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,
#2901
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.
Go to Profile#2902
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.
Go to Profile#2903
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.
Go to Profile#2904
Walter Schiff
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
#2905
Julian Hochfeld
1911 - 1966 (55 years)
Julian Hochfeld was a Polish sociologist. His family originated of German Polish ethnicity, but preferred to stay in new Poland and then assimilated as Polish since the end of World War I. Professor of the University of Warsaw, he is remembered as a major contributor to theories of Polish communism, Marxism and socialism. In his last years he worked for UNESCO. He was a proponent of Open Marxism.
Go to Profile#2906
Julieta Kirkwood
1936 - 1985 (49 years)
María Julieta Kirkwood Bañados was a Chilean sociologist, political scientist, university professor and feminist activist. She is considered one of the founders and impellers of the Chilean feminist movement in the 1980s. She is considered the forerunner of Gender studies in Chile.
Go to Profile#2907
Frederick German Detweiler
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Frederick German Detweiler was an American sociologist and expert on race relations, best known for his 1922 book The Negro Press in the United States, published by University of Chicago Press. At the time of his death he was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Denison University and a Fellow Emeritus of the American Sociological Association.
Go to Profile#2908
Sabin Manuilă
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Sabin Manuilă was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian statistician, demographer and physician. A nationalist activist during World War I, he became noted for his pioneering research into the biostatistics of Transylvania and Banat regions, as well as a promoter of eugenics and social interventionism. As a bio- and geopolitician, Manuilă advocated the consolidation of Greater Romania through population exchanges, colonization, state-sponsored assimilation, or discriminatory policies.
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Floyd Schmoe
1895 - 2001 (106 years)
Floyd Wilfred Schmoe was a Quaker, pacifist, author, college professor, marine biologist, and park ranger living in the Seattle, Washington area for most of his life. He earned Japan's highest civilian honor for his peace activism and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times.
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Wilbert E. Moore
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Wilbert E. Moore was an American sociologist noted, with Kingsley Davis, for their explanation and justification for social stratification, based their idea of "functional necessity." Biography Moore took his Ph.D. at Harvard University's Department of Sociology in 1940. Moore along with Kingsley Davis, Robert Merton and John Riley were part of Talcott Parsons first group of PhD students. Moore is perhaps best known for Some Principles of Stratification . Moore and Davis wrote this paper while at Princeton University where he remained until mid-1960s. This was followed by a period at the Russ...
Go to Profile#2911
Adolph Lowe
1893 - 1995 (102 years)
Adolph Lowe was a German sociologist and economist. His best known student was Robert Heilbroner. He was born in Stuttgart and died in Wolfenbüttel. Major publications of Adolph Lowe Arbeitslosigkeit und Kriminalität, 1914."Zur Methode der Kriegswirtschaftsgesetzgebung", 1915, Die Hilfe"Die freie Konkurrenz", 1915, Die HilfeWirtschaftliche Demobilisierung, 1916."Mitteleuropäische Demobilisierung", 1917, Wirtschaftszeitung der Zentralmächte."Die ausführende Gewalt in der Ernährungspolitik", 1917, Europäische Staats- und Wirtschaftszeitung"Die Massenpreisung im System der Volksernährung", 1917,...
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Johann Plenge
1874 - 1963 (89 years)
Johann Max Emanuel Plenge was a German sociologist. He was professor of political economy at the University of Münster. In his book 1789 and 1914, Plenge contrasted the 'Ideas of 1789' and the 'Ideas of 1914' . He argued: "Under the necessity of war, socialist ideas have been driven into German economic life, its organisation has grown together into a new spirit, and so the assertion of our nation for mankind has given birth to the idea of 1914, the idea of German organisation, the national unity of state socialism". To Plenge, as for many other German nationalists and socialists, organization meant socialism and a planned economy .
Go to Profile#2913
Dimitrie Gusti
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Dimitrie Gusti was a Romanian sociologist, ethnologist, historian, and voluntarist philosopher; a professor at the University of Iaşi and the University of Bucharest, he served as Romania's Minister of Education in 1932–1933. Gusti was elected a member of the Romanian Academy in 1919, and was its president between 1944 and 1946. He was the main contributor to the creation of a new Romanian school of sociology.
Go to Profile#2914
Émile Durkheim
1858 - 1917 (59 years)
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Go to Profile#2915
Georg Simmel
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was influential in the field of sociology. Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking what is society?—directly alluding to Kant's what is nature?—presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomen...
Go to Profile#2916
Marcel Mauss
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous work is The Gift .
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William Graham Sumner
1840 - 1910 (70 years)
William Graham Sumner was an American clergyman, social scientist, and neoclassical liberal. He taught social sciences at Yale University—where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology—and became one of the most influential teachers at any other major school.
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Vilfredo Pareto
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath . He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.
Go to Profile#2919
C. Wright Mills
1916 - 1962 (46 years)
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "parti...
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Karl Mannheim
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
Karl Mannheim was an influential Hungarian sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He is a key figure in classical sociology, as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia , in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and propose a transformation of society.
