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
Chen Xujing
1903 - 1967 (64 years)
Chen Xujing was a leading Chinese sociologist. Biography Chen Xujing was born in Hainan. He was schooled in Singapore and at Lingnan Middle School, at which he enrolled in 1920. He graduated from Fudan University in 1925. After receiving a PhD in Political Science from the University of Illinois in 1928, he published his thesis on theories of sovereignty in the following year. While holding a sociology post at Lingnan University, he travelled to study in Germany. He became a professor at Nankai University, heading the Economic Research Institute and School of Politics and Economics, and serving as vice president of the university.
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Margaret Jarman Hagood
1907 - 1963 (56 years)
Margaret Loyd Jarman "Marney" Hagood was an American sociologist and demographer who "helped steer sociology away from the armchair and toward the calculator". She wrote the books Mothers of the South and Statistics for Sociologists , and later became president of the Population Association of America and of the Rural Sociological Society.
Go to Profile#2853
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 - 1797 (38 years)
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
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George Jackson
1941 - 1971 (30 years)
George Lester Jackson was an American author, activist and convicted felon. While serving an indeterminate sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station in 1961, Jackson became involved in revolutionary activity and co-founded the prison gang Black Guerrilla Family.
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Alan Little
1934 - 1986 (52 years)
Alan Neville Little, JP was a British social scientist. Biography Alan Neville Little was born on 12 July 1934, the son of Charles Henry Little and Lilian Little. In 1955, he married Dr Valerie Hopkinson; they had three children. Little attended Northgate Grammar School in Ipswich, before studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science , receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in sociology and doctorate in economics. He lectured at the LSE from 1959 to 1966 and then spent two years as a consultant at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development . In 1968, he was appointed director of research and statistics at the Inner London Education Authority .
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Marcus Garvey
1887 - 1940 (53 years)
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League , through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas came to be known as Garveyism.
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Jacqueline Burgoyne
1944 - 1988 (44 years)
Jacqueline Lesley Burgoyne was a British sociologist and academic who specialised in family life. Career Jacqueline Burgoyne was born in Worcester on 10 September 1944 and schooled at Bristol. She enrolled at the University of Sheffield in 1963 and completed a sociology degree, before qualifying as a teacher in Bath and then returning to Sheffield to work on a project which would lead to her first book, Books and Reading , the result of a collaboration with Peter H. Mann; after its completion, she worked as a teacher and then in 1971 joined Sheffield City College of Education as a lecturer. ...
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Chen Da
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Chen Da was a Chinese sociologist. Biography Chen was born in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province and his sobriquet was Tongfu . From 1912-1916, he studied at Tsinghua School in Beijing. From 1916 to 1923, he studied in the United States, and obtained his doctorate degree from Columbia University. Upon graduation, he returned to China and taught at Tsinghua for many years. When Tsinghua School transformed into Tsinghua University in 1929, Chen helped found the department of sociology and became a professor and the chair of the department. During Sino-Japanese War, he moved south with the university to K...
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Carl Nicolai Starcke
1858 - 1926 (68 years)
Carl Nicolai Starcke was a Danish sociologist, politician, educator and philosopher. He is buried at Holmens Cemetery. He was the father of Viggo Starcke, another writer and publisher of books such as Denmark in World History.
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Rosemary Seymour
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Rosemary Yolande Levinge Seymour was a New Zealand feminist academic. She was instrumental in establishing New Zealand's first women's studies course at the University of Waikato in 1974, the Women's Studies Journal, and the Women's Studies Association of New Zealand.
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Michel Aflaq
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Michel Aflaq was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement; he is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution .
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Sheldon Glueck
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Sheldon Glueck was a Polish-American criminologist. He and his wife Eleanor Glueck collaborated extensively on research related to juvenile delinquency and developed the "Social Prediction Tables" model for predicting the likelihood of delinquent behavior in youth. They were the first criminologists to perform studies of chronic juvenile offenders and among the first to examine the effects of psychopathy among the more serious delinquents.
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Bobby Sands
1954 - 1981 (27 years)
Robert Gerard Sands was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who died on hunger strike while imprisoned at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland. Sands helped to plan the 1976 Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in Dunmurry, which was followed by a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Sands was arrested while trying to escape and sentenced to 14 years for firearms possession.
