List of Famous Sociologists

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The field of sociology has been shaped by a number of individuals who have dedicated their lives to better understand human societies. Among these thinkers and scholars, certain famous sociologists have made an indelible mark on the discipline. Their contributions range from social theory to empirical research, and have often transcended the boundaries of sociology itself. These world-famous sociologists have illuminated the complexities of human interactions, influenced policy and social change, and inspired generations of academics and practitioners. 

Each prominent sociologist featured in the compilation has impacted the field, often by challenging conventional wisdom in the social sciences. As you explore their key theories and insights, you get a glimpse into the minds of these experts, figures who have been recognized and celebrated as some of the greatest sociologists of all time. 

Among the pantheon of prominent sociologists, certain trailblazers have left an indelible mark on the discipline through their visionary theories and groundbreaking insights. For instance, Karl Marx, a towering figure in sociology and philosophy, examined the ways in which economic systems shaped class struggles, ultimately arguing that social change was driven by material conditions. His groundbreaking works like The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital have remained influential for over a century. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, delved into the realms of power, knowledge, and social institutions, producing thought-provoking analyses on topics like punishment, mental health, and sexuality. Another trailblazer, Jane Addams, combined her sociological expertise with activism, becoming a pivotal figure in the settlement house movement and addressing issues such as poverty, education, and women's rights. 

In exploring the works and insights of these famous sociologists, we find ourselves immersed in the captivating world of sociology, where new discoveries and perspectives continue to shed light on the complexities of our shared human experience. By exploring their lives and works, readers can gain a deeper understanding of sociology as a discipline and appreciate the ways these individuals have helped shape our understanding of the social world. 

