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,
#2851
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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Erving Goffman
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century". In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed him as the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences.
Go to Profile#2853
Erich Fromm
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
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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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Carl R. Fellers
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Carl R. Fellers was an American food scientist and microbiologist who was involved in the pasteurization of dried foods and canning Atlantic blue crab. Early life and career A native of Hastings, New York, Fellers worked in research for the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Canners Association , and the University of Washington before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst department of horticulture manufacturing on December 1, 1925.
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Ellsworth Faris
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Ellsworth Faris was an influential sociologist of the Chicago school. Faris was born in 1874 in Salem, Tennessee. He studied at Texas Christian University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1894 and master's degree in 1896. From 1897 to 1904, he spent time in Belgian Congo as a missionary. When he returned from Africa, Faris earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and was hired into the department.
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Kimball Young
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Kimball Young was the president of the American Sociological Association in 1945. Young was the grandson of Brigham Young. He was born in Provo, Utah, and graduated from Brigham Young University in 1915. However, Kimball Young himself was not a believer in the Latter-day Saint faith, and spoke condescendingly of those who were. He then taught high school for a year in Arizona before going to study at the University of Chicago for sociology. His decision to study at Chicago was largely due to advice from William J. Snow. After studying there, he went to study at Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D.
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Rose Marie Pangborn
1932 - 1990 (58 years)
Rose Marie Valdes Pangborn was a Mexican-American food scientist, food technologist, professor, and a pioneer in the field of sensory analysis of food attributes. She worked as a sensory scientist in the Experiment Station, Step VIII, served for 35 years at the University of California, Davis. She co-founded the Association for Chemoreception Sciences , and the Sensory Reception Scholarship Fund .
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Emory S. Bogardus
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Emory Stephen Bogardus was a prominent figure in the history of American sociology. Bogardus founded one of the first sociology departments at an American university, at the University of Southern California in 1915.
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Frank H. Hankins
1877 - 1970 (93 years)
Frank Hamilton Hankins was an American sociologist and anthropologist who was the president of the American Sociological Society in 1938. He wrote the book The Racial Basis of Civilization which was critical of racial theories such as Aryanism, Gobinism, Celticism, Anglo-Saxonism and Nordicism.
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Fred W. Tanner
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Fred Wilbur Tanner was an American food scientist and microbiologist who involved in the founding of the Institute of Food Technologists and the creation of the scientific journal Food Research . Academic career Tanner joined at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1923, where he was chair of the Bacteriology Department until 1948. His work focused on food safety issues, specifically pasteurization and meat curing. Tanner remained as professor until his retirement in 1956. Tanner's research in food science and technology would also lead to the establishment of the food technolo...
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Robert Staughton Lynd
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Robert Staughton Lynd was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, New York City. He is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with his wife, Helen Lynd; as the coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts ; and a pioneer in the use of social surveys. He was also the author of Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture . In addition to writing and research, Lynd taught at Columbia from 1931 to 1960. He also served on U.S. gover...
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Oliver Cox
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-Americann sociologist. Cox was often misconceived as a Marxist due to his focus on class conflict and capitalism, however, Cox fundamentally disagreed with Marx's analysis of Capitalism. While Marx and other classical economists viewed foreign trade as trade in surpluses, Cox felt that foreign trade was the primary driving force in capitalist development. For Cox, capitalist systems were not isolated, but rather there was an interconnected network of global capitalist systems.
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Ruth Shonle Cavan
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Ruth Shonle Cavan was an American sociologist based at the University of Chicago. She specialized in deviance and criminology and was a leader of the Chicago school of sociology. According to Moyer :Ruth Shonle Cavan is recognized by most current criminologists as an extraordinary writer with analytical skills and the ability to synthesize the research in the field. One of the major strengths of her writings is her ability to build on the theoretical perspectives and methodologies of the Chicago School and to use other perspectives and methodologies when appropriate....[M]ost current crimino...
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Mildred Parten Newhall
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Mildred Bernice Parten Newhall was an American sociologist, a researcher at University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 1929. In it she developed the theory of six stages of child's play, which led to a series of influential publications.
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Alfred Kinsey
1894 - 1956 (62 years)
Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American sexologist, biologist, and professor of entomology and zoology who, in 1947, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as for the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s, and has continued to provoke controversy decades after his death.
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Hornell Hart
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Hornell Norris Hart was an American professor of sociology and parapsychologist. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and raised as a Quaker. In 1921, he obtained a Ph.D. from the Iowa State University.
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Irene Barnes Taeuber
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.
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John M. Gillette
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
John Morris Gillette was an American sociologist, specializing in rural sociology, and the 18th president of the American Sociological Association . Biography Before pursuing an academic career, in 1895 Gillette briefly served as a Presbyterian minister in Dodge City, Kansas. He received his MA from Princeton University in 1895 and his Ph.D. from the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1899 and then in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1901.
