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,
#2801
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.
Go to Profile#2802
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.
Go to Profile#2803
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.
Go to Profile#2804
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.
Go to Profile#2805
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.
Go to Profile#2807
Mike Mitka
#2808
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.
Go to Profile#2810
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.
Go to Profile#2814
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.
Go to Profile#2816
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.
Go to Profile#2818
Doris R. Entwisle
#2819
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.
Go to Profile#2821
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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Edward C. Hayes
1868 - 1928 (60 years)
Edward Cary Hayes was a pioneer in American sociology and was a founder and president of the American Sociological Association. Edward Cary Hayes was born on February 10, 1868, in Lewiston, Maine, to Professor Benjamin Francis Hayes. He received a bachelor's degree from Bates College and then studied at the Cobb Divinity School. He then became a pastor in Augusta, Maine until 1896 when he became a Dean at Keuka College. In 1899 he enrolled at the University of Chicago to study philosophy but soon began to study sociology. He studied under Albion Small and alongside George Herbert Mead, John Dewey and James Tufts.
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Frances Willard
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Willard became the national president of Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898. Her influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution were adopted. Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education. During her lifetime, Willard su...
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Leon Winiarski
1865 - 1915 (50 years)
Leon Winiarski was a Polish sociologist. Pupil of Vilfredo Pareto and later Professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva. Notes Further reading Ian Steedman, Socialism and Marginalism in Economics, Routledge, 1995, , Google Print, p.199-200
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Thomas F. Gieryn
#2835
Tomáš Masaryk
1850 - 1937 (87 years)
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was a Czechoslovak statesman, political activist and philosopher who served as the first president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935. He is regarded as the founding father of Czechoslovakia.
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Marion Talbot
1858 - 1948 (90 years)
Marion Talbot was an American educator who served as Dean of Women at the University of Chicago from 1895 to 1925, and an influential leader in the higher education of women in the United States during the early 20th century. In 1882, while still a student, she co-founded the American Association of University Women with her mentor Ellen Swallow Richards. During her long career at the University of Chicago, Talbot fought tenaciously and often successfully to improve support for women students and faculty, and against efforts to restrict equal access to educational opportunities.
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Tommy Douglas
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Thomas Clement Douglas was a Canadian politician who served as the seventh premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961 and Leader of the New Democratic Party from 1961 to 1971. A Baptist minister, he was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in 1935 as a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation . He left federal politics to become Leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and then the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan. His government introduced the continent's first single-payer, universal health care program.
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Jean Martin
1923 - 1979 (56 years)
Jean Isobel Martin FASSA was an Australian sociologist who was a pioneer of the discipline in Australia. Many of her works examined the role of immigrants in Australian society. Her academic career "spanned teaching and research appointments in seven Australian universities".
Go to Profile#2839
Frederick Charles Frey
1891 - Present (135 years)
Frederick Charles Frey was born near Amite, Louisiana, on November 8, 1891. He was a graduate of Amite High School, Louisiana State University, and the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1929.
Go to Profile#2840
Margaret Hodgen
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Margaret Trabue Hodgen was an American sociologist and author. Hodgen was a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Hodgen wrote the highly influential Doctrine of the Survivals, first published as a book in 1936, but originally launched in the journal American Anthropology in 1931.
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Elmer Louis Struening
#2842
Maud Gonne
1866 - 1953 (87 years)
Maud Gonne MacBride was an Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress. She was of Anglo-Irish descent and was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of people evicted in the Land Wars. She actively agitated for Home Rule and then for the republic declared in 1916. During the 1930s, as a founding member of the Social Credit Party, she promoted the distributive programme of C. H. Douglas. Gonne was well known for being the muse and long-time love interest of Irish poet W. B. Yeats.
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Roger Casement
1864 - 1916 (52 years)
Roger David Casement , known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist executed by the United Kingdom for treason during World War I. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat, becoming known as a humanitarian activist, and later as a poet and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru.
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Carl Kelsey
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Carl Kelsey was an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography A native of Grinnell, Iowa, Kelsey was educated at Iowa College, Andover Theological Seminary, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as a social worker in Helena, Montana in 1895, before moving to do the same job in Buffalo, New York, Boston, and Chicago. In 1903, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and joined their faculty as an instructor the same year. He became an assistant professor there in 1904, and a full professor in 1907.
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Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea was a Romanian Marxist theorist, politician, sociologist, literary critic, and journalist. He was also an entrepreneur in the city of Ploiești. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea was the father of communist activist Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea and of philosopher Ionel Gherea.
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James Q. Dealey
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
James Quayle Dealey was a British American sociologist, journalist, academic, and newspaper editor. Dealey served as the tenth president of the American Sociological Association. Early life and education Dealey was born on 13 August 1861 in Manchester, England to George and Mary Ann Dealey, née Nellins. Dealey was first educated in secondary schools in Liverpool. At the age of nine, Dealey's family moved to Galveston, Texas where attended the local public schools there. When he was seventeen, Dealy was hired at the Galveston News, working alongside his two brothers Thomas and George. Dealey w...
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Marcel Boll
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Marcel Boll was a French scientist, sociologist, philosopher, educator, scientific journalist , and a founding member of the Rationalist Union . Boll was one of the most prolific contributors of articles to Les Cahiers Rationalistes and Raison Présente , two journals published by the Rationalist Union. He was one of the main popularizers of the theory of relativity, the quantum theory, and other aspects of the physical sciences during the interwar period and in the early 1950s. An advocate of neopositivism, his numerous works on physics, philosophy, sociology, education, and other subjects all reflect his neopositivist perspective.
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Alexandru Claudian
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Alexandru Claudian was a Romanian sociologist, political figure, and poet. A student and practitioner of Marxism, he worked as a schoolteacher, entry-level academic, field researcher, and journalist, before finally earning a professorship at the University of Iași. An anti-fascist, Claudian enlisted with the Romanian Social Democratic Party during the interwar, moving closer to the anti-communist center by the late 1940s, and became that faction's main theoretician. His condemnation of Marxism and totalitarianism made him an enemy of the communist regime, which imprisoned him for several year...
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Fred Hampton
1948 - 1969 (21 years)
Fredrick "Chairman Fred" Allen Hampton Sr. was an American activist. He came to prominence in his late teens and very early 20s in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. As a progressive African American, he founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots , and the Young Lords , and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. A Marxist–Leninist, Hampton considere...
Go to Profile#2850
Constantin Dimitrescu-Iași
1849 - 1923 (74 years)
Constantin Dimitrescu-Iași was a Moldavian, later Romanian philosopher, sociologist and pedagogue. Biography Born in Iași, his father was the magistrate Dimitrie Dimitrescu. He attended primary school in his native city from 1856 to 1860, followed by high school from 1860 to 1867. His classmates there included Alexandru Lambrior, George Panu, and Calistrat Hogaș. From 1867 to 1869, he attended the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Iași, and at the same time worked as a substitute Latin teacher. From 1869 to 1870, Dimitrescu-Iași taught at Botoșani. He again taught at Iași from 1870 to 1872, continuing his university studies in the process.
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