  • Karl Marx (German: [ˈkaɐ̯l ˈmaɐ̯ks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital. His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory. Marx's critical theories about society, economics and politics – collectively understood as Marxism – hold that human societies develop through class struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour power in return for wages. Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised. His work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.
  • Paul-Michel Foucault (UK: FOO-koh, US: foo-KOH, French: [pɔl miʃɛl fuko]; 15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984), generally known as Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Activist groups have also found his theories compelling.Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology". From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society. Foucault died in Paris of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.
  • Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, and author. She was a notable figure in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States and an advocate for world peace. She co-founded Chicago's Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses. 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 for the ACLU. In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy, and is known by many as the first woman "public philosopher in the history of the United States".In the Progressive Era, when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers. She helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. In her essay "Utilization of Women in City Government," Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women's roles in the private sphere. Thus, these were matters of which women would have more knowledge than men, so women needed the vote to best voice their opinions. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities.
  • William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( doo-BOYSS; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, 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 (NAACP) in 1909. Before that, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership. Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice in the United States military. Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens The Souls of Black Folk with the central thesis of much of his life's work: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." He wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.
  • Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, jurist, and political economist. His ideas profoundly influenced social theory and social research. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of sociology. Weber was a key proponent of methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than purely empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose and meaning that individuals attach to their own actions. Unlike Durkheim, he did not believe in mono-causality and rather proposed that for any outcome there can be multiple causes.Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and "disenchantment" that he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity. He saw these as the result of a new way of thinking about the world. Weber is best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise in the Western world of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state. He argued that it was in the basic tenets of Protestantism to boost capitalism. Thus, it can be said that the spirit of capitalism is inherent to Protestant religious values. Against Marx's historical materialism, Weber emphasised the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism. The Protestant Ethic formed the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion; he went on to examine the religions of China, the religions of India and ancient Judaism, with particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social stratification. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined the state as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". He was also the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms, which he labelled as charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. His analysis of bureaucracy emphasised that modern state institutions are increasingly based on rational-legal authority. Weber also made a variety of other contributions in economic history, as well as economic theory and methodology. Weber's analysis of modernity and rationalisation significantly influenced the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. After the First World War, Max Weber was among the founders of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.
  • Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was an American politician, sociologist, and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate and served as an adviser to Republican U.S. President Richard Nixon. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Moynihan moved at a young age to New York City. Following a stint in the navy, he earned a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University. He worked on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman before joining President John F. Kennedy's administration in 1961. He served as an Assistant Secretary of Labor under Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, devoting much of his time to the War on Poverty. In 1965, he published the controversial Moynihan Report. Moynihan left the Johnson administration in 1965 and became a professor at Harvard University. In 1969, he accepted Nixon's offer to serve as an Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and he was elevated to the position of Counselor to the President later that year. He left the administration at the end of 1970, and accepted appointment as United States Ambassador to India in 1973. He accepted President Gerald Ford's appointment to the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, holding that position until 1976, when he won election to the Senate. Moynihan represented New York in the Senate from 1977 to 2001. He served as Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee from 1992 to 1993 and as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 1993 to 1995. He also led the Moynihan Secrecy Commission, which studied the regulation of classified information. He emerged as a strong critic of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and opposed President Bill Clinton's health care plan. He frequently broke with liberal positions, but opposed welfare reform in the 1990s. He also voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Congressional authorization for the Gulf War. He is tied with Jacob K. Javits as the longest-serving Senator from the state of New York.
  • Harry Edwards (born November 22, 1942) is an American sociologist and civil rights activist. He completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University and is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Edwards' career has focused on the experiences of African-American athletes.
  • Alexis Charles-Henri-Maurice Clérel, Viscount de Tocqueville (; French: [alɛgzi də tɔkvil]; 29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859) was a French diplomat, political scientist and historian. He was best known for his works Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analyzed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science. Tocqueville was active in French politics, first under the July Monarchy (1830–1848) and then during the Second Republic (1849–1851) which succeeded the February 1848 Revolution. He retired from political life after Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup and thereafter began work on The Old Regime and the Revolution. Tocqueville argued the importance of the French Revolution was to continue the process of modernizing and centralizing the French state which had begun under King Louis XIV. The failure of the Revolution came from the inexperience of the deputies who were too wedded to abstract Enlightenment ideals. Tocqueville was a classical liberal and liberal conservative who advocated parliamentary government, but he was skeptical of the extremes of democracy.
  • Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900: "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.Spencer is best known for the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.
  • David Émile Durkheim (French: [emil dyʁkɛm] or [dyʁkajm]; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a Jewish sociologist in France. He formally established the academic discipline and—with W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Marx and Max Weber—is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies. Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, if this term is understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity" and its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic; that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals. He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.
  • Francisco Pascasio Moreno (May 31, 1852 – November 22, 1919) was a prominent explorer and academic in Argentina, where he is usually referred to as Perito Moreno (perito means "specialist, expert"). Perito Moreno has been credited as one of the most influential figures in the Argentine incorporation of large parts of Patagonia and its subsequent development.
  • Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (Czech: [ˈtomaːʃ ˈɡarɪk ˈmasarɪk]), sometimes anglicised Thomas Masaryk (7 March 1850 – 14 September 1937), was a Czechoslovak politician, statesman, sociologist and philosopher. Until 1914, he advocated reforming the Austro-Hungarian monarchy into a federal state. With the help of the Allied powers, Masaryk gained independence for a Czechoslovak republic as World War I ended in 1918. He founded Czechoslovakia, was its first president, and is called the "President Liberator" (Prezident Osvoboditel) by some Czechs.
  • Michael S. Schudson is Professor of Journalism in the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is a well-respected and widely-cited expert in the fields such as journalism history, media sociology, political communication, and public culture.
  • Harriet Martineau (; 12 June 1802 – 27 June 1876) was a British social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist.Martineau wrote many books and a multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic, and perhaps most controversially, feminine perspective. She also translated various works by Auguste Comte, and she earned enough to support herself entirely by her writing, a rare feat for a woman in the Victorian era.The young Princess Victoria enjoyed reading Martineau's publications. She invited Martineau to her coronation in 1838 — an event which Martineau described in great and amusing detail to her many readers. Martineau said of her own approach to writing: "when one studies a society, one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She believed a thorough societal analysis was necessary to understand women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant said "as a born lecturer and politician [Martineau] was less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation".
  • Johanna "Hannah" Cohn Arendt (, also US: , German: [ˈaːʁənt]; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975), also known as Hannah Arendt Bluecher, was a German-American philosopher and political theorist. Her many books and articles on topics ranging from totalitarianism to epistemology have had a lasting influence on political theory. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany but mostly raised in Königsberg in a secular merchant Jewish culture by parents who were politically progressive, being supporters of the Social Democrats. Her father died when she was seven, so she was raised by her mother and grandfather. After completing her secondary education, she studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief affair, and he had a lasting influence on her thinking. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy in 1929 at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers. Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and while researching antisemitic propaganda for the Zionist Federation of Germany in Berlin that year, Arendt was denounced and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established and a series of seminal works followed. These included The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of evil". She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names and schools, amongst other things.
  • Charles Wright Mills (1916–1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books such as The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the US political, military, and economic elites; White Collar: The American Middle Classes, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, which presents a model of analysis for the interdependence of subjective experiences within a person's biography, the general social structure, and historical development. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. Mills's biographer, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." Indeed, it was Mills who popularized the term New Left in the US in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left".
  • Pierre Bourdieu (French: [buʁdjø]; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher and public intellectual.Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order is maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Building upon the theories of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky and Marcel Mauss among others, his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods, and introduced such influential concepts as cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital (as opposed to traditional economic forms of capital), the cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, and symbolic violence. Another notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations. Bourdieu's major contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education), popular culture, and the arts. Bourdieu's best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979). The book was judged the sixth most important sociological work of the twentieth century by the International Sociological Association. In it, Bourdieu argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
  • Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte (pronounced [oɡyst kɔ̃t] (listen); 19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857) was a French philosopher and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Comte is also seen as the founder of the academic discipline of sociology.Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research. Comte's social theories culminated in his "Religion of Humanity", which presaged the development of non-theistic religious humanist and secular humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte may have coined the word altruisme (altruism).
  • Thorstein Veblen (30 July 1857 – 3 August 1929) was a Norwegian-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 (1899), Veblen coined the concept 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. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in the United States of America, Veblen attacked production for profit. His emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced economists who engaged in non-Marxist critiques of capitalism and of technological determinism.
  • John W. Meyer is a sociologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, located in Palo Alto, California. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, Meyer has contributed fundamental ideas to the field of sociology, especially in the areas of education, organizations, and global and transnational sociology. He is best known for the development of the neo-institutional perspective on globalization, known as world society or World Polity Theory.
  • Edward Westermarck

