitical questions and social economics. After his activity as a physician, he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Welt am Morgen, where he became acquainted with Friedrich Naumann, who was, at the time, working door-to-door for different daily papers.
Go to Profile#2710
Arnold Gehlen
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Arnold Gehlen was an influential conservative German philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist. Biography Gehlen's major influences while studying philosophy were Hans Driesch, Nicolai Hartmann and especially Max Scheler. Furthermore, he was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and US-American pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and especially George Herbert Mead.
Go to Profile#2711
Hilmi Ziya Ülken
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Hilmi Ziya Ülken was a Turkish scholar and writer who had an influential role in the development of sociological and philosophical views in Turkey. In addition to his scientific work, he produced literary work, including poems.
Go to Profile#2712
Beatrice Webb
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term "collective bargaining". She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society.
Go to Profile#2713
Nels Anderson
1889 - 1986 (97 years)
Nels Anderson was an early American sociologist who studied hobos, urban culture, and work culture. Biography Anderson studied at the University of Chicago under Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, whose Concentric zone model was one of the earliest models developed to explain the organization of urban areas. Anderson's first publication, The Hobo , was a work that helped pioneer participant observation as a research method to reveal the features of a society and was the first field research monograph of the famed Chicago School of Sociology, marking a significant milepost in the discipline of Sociology.
Go to Profile#2714
Helmuth Plessner
1892 - 1985 (93 years)
Helmuth Plessner was a German philosopher and sociologist, and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology". Life and career Plessner had an itinerant education in Germany between 1910 and 1920. He began studying medicine in Friedburg before moving on to zoology and philosophy in Heidelberg. In Göttingen, he studied phenomenology with Husserl, and finally wrote his "Habititationsschrift" under the guidance of Max Scheler. Plessner then held a professorship in Cologne from 1926 to 1933, when he was forced to resign his position because of Jewish ancestry on his father's side. Living in isolation, Plessner initially fled Germany to Istanbul.
Go to Profile#2715
Emil Lederer
1882 - 1939 (57 years)
Emil Lederer was a Bohemiann-born German economist and sociologist. Purged from his position at Humboldt University of Berlin in 1933 for being Jewish, Lederer fled into exile. He helped establish the "University in Exile" at the New School in New York City.
Go to Profile#2716
James D. Thompson
1920 - 1973 (53 years)
James David Thompson was an American sociologist. In 1932, Thompson's family moved to Chicago where he went to a public high school. He graduated from Indiana University with a B.A. in business and served in the United States Air Force from 1941 to 1946. He obtained a master's degree in journalism and worked half a year as an editor for the Chicago Journal of Commerce before taking a position as a journalism teacher at the University of Wisconsin. From 1950 to 1954, he worked on his final degree, a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Go to Profile#2717
Albert Eulenburg
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
Albert Eulenburg was a German neurologist born in Berlin. Education Born into a Jewish family, he studied medicine at the Universities of Berlin, Bern and Zurich, earning his doctorate in 1861. Among his instructors were Johannes Peter Müller , Ludwig Traube and Albrecht von Graefe . Later he became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Greifswald, and in 1882, a professor of neurology in Berlin.
Go to Profile#2718
Stefan Czarnowski
1879 - 1937 (58 years)
Stefan Zygmunt Czarnowski was a Polish sociologist, folklorist and professor of the University of Warsaw. Czarnowski was a member of the Polish pro-independence movements, he fought in the Polish Legions and the Polish-Soviet War. At first supporter of endecja, he gravitated towards supporting Polish Socialist Party.
Go to Profile#2719
Georges Palante
1862 - 1925 (63 years)
Georges Toussaint Léon Palante was a French philosopher and sociologist. Palante advocated aristocratic individualist ideas similar to Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. He was opposed to Émile Durkheim's holism, promoting methodological individualism instead.
Go to Profile#2720
Howard P. Becker
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Howard Paul Becker was a longtime professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Biography Becker was born in New York in 1899, the son of Charles Becker, a New York police officer, and Letitia , of Ontario. His parents divorced six years after his birth. His mother married again, to Becker's brother Paul. His father Charles Becker later married twice more. He was prosecuted in New York for the 1912 murder of a gambler, found guilty, and executed in 1915.
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Albert Galloway Keller
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Albert Galloway Keller was a sociologist, author, and student and colleague of William Graham Sumner. He is best known as the editor of Sumner's papers, in numerous volumes, published in the early 20th century by the Yale University Press. He was a scholar in his own right and wrote on German colonial policy, economic geography, and sociology.