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Leo Löwenthal
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Leo Löwenthal was a German sociologist and philosopher usually associated with the Frankfurt School. Life Born in Frankfurt as the son of assimilated Jews , Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. He joined the newly founded Institute for Social Research in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Heterodox and independent Marxists, open to new intellectual currents such as psychoanalysis, and predominantly Jewish, the institute's members swiftly fled Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
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László Radványi
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
László Radványi , also known as Johann Lorenz Schmidt, was a Hungarian-German writer and academic. Life Childhood and early career Radványi was born into a Jewish family in Hungary. As a boy, Radványi attended a grammar school on Marko Street in Budapest. While attending grammar school, at the age of 16, he authored a book of poetry, which received a preface from Frigyes Karinthy. Radványi studied economics and philosophy at the University of Budapest from 1918 to 1919, where he became involved in radical politics. With the destruction of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he fled to Vienn...
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Harry Alpert
1912 - 1977 (65 years)
Harry Alpert was an American sociologist, best known for his directorship of the National Science Foundation's social science program in the 1950s. During his time at the NSF , Alpert guided the development of the U.S. NSF's earliest efforts to provide funding to the social sciences, and helped to establish the agency's basic policy framework for funding social science research and fellowships. In his short five-year term as director, Alpert was able to establish a viable policy framework for NSF funding that would help to demonstrate both the value and scientific legitimacy of social scienc...
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Bernard E. Proctor
1901 - 1959 (58 years)
Bernard E. Proctor was an American food scientist who was involved in early research on food irradiation. Early life A native of Malden, Massachusetts, Proctor graduated from Malden High in 1919, then graduated with an S.B. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1923. He would then earn his Ph.D. at MIT in 1927.
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Frederick H. Harbison
1912 - 1976 (64 years)
Frederick Harris Harbison was an American labor economist and Professor of Labor Economics at Princeton University. He was known for his 1959 study Management in the industrial world and other works on labor and management.
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Luther L. Bernard
1881 - 1951 (70 years)
Luther Lee Bernard was an American sociologist and psychologist. He was the 22nd President of the American Sociological Association . He has been described as "among the best known U.S. sociologist in the country... between the 1920 and the 1940,".
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Paul H. Landis
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Paul Henry Landis, was an American sociologist. A prolific writer of over 20 books and 100 journal articles, Landis's work spanned the fields of rural sociology, Natural Resource Sociology, Sociology of Education, Adolescence, Social Control, and many other topics. Born in Cuba, Illinois, Landis was raised in a fundamentalist religious upbringing, before attending Greenville College and eventually the University of Michigan for a master's degree and The University of Minnesota for a PhD. After graduation from the University of Minnesota in 1931, Landis joined the faculty of South Dakota State University as an assistant professor in the Department of Rural Sociology.
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Henry Pratt Fairchild
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Henry Pratt Fairchild was a distinguished American sociologist who was actively involved in many of the controversial issues of his time. He wrote about race relations, abortion and contraception, and immigration. He was involved with the founding of Planned Parenthood and served as President to the American Eugenics Society.
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George F. Stewart
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
George F. Stewart was an American food scientist who was involved in processing, preservation, chemistry, and microbiology of poultry and egg-based food products. He also became the first president of the International Union of Food Science and Technology after it was formed at the 1970 conference in Washington, D.C., from the International Congress of Food Science and Technology.
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E. Franklin Frazier
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Edward Franklin Frazier , was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States ; it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
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Thorsten Sellin
1896 - 1994 (98 years)
Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology. Biography Sellin was born in Örnsköldsvik in Västernorrland County, Sweden and came to Canada with his parents when he was 17 years old. He received his bachelor's degree from Augustana College in Illinois when he was 19. He went on to receive a master's degree and doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1922 until becoming Professor Emeritus in 1967.
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Nicholas Timasheff
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Nicholas Sergeyevitch Timasheff was a Russian sociologist, professor of jurisprudence and writer. Biography Timasheff "came from an old family of Russian nobility"; his father was Minister of Trade and Industry under Nicholas II. In St. Petersburg, where he was born, he attended a classical high school; he went on to attend the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the University of Strasbourg, and the Saint Petersburg State University . At the latter university he met the Polish-Russian jurist Leon Petrazycki, who was a significant influence on him throughout his life. Two years later he began teaching sociological jurisprudence at the University of Petrograd.