    Edward Westermarck

    Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. The phenomenon of reverse sexual imprinting, now known as the Westermarck effect, was first formally described by him in his book The History of Human Marriage. He has been described as "first Darwinian sociologist" or "the first sociobiologist". He helped found academic sociology in the United Kingdom, becoming the first professor of sociology in 1907 in the University of London. In the UK, his name is often spelled Edward. His sister, Helena Westermarck, was a writer and artist.
  • Ulrich Beck was a German sociologist. His work focused on questions of uncontrollability, ignorance and uncertainty in the modern age, and he coined the terms "risk society" and "second modernity". He also pushed to replace the national perspectives that have predominated in sociological investigations to date with a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the interconnectedness of the modern world. He was a professor at the University of Munich and also held appointments at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, and at the London School of Economics.
  • Charles Tilly (May 27, 1929 – April 29, 2008) was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan 1969–1984 and in his last position the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. He has been described as "the founding father of 21st-century sociology" and "one of the world's preeminent sociologists and historians" as his "scholarship was unsurpassed, his humanity of the highest order, his spirit unwavering." After his death, numerous special journal issues, conferences, awards and obituaries appeared in his honor.
  • Nancy Julia Chodorow (born January 20, 1944) is an American sociologist, feminist psychoanalyst, and professor. Influenced by Freud, Chodorow has written a number of influential books in contemporary feminist writing, including The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978); Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989); Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994); and The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999). In 1995, Chodorow was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences. In 1996, The Reproduction of Mothering was chosen by Contemporary Sociology as one of the ten most influential books of the past 25 years.Chodorow is widely regarded as a leading psychoanalytic feminist theorist and is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, often speaking at its congresses. She spent many years as a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Chodorow retired from the University of California in 2005, and later went on to teach Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance.
  • Laurence John Taylor (born 1 August 1936) is an English sociologist and radio presenter, originally from Liverpool.
  • Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms transclusion, virtuality, and intertwingularity (in Literary Machines), and teledildonics. According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software.'"
  • Seymour Martin Lipset (March 18, 1922 – December 31, 2006) was an American sociologist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was often considered a neoconservative. At his death in 2006, The Guardian called him "the leading theorist of democracy and American exceptionalism"; The New York Times said he was "a pre-eminent sociologist, political scientist and incisive theorist of American uniqueness"; and the Washington Post said he was "one of the most influential social scientists of the past half century."
  • Immanuel Wallerstein