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Thorstein Veblen
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.
Go to Profile#2922
Florian Znaniecki
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
Florian Witold Znaniecki was a Polish and American philosopher and sociologist who taught and wrote in Poland and in the United States. Over the course of his work he shifted his focus from philosophy to sociology. He remains a major figure in the history of Polish and American sociology; the founder of Polish academic sociology, and of an entire school of thought in sociology. He won international renown as co-author, with William I. Thomas, of the study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America , which is considered the foundation of modern empirical sociology. He also made major contributi...
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Norbert Elias
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
Norbert Elias was a German sociologist who later became a British citizen. He is especially famous for his theory of civilizing/decivilizing processes. Biography Elias was born on 22 June 1897 in Breslau in Prussia's Silesia Province to Hermann Elias and Sophie Elias, née Gallewski . His father was a native of Kempen and a businessman in the textile industry. His mother was a native of the Jewish community of Breslau itself. After passing the abitur in 1915, Norbert Elias volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher, first at the Eastern front, then at the Western front.
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Albion Woodbury Small
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Albion Woodbury Small founded the first independent department of sociology in the United States at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, in 1892. He was influential in the establishment of sociology as a valid field of academic study.
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Magnus Hirschfeld
1868 - 1935 (67 years)
Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Historian Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights". He is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century.
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Jane Addams
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States. Addams co-founded Chicago's Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. In 1910, Addams was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the Amer...
Go to Profile#2927
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868 - 1963 (95 years)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.
Go to Profile#2928
Harriet Martineau
1802 - 1876 (74 years)
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist often seen as the first female sociologist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her work and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised "a focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She applied thorough analysis to women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant called her "a born lecturer and politician...
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Alfred Schütz
1899 - 1959 (60 years)
Alfred Schutz was an Austrian philosopher and social phenomenologist whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions. Schutz is gradually being recognized as one of the 20th century's leading philosophers of social science. He related Edmund Husserl's work to the social sciences, using it to develop the philosophical foundations of Max Weber's sociology, in his major work Phenomenology of the Social World. However, much of his influence arose from the publication of his Collected Papers in the 1960s.
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Helmut Schelsky
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Helmut Schelsky , was a German sociologist, the most influential in post-World War II Germany, well into the 1970s. Biography Schelsky was born in Chemnitz, Saxony. He turned to social philosophy and even more to sociology, as elaborated at the University of Leipzig by Hans Freyer . Having earned his doctorate in 1935 , in 1939 he qualified as a lecturer with a thesis on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes at the University of Königsberg. He was called up in 1941, so did not take up his first chair of Sociology at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg in 1944.
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Lester Frank Ward
1841 - 1913 (72 years)
Lester Frank Ward was an American botanist, paleontologist, and sociologist. He served as the first president of the American Sociological Association. In service of democratic development, polymath Lester Ward was the original American leader promoting the introduction of sociology courses into American higher education. His Enlightenment belief that institution-building could be scientifically informed was attractive to democratic intellectuals during the Progressive Era. To avoid anachronism and misinterpretation, it is crucial to understand that what "scientific" means, including scientists' own science concept, has long been contested.
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W. I. Thomas
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
William Isaac Thomas was an American sociologist, understood today as a key figure behind the theory of symbolic interactionism. Collaborating with Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki, Thomas developed and influenced the use of empirical methodologies in sociological research and contributed theories to the sociology of migration. Thomas went on to formulate a fundamental principle of sociology, known as the Thomas theorem , whereby he would contend that "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." This microsociological concept served as a theoretical foundation ...
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Robert Michels
1876 - 1936 (60 years)
Robert Michels was a German-born Italian sociologist who contributed to elite theory by describing the political behavior of intellectual elites. He belonged to the Italian school of elitism. He is best known for his book Political Parties, published in 1911, which contains a description of the "iron law of oligarchy." He was a friend and disciple of Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Achille Loria.
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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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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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T. H. Marshall
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Thomas Humphrey Marshall was an English sociologist who is best known for his essay "Citizenship and Social Class," a key work on citizenship that introduced the idea that full citizenship includes civil, political, and social citizenship.
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Ernest Burgess
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Ernest Watson Burgess was a Canadian-American urban sociologist born in Tilbury, Ontario. He was educated at Kingfisher College in Oklahoma and continued graduate studies in sociology at the University of Chicago. In 1916, he returned to the University of Chicago, as a faculty member. Burgess was hired as an urban sociologist at the University of Chicago. Burgess also served as the 24th President of the American Sociological Association .
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Donald Cressey
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Dr. Donald Ray Cressey was an American penologist, sociologist, and criminologist who made innovative contributions to the study of organized crime, prisons, criminology, the sociology of criminal law, white-collar crime.
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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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Richard LaPiere
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Richard Tracy LaPiere was a professor of sociology at Stanford University from 1929 to 1965. Early years and education Born in Beloit, Wisconsin, LaPiere obtained his B.A. in Economics , followed by his M.A in Sociology and his Ph.D in Sociology , all at Stanford University.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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