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,
#2901
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.
Go to Profile#2902
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.
Go to Profile#2903
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 ...
Go to Profile#2904
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.
Go to Profile#2905
Harry Benjamin
1885 - 1986 (101 years)
Harry Benjamin was a German-American endocrinologist and sexologist, widely known for his clinical work with transgender people. Early life and career Benjamin was born in Berlin, and raised in a German Lutheran home. After premedical education in Berlin and Rostock, he joined a regiment of the Prussian Guard. He received his doctorate in medicine in 1912 in Tübingen for a dissertation on tuberculosis. Sexual medicine interested him, but was not part of his medical studies. In a 1985 interview he recalled:
Go to Profile#2906
Joan Woodward
1916 - 1971 (55 years)
Joan Woodward was a British professor in industrial sociology and organizational studies. Background Woodward was educated at Oxford University, where she gained a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1936, followed by an MA in medieval philosophy from Durham University in 1938, and a Diploma in Social and Public Administration from Oxford in 1939. During World War II she worked as a manager, rising to be Senior Labour Manager at ROF Bridgwater. She undertook her early research at South East Essex College of Technology, before joining Imperial College in 1957 as a part-time lecturer...
Go to Profile#2907
Hans Freyer
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Hans Freyer was a German conservative revolutionary sociologist and philosopher. Life Freyer began studying theology, national economics, history and philosophy at the University of Greifswald in 1907, with the aim of becoming a Lutheran theologian. A year later he moved to Leipzig, where he initially took the same courses, but then gave up the theological parts. He gained his doctorate in 1911. His early works on the philosophy of life had an influence on the German youth movement. In 1920 he qualified as a university lecturer, and in 1922 he became a professor at the university of Kiel.
Go to Profile#2908
Roger Bastide
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Roger Bastide was a French sociologist and anthropologist, specialist in sociology and Brazilian literature. He was raised as a Protestant and studied philosophy in France, developing at the same time an interest for sociological issues. His first sociological field research, in 1930–31, was about immigrants from Armenia to Valence, France. As scholars later noticed, already in his first works about the Armenians he was interested in how the memory of a different culture survives when a group of people moves to a faraway land, a theme that will become crucial in his studies of African populat...
Go to Profile#2909
Charles Horton Cooley
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Charles Horton Cooley was an American sociologist. He was the son of Michigan Supreme Court Judge Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan. He was a founding member of the American Sociological Association in 1905 and became its eighth president in 1918. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the looking-glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. Cooley's health began to deteriorate in 1928. He was diagnosed with an unidentified form o...
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Edvard Westermarck
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. Biography Westermarck was born in 1862 in a well-off Lutheran family, part of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland. His father worked at the University of Helsinki as a bursar, and his maternal grandfather was a professor at the same university. It was thus natural for Edvard to study there, obtaining his first degree in philosophy in 1886, but developing also an interest in anthropology and reading the works of Charles Darwin. His thesis, The History of...
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Theodor Geiger
1891 - 1952 (61 years)
Theodor Julius Geiger was a German socialist, lawyer and sociologist who studied Sociology of Law, social stratification and social mobility, methodology, and intelligentsia, among other things. He was Denmark's first professor of sociology, working at the University of Aarhus .
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Maurice Halbwachs
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory. Halbwachs also contributed to the sociology of knowledge with his La Topographie Legendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte; study of the spatial infrastructure of the New Testament.
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Franklin Henry Giddings
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Franklin Henry Giddings was an American sociologist and economist. Biography Giddings was born at Sherman, Connecticut. He graduated from Union College . For ten years he wrote items for the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican and the Daily Union. In 1888 he was appointed lecturer in political science at Bryn Mawr College; in 1894 he became professor of sociology at Columbia University. From 1892 to 1905 he was a vice president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Go to Profile#2914
Leopold von Wiese
1876 - 1969 (93 years)
Leopold Max Walther von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau was a German sociologist and economist, as well as professor and chairman of the German Sociological Association. Biography Leopold von Wiese was the only son of a prematurely deceased Prussian officer and received his education at the cadet schools in Wahlstatt and Lichterfelde. After leaving the cadet corps, he then studied economics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin where he got his Ph.D. in 1902. Subsequently, he was scientific secretary of the "Institute for the common good" in Frankfurt. In 1905, he was Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#2915
Harvey Sacks
1935 - 1975 (40 years)
Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of conversation analysis. His work has had significant influence on fields such as linguistics, discourse analysis, and discursive psychology.
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Edward Alsworth Ross
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Edward Alsworth Ross was a progressive American sociologist, eugenicist, economist, and major figure of early criminology. Early life He was born in Virden, Illinois. His father was a farmer. He attended Coe College and graduated in 1887. After two years as an instructor at a business school, the Fort Dodge Commercial Institute, he went to Germany for graduate study at the University of Berlin. He returned to the U.S., and in 1891 he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in political economy under Richard T. Ely, with minors in philosophy and ethics.