    Immanuel Wallerstein

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (; born September 28, 1930) is an American sociologist, economic historian and world-systems analyst, arguably best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach. He published bimonthly syndicated commentaries on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019. He has been a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University since 2000.
  • Julia Kristeva (French: [kʁisteva]; Bulgarian: Юлия Кръстева; born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a professor emeritus at the University Paris Diderot. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969. Her sizeable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. She is prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought. Kristeva is also the founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.
  • Charles Johnson

    Charles Johnson

    Charles Spurgeon Johnson was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results. His position is often contrasted with that of W. E. B. Du Bois, who was a powerful and militant advocate for blacks and described Johnson as "too conservative." During Johnson's academic studies and leadership of Fisk University during the 1930s and 1940s, the South had legal racial segregation and Jim Crow discriminatory laws and practices, including having disfranchised most black voters in constitutions passed at the turn of the century. Johnson was unwavering in personal terms in his opposition to this oppressive system, yet worked hard to change race relations in terms of short-term practical gains. His grandson Jeh Johnson served as the United States Secretary of Homeland Security beginning in 2013.
  • Claude S. Fischer

    Claude S. Fischer

    Claude Serge Fischer (born January 9, 1948) is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in urban sociology, research methods, and American society at UC Berkeley. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.
  • George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism and of what has come to be referred to as the Chicago sociological tradition.
  • Ronald M. Enroth

    Ronald M. Enroth

    Ronald M. Enroth (born October 28, 1938) has been a Professor of Sociology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, prominent evangelical Christian author of books concerning what he defines as "cults" and "new religious movements" and important figure in the Christian countercult movement.
  • Theodor W. Adorno (; German: [ʔaˈdɔɐ̯no]; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist and composer known for his critical theory of society. 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. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left. Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. The reputation of his work on music, however, has sharply declined over time. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, antisemitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's language of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion.
  • Nach is a MC, actor, poet and sociologist.
  • Ayesha Jalal (Punjabi, Urdu: عائشہ جلال‎) is a Pakistani-American historian who serves as the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University, and was the recipient of the 1998 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
  • Erving Goffman (11 June 1922 – 19 November 1982) was a Canadian-American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century". In 2007 he was listed by The Times Higher Education Guide as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, behind Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and ahead of Jürgen Habermas.Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.
  • Beatrice Webb