Go to Profile#2722
Jean Stoetzel
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Jean Stoetzel was a French sociologist. Biography He had Alsacian and Lorrainian descent. Stoetzel had studied in Lycée Louis-le-Grand, in a preparatory class for superior schools In 1932, he entered École normale supérieure in Parisе.
Go to Profile#2723
Everett Stonequist
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Everett Verner Stonequist was an American Sociologist perhaps best known for his 1937 book, The Marginal Man Life & Work Stonequist was born in Worcester, Mass. and received his A.B. degree in History and Sociology at Clark University. He later studied at Cornell University, Columbia University, and the University of Paris. He received his doctorate in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1930.
Go to Profile#2724
Roderick D. McKenzie
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Roderick Duncan McKenzie was a Canadian-American sociologist, who became head of the sociology department at the University of Michigan. McKenzie served as the 2nd Vice-President of the American Sociological Association in 1932–1933, and was a charter member of the Sociological Research Association.
Go to Profile#2725
George M. Simmel
#2726
Ali Shariati
1933 - 1977 (44 years)
Ali Shariati Mazinani was an Iranian revolutionary and sociologist who focused on the sociology of religion. He is held as one of the most influential Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century, and has been called the "ideologue of the Islamic Revolution", although his ideas did not end up forming the basis of the Islamic Republic.
Go to Profile#2727
Jacob Riis
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most fa...
Go to Profile#2728
Neva Boyd
1876 - 1963 (87 years)
Neva Leona Boyd was an American sociologist. She founded the Recreational Training School at the Hull House in Chicago. The school taught a one-year educational program in group games, gymnastics, dancing, dramatic arts, play theory, and social problems. She was on the faculty of Northwestern University from 1927 to 1941.
Go to Profile#2729
Kurt Albert Gerlach
1886 - 1922 (36 years)
Kurt Albert Gerlach was a German professor and sociologist. Life Gerlach was the son of the chemist and later director of the Continental AG Albert Gerlach and his wife Martha Friedmann. He had studied at the university of Kiel under Ferdinand Tönnies and received his doctorate in 1911 with a work on the role of Denmark in global economy. He then studied at the University of Leipzig. In 1911 and 1912 he went to England and studied at the London School of Economics and became a member of the Fabian Society. In 1913 he habilitated in Leipzig with a treaty on protective measures for female factory workers in England.
Go to Profile#2730
Eugen Steinach
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Eugen Steinach was an Austrian physiologist and pioneer in endocrinology. Steinach played a significant role in discovering the relationship between sex hormones and human physical identifiers. Life and career Steinach was born on 28 January 1861, in Hohenems, County of Tyrol, Austrian Empire. His family were well-off and had been prominent in Jewish affairs in Hohenems for several generations. His father and his grandfather were both physicians; his father studied under Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, a leading German physiologist.
Go to Profile#2731
Rose Goldsen
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Rose Kohn Goldsen was a professor of sociology at Cornell University and a pioneer in studying the effects of television and popular culture. Prior to coming to Cornell, Goldsen worked for the Office of Radio Research, Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research. Goldsen came to Cornell as a research associate and felt that she encountered employment discrimination because she was a woman. In 1958, a faculty position opened up and she demanded to be considered, resulting in her appointment to the faculty.
Go to Profile#2732
Frank Tannenbaum
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Frank Tannenbaum was an Austrian-American historian, sociologist and criminologist, who made significant contributions to modern Mexican history during his career at Columbia University. Early life Tannenbaum was born in Austria on 4 March 1893. His Eastern European Jewish family immigrated to the United States in 1905. He ran away from home as an adolescent and never finished high school. He worked at a number of menial jobs and became involved in radical labor politics of the era.
Go to Profile#2733
George Edgar Vincent
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
George Edgar Vincent was an American sociologist and university president. Biography He was born at Rockford, Illinois, the son of Bishop John H. Vincent. He studied at Yale, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and served on the thirteenth editorial board of The Yale Record. After graduating in 1885, he engaged in journalistic and literary work.
Go to Profile#2734
Charles Richmond Henderson
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
Charles Richmond Henderson was an American Baptist minister and sociologist. After being a pastor for nearly 20 years in Terre Haute and Detroit, he took an appointment as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, where he became a tenured professor. He published several works on society in the United States, the prison system, and the sociology of charities.
Go to Profile#2735
Margaret Fuller
1810 - 1850 (40 years)
Sarah Margaret Fuller , sometimes referred to as Margaret Fuller Ossoli, was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first American female war correspondent and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.
Go to Profile#2736
St. Clair Drake
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research.
Go to Profile#2737
Eilert Sundt
1817 - 1875 (58 years)
Eilert Lund Sundt was a Norwegian theologist and sociologist, known for his work on mortality, marriage and other subjects among the working class. He was an early pioneer of the field of sociology in Norway.