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Alvin Gouldner
1920 - 1980 (60 years)
Alvin Ward Gouldner was an American sociologist, lecturer and radical activist. Early life Goulder was born in New York City. He earned a B.B.A. degree from the Baruch College of the City University of New York and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.
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Dorothy Swaine Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Dorothy Swaine Thomas was an American sociologist and economist. She was the 42nd President of the American Sociological Association, the first woman in that role. Life and career Thomas was born on October 24, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland to John Knight and Sarah Swaine Thomas.
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Antonio Gramsci
1891 - 1937 (46 years)
Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937.
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Jan Stanisław Bystroń
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Jan Stanisław Bystroń was a Polish sociologist and ethnographer. Professor of University of Poznań, University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, member of Polish Academy of Science.
Go to Profile#2921
Alfred Vierkandt
1867 - 1953 (86 years)
Alfred Vierkandt was a German sociologist, ethnographer, social psychologist, social philosopher and philosopher of history. He is known for a broad and phenomenological Gesellschaftslehre promulgated in the 1920s, and for his formal sociology.
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Vilhelm Aubert
1922 - 1988 (66 years)
Johan Vilhelm Aubert was an influential Norwegian sociologist. He was a professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo from 1963 to 1971 and at the Department of Sociology from 1971 to 1988. He co-founded the Norwegian Institute for Social Research already in 1950, and has been labelled the "father of Norwegian sociology". In his early life he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance group XU, and while later involved on the radical wing of the Labour Party, he edited the newspaper Orientering.
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Franz Oppenheimer
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Franz Oppenheimer was a German Jewish sociologist and political economist, who published also in the area of the fundamental sociology of the state. Life and career After studying medicine in Freiburg and Berlin, Oppenheimer practiced as a physician in Berlin from 1886 to 1895. From 1890 onwards, he began to concern himself with sociopolitical questions and social economics. After his activity as a physician, he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Welt am Morgen, where he became acquainted with Friedrich Naumann, who was, at the time, working door-to-door for different daily papers.
Go to Profile#2924
Arnold Gehlen
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Arnold Gehlen was an influential conservative German philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist. Biography Gehlen's major influences while studying philosophy were Hans Driesch, Nicolai Hartmann and especially Max Scheler. Furthermore, he was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and US-American pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and especially George Herbert Mead.
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Hilmi Ziya Ülken
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Hilmi Ziya Ülken was a Turkish scholar and writer who had an influential role in the development of sociological and philosophical views in Turkey. In addition to his scientific work, he produced literary work, including poems.
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Beatrice Webb
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term "collective bargaining". She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society.
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Nels Anderson
1889 - 1986 (97 years)
Nels Anderson was an early American sociologist who studied hobos, urban culture, and work culture. Biography Anderson studied at the University of Chicago under Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, whose Concentric zone model was one of the earliest models developed to explain the organization of urban areas. Anderson's first publication, The Hobo , was a work that helped pioneer participant observation as a research method to reveal the features of a society and was the first field research monograph of the famed Chicago School of Sociology, marking a significant milepost in the discipline of Sociology.
Go to Profile#2928
Helmuth Plessner
1892 - 1985 (93 years)
Helmuth Plessner was a German philosopher and sociologist, and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology". Life and career Plessner had an itinerant education in Germany between 1910 and 1920. He began studying medicine in Friedburg before moving on to zoology and philosophy in Heidelberg. In Göttingen, he studied phenomenology with Husserl, and finally wrote his "Habititationsschrift" under the guidance of Max Scheler. Plessner then held a professorship in Cologne from 1926 to 1933, when he was forced to resign his position because of Jewish ancestry on his father's side. Living in isolation, Plessner initially fled Germany to Istanbul.
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Emil Lederer
1882 - 1939 (57 years)
Emil Lederer was a Bohemiann-born German economist and sociologist. Purged from his position at Humboldt University of Berlin in 1933 for being Jewish, Lederer fled into exile. He helped establish the "University in Exile" at the New School in New York City.
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James D. Thompson
1920 - 1973 (53 years)
James David Thompson was an American sociologist. In 1932, Thompson's family moved to Chicago where he went to a public high school. He graduated from Indiana University with a B.A. in business and served in the United States Air Force from 1941 to 1946. He obtained a master's degree in journalism and worked half a year as an editor for the Chicago Journal of Commerce before taking a position as a journalism teacher at the University of Wisconsin. From 1950 to 1954, he worked on his final degree, a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Albert Eulenburg
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
Albert Eulenburg was a German neurologist born in Berlin. Education Born into a Jewish family, he studied medicine at the Universities of Berlin, Bern and Zurich, earning his doctorate in 1861. Among his instructors were Johannes Peter Müller , Ludwig Traube and Albrecht von Graefe . Later he became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Greifswald, and in 1882, a professor of neurology in Berlin.
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Stefan Czarnowski
1879 - 1937 (58 years)
Stefan Zygmunt Czarnowski was a Polish sociologist, folklorist and professor of the University of Warsaw. Czarnowski was a member of the Polish pro-independence movements, he fought in the Polish Legions and the Polish-Soviet War. At first supporter of endecja, he gravitated towards supporting Polish Socialist Party.