    Beatrice Webb

    Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, (née Potter; 22 January 1858 – 30 April 1943), 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.
  • Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born 18 January 1938) is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities.Four notable stages can be identified in his academic life. The first one involved outlining a new vision of what sociology is, presenting a theoretical and methodological understanding of that field based on a critical reinterpretation of the classics. His major publications of that era include Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971) and The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (1973). In the second stage, Giddens developed the theory of structuration, an analysis of agency and structure in which primacy is granted to neither. His works of that period, such as New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984), brought him international fame on the sociological arena. The third stage of Giddens's academic work was concerned with modernity, globalisation and politics, especially the impact of modernity on social and personal life. This stage is reflected by his critique of postmodernity and discussions of a new "utopian-realist" Third Way in politics which is visible in the Consequences of Modernity (1990), Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998). Giddens' ambition was both to recast social theory and to re-examine our understanding of the development and trajectory of modernity. In the most recent stage, Giddens has turned his attention to a more concrete range of problems relevant to the evolution of world society, namely environmental issues, focussing especially upon debates about climate change, analysed in successive editions of his book The Politics of Climate Change (2009); the role and nature of the European Union in Turbulent and Mighty Continent: What Future for Europe? (2014); and in a series of lectures and speeches also the nature and consequences of the Digital Revolution. Giddens served as Director of the London School of Economics from 1997 to 2003, where he is now Emeritus Professor at the Department of Sociology. He is a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.
  • Arthur Ruppin (1 March 1876 – 1 January 1943) was a Zionist thinker and leader. He was one of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv. He directed Berlin's Bureau for Jewish Statistics and Demography from 1902 to 1907. From 1908 on, he was the director of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa, organizing Zionist colonisation in Palestine. In 1926 Ruppin joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founded the sociology department. A building there is now named in his honor. His most celebrated sociological work is The Jews in the Modern World (1934).
  • George Andreas Papandreou (Greek: Γεώργιος Ανδρέας Παπανδρέου, pronounced [ʝeˈorʝios papanˈðreu], shortened to Giorgos (Γιώργος) [ˈʝorɣos] to distinguish him from his grandfather; born 16 June 1952) is a Greek American politician who served as Prime Minister of Greece from 2009 to 2011. He is currently serving as an MP for Movement for Change. Belonging to a political dynasty of long standing, he served under his father, then-prime minister Andreas Papandreou as Minister for National Education and Religious Affairs (1988–1989 and 1994–1996) and Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1999 to 2004. Papandreou was leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) party, which his father founded, from February 2004 until March 2012, and has been President of the Socialist International since January 2006. On 6 October 2009, George Papandreou became the 182nd Prime Minister of Greece. He was the third member of the Papandreou family to serve as the country's prime minister, following his father Andreas and his grandfather Georgios Papandreou. He resigned on 11 November 2011 during the Greek government debt crisis to make way for a national unity government. In March 2012, he resigned as leader of PASOK, and in January 2015, he left the party completely, founding his own political party, the Movement of Democratic Socialists (KIDISO), which was the 8th most voted-for party in the January 2015 elections, but did not manage to enter Parliament. In 2017, KIDISO joined the Democratic Alignment, a political alliance formed by PASOK and other centre-left parties. Democratic Alignment later evolved into Movement for Change, which in the 2019 elections was the third most voted-for party, with Papandreou himself returning to Parliament as an MP representing the region of Achaea.
  • Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol (Romanian pronunciation: [alekˈsandru diˈmitri.e kseˈnopol]; March 23, 1847, Iaşi – February 27, 1920, Bucharest) was a Romanian historian, philosopher, professor, economist, sociologist, and author. Among his many major accomplishments, he is the Romanian historian credited with authoring the first major synthesis of the history of the Romanian people.
  • Niklas Luhmann