Go to Profile#2738
Pan Guangdan
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Pan Guangdan known in English as Quentin Pan, was a Chinese sociologist, eugenicist, and writer. He was one of the most distinguished sociologists and eugenicists of China. Educated at Tsinghua University on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, Dartmouth College and Columbia University, where he was trained by Charles B. Davenport, Pan was also a renowned expert on education. His wide research scope included eugenics, education policy, matrimony policy, familial problems, prostitute policy, and intellectual distributions. Pan's wide-ranging intellect led to his active participation in the Crescent...
Go to Profile#2739
Józef Chałasiński
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Józef Chałasiński was a Polish sociologist, academic and university professor. Biography He studied at the University of Poznań under the famous Polish sociologist, Florian Znaniecki, gaining a PhD in 1927. He joined the faculty of the University of Warsaw in 1935. Since 1945 he became involved with the University of Łódź . Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, founding member of the Polish Sociological Association, guest lecturer at the University of California , he retired in 1974 and died in 1979.
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Richard Titmuss
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Richard Morris Titmuss was a pioneering British social researcher and teacher. He founded the academic discipline of social administration and held the founding chair in the subject at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#2741
Wilhelm Liebknecht
1826 - 1900 (74 years)
Wilhelm Martin Philipp Christian Ludwig Liebknecht was a German socialist and one of the principal founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany . His political career was a pioneering project combining Marxist revolutionary theory with practical legal political activity. Under his leadership, the SPD grew from a tiny sect to become Germany's largest political party. He was the father of Karl Liebknecht and Theodor Liebknecht.
Go to Profile#2742
Georges Davy
1883 - 1976 (93 years)
Georges Davy was a French sociologist. He was a student and disciple of Émile Durkheim. With Marcel Mauss and Paul Huvelin he pioneered anthropological studies of the origins of the idea of contract.
Go to Profile#2743
Valtazar Bogišić
1834 - 1908 (74 years)
Valtazar Bogišić , also known as Baltazar Bogišić, was a Serbian jurist and a pioneer in sociology. In the domain of private law his most notable research was on family structure and the unique Montenegrin civil code of 1888. He is considered to be a pioneer in the sociology of law and sociological jurisprudence. He was also a follower of the German Historical School of law, and may be considered a transitional figure between the Historical School and sociological approaches to law. In 1902 Bogišić was elected president of the International Institute of Sociology in Paris.
Go to Profile#2744
Ulysses G. Weatherly
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Ulysses Grant Weatherly Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and a founding member of the American Sociological Society, and on its executive committee from 1907 to 1910. He was appointed as vice president in 1920 and President in 1923.
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Gabriel Le Bras
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Gabriel Le Bras was a French legal scholar and sociologist. Early life Gabriel Le Bras was born on July 23, 1891, in Paimpol, France. He received a Doctorate and the Agrégation in Laws in 1922. Career Le Bras was a Professor of Law at the University of Strasbourg from 1923 to 1929. He was director of research in the Sociology of Religion at the École pratique des hautes études from 1945 to 1962. He served as the Dean of the Law School at the University of Paris from 1959 to 1962.
Go to Profile#2746
Robert McKenzie
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Robert Trelford McKenzie was a Canadian professor of politics and sociology, and a psephologist . He is perhaps best known in Britain as one of the main presenters of the BBC's General Election programmes.
Go to Profile#2747
John L. Gillin
1871 - 1958 (87 years)
John Lewis Gillin was an American sociologist, specializing in applied sociology, and the 16th president of the American Sociological Association . He was also active in the activities of the American Red Cross.
Go to Profile#2748
Minnie Louise Haskins
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Minnie Louise Haskins was a British poet and an academic in the field of sociology, best known for being quoted by King George VI in his Royal Christmas Message of 1939. Early life Haskins was born at 2 Kingswood Hill, Oldland, South Gloucestershire, six miles east of Bristol, and she grew up in the neighbouring village of Warmley. Her father was Joseph Haskins, a grocer, and her mother was Louisa Bridges. Her father acquired a pottery at Warmley making drain pipes, which was continued after his death by her mother. The family lived at Warmley House.
Go to Profile#2749
Lewis Wade Jones
1910 - 1979 (69 years)
Lewis Wade Jones was a sociologist and teacher. He was born in Cuero, Texas, the son of Wade E. and Lucynthia McDade Jones. A member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, he received his AB degree from Fisk University in 1931, and followed it with postgraduate study as a Social Science Research Council Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1931–1932.
Go to Profile#2750
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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