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Georges Palante
1862 - 1925 (63 years)
Georges Toussaint Léon Palante was a French philosopher and sociologist. Palante advocated aristocratic individualist ideas similar to Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. He was opposed to Émile Durkheim's holism, promoting methodological individualism instead.
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Howard P. Becker
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Howard Paul Becker was a longtime professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Biography Becker was born in New York in 1899, the son of Charles Becker, a New York police officer, and Letitia , of Ontario. His parents divorced six years after his birth. His mother married again, to Becker's brother Paul. His father Charles Becker later married twice more. He was prosecuted in New York for the 1912 murder of a gambler, found guilty, and executed in 1915.
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Albert Galloway Keller
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Albert Galloway Keller was a sociologist, author, and student and colleague of William Graham Sumner. He is best known as the editor of Sumner's papers, in numerous volumes, published in the early 20th century by the Yale University Press. He was a scholar in his own right and wrote on German colonial policy, economic geography, and sociology.
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Jean Stoetzel
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Jean Stoetzel was a French sociologist. Biography He had Alsacian and Lorrainian descent. Stoetzel had studied in Lycée Louis-le-Grand, in a preparatory class for superior schools In 1932, he entered École normale supérieure in Parisе.
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Everett Stonequist
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Everett Verner Stonequist was an American Sociologist perhaps best known for his 1937 book, The Marginal Man Life & Work Stonequist was born in Worcester, Mass. and received his A.B. degree in History and Sociology at Clark University. He later studied at Cornell University, Columbia University, and the University of Paris. He received his doctorate in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1930.
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Roderick D. McKenzie
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Roderick Duncan McKenzie was a Canadian-American sociologist, who became head of the sociology department at the University of Michigan. McKenzie served as the 2nd Vice-President of the American Sociological Association in 1932–1933, and was a charter member of the Sociological Research Association.
Go to Profile#2939
George M. Simmel
#2940
Ali Shariati
1933 - 1977 (44 years)
Ali Shariati Mazinani was an Iranian revolutionary and sociologist who focused on the sociology of religion. He is held as one of the most influential Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century, and has been called the "ideologue of the Islamic Revolution", although his ideas did not end up forming the basis of the Islamic Republic.
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Jacob Riis
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most fa...
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Neva Boyd
1876 - 1963 (87 years)
Neva Leona Boyd was an American sociologist. She founded the Recreational Training School at the Hull House in Chicago. The school taught a one-year educational program in group games, gymnastics, dancing, dramatic arts, play theory, and social problems. She was on the faculty of Northwestern University from 1927 to 1941.
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Kurt Albert Gerlach
1886 - 1922 (36 years)
Kurt Albert Gerlach was a German professor and sociologist. Life Gerlach was the son of the chemist and later director of the Continental AG Albert Gerlach and his wife Martha Friedmann. He had studied at the university of Kiel under Ferdinand Tönnies and received his doctorate in 1911 with a work on the role of Denmark in global economy. He then studied at the University of Leipzig. In 1911 and 1912 he went to England and studied at the London School of Economics and became a member of the Fabian Society. In 1913 he habilitated in Leipzig with a treaty on protective measures for female factory workers in England.
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Eugen Steinach
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Eugen Steinach was an Austrian physiologist and pioneer in endocrinology. Steinach played a significant role in discovering the relationship between sex hormones and human physical identifiers. Life and career Steinach was born on 28 January 1861, in Hohenems, County of Tyrol, Austrian Empire. His family were well-off and had been prominent in Jewish affairs in Hohenems for several generations. His father and his grandfather were both physicians; his father studied under Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, a leading German physiologist.
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Rose Goldsen
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Rose Kohn Goldsen was a professor of sociology at Cornell University and a pioneer in studying the effects of television and popular culture. Prior to coming to Cornell, Goldsen worked for the Office of Radio Research, Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research. Goldsen came to Cornell as a research associate and felt that she encountered employment discrimination because she was a woman. In 1958, a faculty position opened up and she demanded to be considered, resulting in her appointment to the faculty.
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Frank Tannenbaum
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Frank Tannenbaum was an Austrian-American historian, sociologist and criminologist, who made significant contributions to modern Mexican history during his career at Columbia University. Early life Tannenbaum was born in Austria on 4 March 1893. His Eastern European Jewish family immigrated to the United States in 1905. He ran away from home as an adolescent and never finished high school. He worked at a number of menial jobs and became involved in radical labor politics of the era.
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George Edgar Vincent
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
George Edgar Vincent was an American sociologist and university president. Biography He was born at Rockford, Illinois, the son of Bishop John H. Vincent. He studied at Yale, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and served on the thirteenth editorial board of The Yale Record. After graduating in 1885, he engaged in journalistic and literary work.
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Charles Richmond Henderson
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
Charles Richmond Henderson was an American Baptist minister and sociologist. After being a pastor for nearly 20 years in Terre Haute and Detroit, he took an appointment as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, where he became a tenured professor. He published several works on society in the United States, the prison system, and the sociology of charities.
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