    Niklas Luhmann

    Niklas Luhmann (; German: [ˈluːman]; December 8, 1927 – November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.
  • Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) 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 1929. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department.Based on empirical data, Parsons' social action theory was the first broad, systematic, and generalizable theory of social systems developed in the United States and Europe. Some of Parsons' largest contributions to sociology in the English-speaking world were his translations of Max Weber's work and his analyses of works by Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto. Their work heavily influenced Parsons' view and was the foundation for his social action theory. Parsons viewed voluntaristic action through the lens of the cultural values and social structures that constrain choices and ultimately determine all social actions, as opposed to actions that are determined based on internal psychological processes.Although Parsons is generally considered a structural functionalist, towards the end of his career, in 1975, he published an article that stated that "functional" and "structural functionalist" were inappropriate ways to describe the character of his theory.From the 1970s, a new generation of sociologists criticized Parsons' theories as socially conservative and his writings as unnecessarily complex. Sociology courses have placed less emphasis on his theories than at the peak of his popularity (from the 1940s to the 1970s). However, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in his ideas.Parsons was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion in American academia. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1949 and served as its secretary from 1960 to 1965.
  • Theda Skocpol (born May 4, 1947) is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. An influential figure in both disciplines, Skocpol is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory." She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. In historical sociology, Skocpol's works and opinions have been associated with the structuralist school. As an example, she argues that social revolutions can best be explained given their relation with specific structures of agricultural societies and their respective states. Such an approach differs greatly from more "behaviorist" ones, which tend to emphasize the role of "revolutionary populations," "revolutionary psychology," and/or "revolutionary consciousness," as determinant factors of revolutionary processes. According to her profile on the Harvard Department of Sociology website, her current research agenda focuses on “U.S. social policy and civic engagement in American democracy, including changes since the 1960s. She has recently launched new projects on the development of U.S. higher education and on the transformations of U.S. federal policies in the Obama era.”
  • Daniel Bell (May 10, 1919 – January 25, 2011) was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He has been described as "one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era." His three best known works are The End of Ideology, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
  • Herbert Marcuse (; German: [maɐ̯ˈkuːzə]; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim (1924–1951), Inge Neumann (1955–1973), and Erica Sherover (1976–1979). In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, historical materialism and entertainment culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.Between 1943 and 1950, Marcuse worked in US government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) where he criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958). After his studies, in the 1960s and the 1970s he became known as the preeminent theorist of the New Left and the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States; some consider him the "father of the New Left".His best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the United States and internationally.
  • Edgar Morin (; French: [mɔʁɛ̃]; born Edgar Nahoum on 8 July 1921) is a French philosopher and sociologist who has been internationally recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought" (pensée complexe), and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. He holds degrees in history, economics, and law. Though less well known in the anglophone world due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Europe, and Latin America.
  • Manuel Castells Oliván (Spanish: [kasˈtels], Catalan: [kəsˈteʎs]; born 9 February 1942) is a Spanish sociologist especially associated with research on the information society, communication and globalization. The 2000–2014 research survey of the Social Sciences Citation Index ranks him as the world's fifth most-cited social science scholar, and the foremost-cited communication scholar.He was awarded the 2012 Holberg Prize, for having "shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society." In 2013 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Sociology.
  • Carol Queen is an American author, editor, sociologist and sexologist active in the sex-positive feminism movement. Queen has written on human sexuality in books such as Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture. She has written a sex tutorial, Exhibitionism for the Shy: Show Off, Dress Up and Talk Hot, as well as erotica, such as the novel The Leather Daddy and the Femme. Queen has produced adult movies, events, workshops and lectures. Queen was featured as an instructor and star in both installments of the Bend Over Boyfriend series about female-to-male anal sex, or pegging. She has also served as editor for compilations and anthologies. She is a sex-positive sex educator in the United States.
  • Constantin Rădulescu-Motru (Romanian pronunciation: [konstanˈtin rəduˈlesku ˈmotru]; born Constantin Rădulescu, he added the surname Motru in 1892; February 15, 1868 – March 6, 1957) was a Romanian philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, logician, academic, dramatist, as well as centre-left nationalist politician with a noted anti-fascist discourse. A member of the Romanian Academy after 1923, he was its vice president in 1935–1938, 1941–1944, and its president between 1938 and 1941.
  • Morris Janowitz (October 22, 1919 – November 7, 1988) 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. Janowitz was the vice-president of the American Sociological Association, receiving their Career of Distinguished Scholarship award, and a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association. Janowitz also founded the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, as well as the journal Armed Forces & Society. He was an early founder of the field of military sociology. His students, such as David R. Segal, Mady Segal, and James Burk are prominent and influential military sociologists.
  • Siegfried Kracauer (; German: [ˈkʁakaʊ̯ɐ]; February 8, 1889 – November 26, 1966) was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. He has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He is notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema.