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Lowell Juilliard Carr
1885 - 1963 (78 years)
Lowell Juilliard Carr was an American sociologist, author, and long-time university professor. He is best known for his book Willow Run, which discusses the sociological conditions arising from the wartime increase in the worker population at the Willow Run bomber plant during World War II. He was also a pioneer in the field of studying the underlying social causes for juvenile delinquency.
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Benjamin Mays
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Benjamin Elijah Mays was an American Baptist minister and American rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists, including Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, and Donn Clendenon, among others. His rhetoric and intellectual pursuits focused on Black self-determination. Mays' commitment to social justice through nonviolence and civil resistance were cultivated from his youth through the lessons imbibed from his parents and eldest sister. The peak of his public i...
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Joachim Wach
1898 - 1955 (57 years)
Joachim Ernst Adolphe Felix Wach was a German religious scholar from Chemnitz, who emphasized a distinction between the Religious Studies and the philosophy of religion. Wach was descended on both sides from the famous Mendelssohn family, both the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. He shared the latter's love of music and was said to have inherited some important papers and relics of his ancestor. After schooling in Dresden, he enlisted in the German army in 1916, where he served as a cavalry officer. After World War I, he studied at the Universities of Munich, Berlin, Freiburg, and Leipzig, where he received his PhD in 1922.
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Alexander Goldenweiser
1880 - 1940 (60 years)
Alexander Aleksandrovich Goldenweiser was a Russian-born U.S. anthropologist and sociologist. Biography Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1880. He emigrated to the United States in 1900. He studied anthropology under Franz Boas, and earned his AB degree from Columbia University in 1902, his AM degree in 1904, and his Ph.D. in 1910.
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Albert Salomon
1891 - 1966 (75 years)
Albert Salomon was a German-Jewish sociologist. He was the nephew of Alice Salomon, a pioneer of the academic discipline of social work. Studies He first studied history of art, history of religions and philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1910. He later studied philosophy in Freiburg and Heidelberg, where he came into contact with Max Weber and Georg Lukács, among others. During World War I, he served as a nurse, and in 1921 he took his doctorate in the culture of friendship in Germany in the 19th Century.
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Marcel Granet
1884 - 1940 (56 years)
Marcel Granet was a French sociologist, ethnologist and sinologist. As a follower of Émile Durkheim and Édouard Chavannes, Granet was one of the first to bring sociological methods to the study of China. Granet was revered in his own time as a sociological sinologist, or sinological sociologist, and member of the Durkheimian school of sociology.
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John Porter
1921 - 1979 (58 years)
John Arthur Porter was a Canadian sociologist from 1950 to the late 1970s. His work in the field of social stratification opened up new areas of inquiry for many sociologists in Canada. Porter was born in Vancouver and completed his education at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. There, he became interested in studies of social class. On returning to Canada he joined the faculty of Carleton University. He remained at Carleton as a professor, and later, as department chairman, dean and academic vice-president. He was also visiting professor at Harvard and the University of ...
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Paul Massing
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Paul Wilhelm Massing was a German sociologist. Life and career Born in Grumbach in the Rhine Province, he attended school in Cologne, and later studied economics and social sciences at Frankfurt University, when Franz Neumann was there and at Cologne Handelshochschule . He graduated in 1926 as a Diplom-Kaufmann . A year later, he studied for one term at the Sorbonne in Paris and prepared his dissertation on agrarian conditions of France in 19th century and the agrarian program of the French socialist parties. In 1928, he returned to Frankfurt University to study with Wilhelm Gerloff and at...
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Delores P. Aldridge
1900 - Present (126 years)
Delores P. Aldridge is an American sociologist. Aldridge was the first African-American faculty member at Emory University, and the founder of the first African American and African studies program in the American south.
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Charles Josiah Galpin
1864 - 1947 (83 years)
Charles Josiah Galpin was an American academic. Galpin was a trailblazer of rural sociology, known for advancing research in analysis of rural populations, rural standards of living, rural social organization, and social structures. Galpin was a rural sociologist, professor, author, pastor, and advocate for rural populations. He published 112 works in 245 publications in one language and 2,667 library holdings including The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community ; Rural Life ; My Drift into Rural Sociology ; and Rural Social Problems . His early career set the stage for his influential c...
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Paul Fauconnet
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Paul Fauconnet was a French sociologist who is best known as a contributor to the L'Année Sociologique. Fauconnet aggregated in philosophy in 1892 and earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1895. He also earned a further doctorate in law in 1920, although his interest in the law was purely scholarly and he never practiced as a lawyer. He became a professor at the faculty of letters in 1907 at the University of Toulouse and later chargé de cours at the faculty of letters in 1921 in Paris, obtaining a chair in 1932. His dissertation was entitled La responsabilité: Etude de sociologie . It adopt...