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Mary Frank Fox
Mary Frank Fox is Dean's Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a pioneer and leader in the study of women and men in academic and scientific occupations and organizations. Her work has introduced and established the ways that participation and performance in science reflect and are affected by complex social-organizational processes. Fox's research is published in over 60 different scholarly and scientific journals, books, and collections, including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Sociology of Edu...
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Samuel A. Stouffer
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Samuel Andrew Stouffer was a prominent American sociologist and developer of survey research techniques. Stouffer spent much of his career attempting to answer the fundamental question: How does one measure an attitude?
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Helen Lynd
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Helen Merrell Lynd was an American sociologist, social philosopher, educator, and author. She is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with her husband, Robert Staughton 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. She was also the author of England in the 1880s: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom , Shame and the Search for Identity , and essays on academic freedom. In addition to writing and research, Lynd was a lectu...
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Morris Janowitz
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
Morris Janowitz was an American sociologist and professor who made major contributions to sociological theory, the study of prejudice, urban issues, and patriotism. He was one of the founders of military sociology and made major contributions, along with Samuel P. Huntington, to the establishment of contemporary civil-military relations. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago and held a five-year chairmanship of the Sociology Department at University of Chicago. He was the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
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Max Horkheimer
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason , Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, suppo...
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Theodore Fred Abel
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Theodore Fred Abel was an American sociology professor who collected the largest single archive of first person accounts from people who joined Hitler's National Socialist movement. The collection of men's accounts was published in 1938 in a book titled Why Hitler Came to Power. The women's accounts were set aside to publish at a later date. Those accounts were lost and then rediscovered in the archives of the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto, after which three Florida State University professors arranged to have them transcribed, translated and digitized. This collection of first person account...
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Bernard Berelson
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Bernard Reuben Berelson was an American behavioral scientist, known for his work on communication and mass media. He was a leading proponent of the broad idea of the "behavioral sciences", a field he saw as including areas such as public opinion. In Chapter 14 of Voting , he enunciated what has become known as Berelson's paradox on democracy: while classical theories of its success assume voters committed to interest in public life, this fails to correspond with practical politics, while the system itself functions.
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Roy Wallis
1945 - 1990 (45 years)
Roy Wallis was a sociologist and Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the Queen's University Belfast. He is mostly known for his creation of the seven signs that differentiate a religious congregation from a sectarian church, which he created while researching the Church of Scientology. He introduced the distinction between world-affirming and world-rejecting new religious movements.
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George C. Homans
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
George Caspar Homans was an American sociologist, founder of behavioral sociology, the 54th president of the American Sociological Association, and one of the architects of social exchange theory. Homans is best known in science for his research in social behavior and his works The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, his contributions to exchange theory, and the different propositions he developed to explain social behavior. He is also the third great grandson of the second President of the United States, John Adams.
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Everett Hughes
1897 - 1983 (86 years)
Everett Cherrington Hughes was an American sociologist best known for his work on ethnic relations, work and occupations and the methodology of fieldwork. His take on sociology was, however, very broad. In recent scholarship, his theoretical contribution to sociology has been discussed as interpretive institutional ecology, forming a theoretical frame of reference that combines elements of the classical ecological theory of class , and elements of a proto-dependency analysis of Quebec's industrialization in the 1930s .
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Paul Lazarsfeld
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-American sociologist. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds". He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology.
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Theodor W. Adorno
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Le...
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Talcott Parsons
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department. Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard.
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Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett is a British sociologist who has held academic positions in the United Kingdom and Australia. His work focusses on cultural studies and cultural history. Early life and education Bennett was born in Manchester and earned a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University in 1968 and a PhD in sociology at Sussex University in 1972.
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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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Norman E. Himes
1899 - 1949 (50 years)
Norman Edwin Himes was an American sociologist and economist and Professor at Colgate University, known for his work on the medical history of contraception. Himes obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1932. After graduation, he started his academic career at Colgate University in 1932. In World War II he served at the Surgeon General of the United States. His research interests were in the field of "population problems, history of contraception and the birth control movement, and marriage and family relations."
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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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