  • Barrington Moore Jr. (12 May 1913 – 16 October 2005) was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore. He is famous for his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), a comparative study of modernization in Britain, France, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and India. His many other works include Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery (1972) and an analysis of rebellion, Injustice: the Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (1978).
  • Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845. Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a primeval Matriarchal religion or Urreligion. Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th-century theories of matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and "matriarchal studies" in 1970s feminism.
  • Harold Garfinkel (October 29, 1917 – April 21, 2011) was an American sociologist, ethnomethodologist, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology. He is probably best known for his classic book, Studies in Ethnomethodology, which was published in 1967, a collection of articles some of which had previously been published. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program. There was also a collection of 'studies of work' by his students which he edited.
  • James William Loewen (born February 6, 1942) is an American sociologist, historian, and author, best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, which was republished in 2008, and again in 2018.
  • Daniel Grafton Hill III, (November 23, 1923 – June 26, 2003) was a Canadian sociologist, civil servant, human rights specialist, and Black Canadian historian. Born in Independence, Missouri, he grew up in the western United States. In 1948, he graduated with a BA from Howard University. In 1950, he moved to Canada to study sociology at the University of Toronto. He received an M.A. in 1951 and a Ph.D in 1960. From 1955 to 1958, he was a researcher for the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto. From 1958 to 1960, he was Executive Secretary of the North York Social Planning Council. In 1960, he was the assistant director of the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Research Foundation. From 1961 to 1962, he taught in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto. In 1962, he was the first full-time director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. In 1972, he became Ontario Human Rights Commissioner. In 1973, he resigned to found his own human rights consulting firm. From 1984 to 1989, he was the Ontario Ombudsman. He founded the Ontario Black History Society. In 1981, he wrote the book, The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada.In 1993, he was awarded the Order of Ontario. In 1999, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1953, he married Donna Bender, a civil rights activist (1928-2018). They had three children: singer-songwriter Dan Hill, author Lawrence Hill, and poet and novelist Karen Hill. He was the nephew of Violet Hill Whyte.
  • Gavan McDonell is an Australian civil engineer, economist and political sociologist in the fields of national infrastructure policy reform, international development and academic education for advanced sustainability studies. McDonell has directed four public enquiries for different State and Federal governments, three as sole Commissioner under legislation similar to a Royal Commission. (See Public commissions of enquiry below). From the late 1950s to the mid-1990s he was a consultant, adviser and senior official in about forty countries, working on national infrastructure and regional development. (See International Consultancy below). From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, McDonell established in the University of New South Wales, Sydney, one of the first transdiciplinary programs in advanced social and political theory relating to environmental sustainability. This has produced leading contributions in research, policy and governance for science, technology and environment. (See Academic career below). As a senior investment banker in the early 1990s, he wrote the first survey by a Westerner since World War II of the energy, transport and related environmental issues of the eight energy-rich republics of the former Soviet Union in the Caucasus and Central Asia. (See European Bank for Reconstruction and Development below). During the early 2000s he made well known contributions to policy reform for the design and structure of the national electricity markets and grid, the country's most complex infrastructure system. (See National Electricity Market below.)In 1997 McDonell received a Doctor of Engineering from the University of Queensland, the highest academic recognition, rarely awarded, given for original and distinguished contributions of a career. The citation observed that his work marked " ... the emergence of a new professional field which might be called 'the engineering, management and evaluation of large infrastructure systems ... linked with social and political theory and relating human concerns to the environment ... ', and that it had ' ... set policy agendas and legislative programs for longterm change at national and State levels in freight and urban transport, shipping and ports, electricity and energy, and toxic wastes'." In 1991 he was admitted to Fellowship in the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the highest professional award. He is married to Jennifer Uscinski and has four sons-Domininc, Lawrence, Justin, and Benjamin-from a former marriage to Anne Callaghan.
  • John Gibbs St. Clair Drake (January 2, 1911 – June 15, 1990) was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research. While studying at University of Chicago, in 1945 Drake co-authored with Horace R. Cayton, Jr. the work Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, a landmark study of race and urban life. Drake was one of the first African-American faculty members at Roosevelt University in Chicago, at a time when academic opportunities for Black scholars were usually limited to historically black colleges and universities. He continued his research while a professor at Roosevelt for 23 years, before leaving to found the African and African American Studies program at Stanford University.A major element in Drake's career was an interest in Africa and the pan-African movement, which sprang from his dissertation work with immigrants from Africa living in the United Kingdom, and was expanded upon during his later research projects conducted in West Africa. Ultimately he spent years working in the newly independent country of Ghana as an academic and an informal advisor to the national government there, before his return to the United States and his academic career in that country.
  • Edward Franklin Frazier (; September 24, 1894 – May 17, 1962), 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 (1939); 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. In 1948 Frazier was elected as the first black president of the American Sociological Association. He published numerous other books and articles on African-American culture and race relations. In 1950 Frazier helped draft the UNESCO statement The Race Question. Frazier wrote a dozen books in his lifetime, including The Black Bourgeosie, a critique of the black middle class in which he questioned the effectiveness of African-American businesses to produce racial equality.
  • Peter Blau