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Eddie Roux
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Eddie Roux was a Transvaal Colony-born botanist, academic, writer, member of the South African Communist Party and anti-apartheid activist. Early life He was born Edward Roux to Afrikaner father Phillip R. Roux, a pharmacist and botanist, who was involved in the Labour Party and English mother, Edith May Wilson. He grew up in Bezuidenhout Valley, Johannesburg. Roux's political view were further inspired by the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. After matriculating at Jeppe High School, he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand and studied botany and zoology. At university, he joined ...
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Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar
1884 - 1937 (53 years)
Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar was a Marathi sociologist, historian and novelist from Maharashtra, India. He is principally known as the chief editor of Maharashtriya Jnanakosha, the first-ever encyclopedia in the Marathi language.
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Hilda Weiss
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Hilda Weiss was a sociologist, trade unionist, and socialist. She lived in Germany until 1933 when Hitler came to power, then escaped to France. In 1939 she emigrated to the United States and lived there until her death in 1981.
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Vera Mae Green
1928 - 1982 (54 years)
Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to...
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Arthur Salz
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Arthur Salz was a German professor of sociology and economics who wrote on mercantilism, imperialism, and power. He taught at the University of Heidelberg before being forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish faith. He was familiar with the Stefan George circle and married Sophie Kantorowiz, the sister of historian Ernst Kantorowicz.
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Patrick Murphy Malin
1903 - 1964 (61 years)
Patrick Murphy Malin was an American activist and administrator who followed Roger Nash Baldwin as the second Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Early life Malin was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1903, the son of a banker. He entered the family business at age ten, and was expected to eventually become president of the bank. However, Woodrow Wilson's World War I speeches gave him a desire to travel and get a government job. He attended the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, graduating as valedictorian in 1924.
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William Lyman Underwood
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
William Lyman Underwood was an American photographer who was also involved in the research of time-temperature canning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1895 to 1896. Biography A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Underwood was the second son of William James Underwood, one of the nine children of William Underwood, the founder of the William Underwood Company.
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Joseph Husslein
1873 - 1952 (79 years)
Joseph C. Husslein, S.J. was a key figure in the early twentieth century in the development of American Catholic social thought. Husslein was one of several figures, such as John A. Ryan, trying to apply the Catholic social teaching of Pope Leo XIII’s watershed encyclical Rerum novarum . In the next decades Husslein would write over 500 articles on Catholic social teaching. The national Jesuit weekly magazine America published most of these articles. Husslein worked as an editor of the magazine.
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Stanisław Ossowski
1897 - 1963 (66 years)
Stanisław Ossowski was one of Poland's most important sociologists. He held professorships at Łódź University and Warsaw University . Life Ossowski first contributed to logic and aesthetics before moving on to sociology. He studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw, his teachers were i.a. Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Jan Łukasiewicz and Władysław Tatarkiewicz. He also studied in Paris , in Rome and in London. He took part in the 1920 war. Doctorate wrote to Tadeusz Kotarbiński at the University of Warsaw. He took part in the September campaign. He spent the occupation in Lviv and Warsaw. He ta...
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Eva Verbitsky Hunt
1934 - 1980 (46 years)
Muriel Eva Verbitsky de Hunt was an Argentine cultural anthropologist, academic and writer who moved to the United States in the late 1950s. She is remembered for her contributions to symbolic anthropology and ethnohistory. Together with her husband Robert Hunt, she performed innovative regional work in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the 1960s.
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Mary Roberts Coolidge
1860 - 1945 (85 years)
Mary Roberts Coolidge , also known as Mary Roberts Smith, was an American sociologist and author. She was an instructor at Wellesley College before joining the faculty of Stanford University, where she became the first full-time American professor of sociology. She later founded the sociology department of Mills College.
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Elmer Pendell
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
Elmer Pendell was an American eugenicist and sociologist. Early life Pendell was born in Waverly, New York to George and Ida Harris PenDell. Pendell received his B.S. from the University of Oregon; M.A. from the University of Chicago; PhD from Cornell University; L.L.B. from George Washington University.
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Yves Stourdzé
1947 - 1986 (39 years)
Yves Stourdzé was a French sociologist. He studied technical and institutional conditions for innovation and how acceptable the effects of these are on society. He has also produced one of the most pertinent analyses of the phenomenon of informatization.
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David Glass
1911 - 1978 (67 years)
David Victor Glass was an eminent English sociologist and was one of the few sociologists elected to the Royal Society. He is also one of the very few people to be elected both Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the Royal Society. He was professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, 1948–1978.
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Mary Mims
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Mary Mims was born in Minden, Louisiana. She was a community organizer, teacher, educator, humanitarian, lecturer, and a pioneering sociologist. She was the founder of the "community organization movement" in cooperative extension. She was an extension services specialist in community organizing and worked for Louisiana State University. She was a state community worker for Louisiana.
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Walter Schiff
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
#2898
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.
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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.
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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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