    Peter Blau

    Peter Michael Blau (February 7, 1918 – March 12, 2002) was an American sociologist and theorist. Born in Vienna, Austria, he immigrated to the United States in 1939. He completed his PhD doctoral thesis with Robert K. Merton at Columbia University in 1952, laying an early theory for the dynamics of bureaucracy. The next year, he was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1953 to 1970. He also taught as Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in Great Britain, as a senior fellow at King's College, and as a Distinguished Honorary professor at Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences which he helped to establish. In 1970 he returned to Columbia University, where he was awarded the lifetime position of Professor Emeritus. From 1988 to 2000 he taught as the Robert Broughton Distinguished Research Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the same department as his wife, Judith Blau, while continuing to commute to New York to meet with graduate students and colleagues. His sociological specialty was in organizational and social structures. He formulated theories relating to many aspects of social phenomena, including upward mobility, occupational opportunity, and heterogeneity. From each of his theories, he deduced an hypothesis which he would test against large scale empirical research. He was one of the first sociological theorists to use high level statistics to develop sociology as a scientific discipline using macro-level empirical data to gird theory. He also produced theories on how population structures can influence human behavior. One of Blau's most important contributions to social theory is his work regarding exchange theory, which explains how small-scale social exchange directly relates to social structures at a societal level. He also was the first to map out the wide variety of social forces, dubbed "Blau Space" by Miller McPherson. This idea was one of the first to take individuals and distribute them along a multidimensional space. Blau-space is still used as a guide by sociologists and has been expanded to include areas of sociology never specifically covered by Blau himself. In 1974 Blau served as the 65th president of the American Sociological Association.
  • Marcello Truzzi

    Marcello Truzzi

    Marcello Truzzi (September 6, 1935 – February 2, 2003) was a professor of sociology at New College of Florida and later at Eastern Michigan University, founding co-chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), a founder of the Society for Scientific Exploration, and director for the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research. Truzzi was an investigator of various protosciences and pseudosciences and, as fellow CSICOP cofounder Paul Kurtz dubbed him "the skeptic's skeptic". He is credited with originating the oft-used phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", though earlier versions existed.
  • Francesco Alberoni

    Francesco Alberoni

    Francesco Alberoni (born 31 December 1929 in Borgonovo Val Tidone, Piacenza) is an Italian journalist and a professor of sociology. He was a board member and senior board member (chairman) of RAI, the Italian state television network, from 2002 to 2005. Alberoni was among the few regular front page writers of Corriere della Sera, Italy's most popular newspaper, which published his articles from 1973 to 2011. He wrote a four-column editorial titled "Public & Private" (begun in 1982) for the Monday edition.
  • Martin Kenney

    Martin Kenney

  • Bernard Lefkowitz, a native of New York City, was an author, sociologist, journalist and investigative reporter.A reporter and assistant editor at the New York Post, Lefkowitz worked for the Peace Corps before becoming an author. Of Lefkowitz's books, which include The Victims, Break-time: Living Without Work in a Nine-to-Five World and Tough Change:Growing Up on Your Own in America, his most famous is probably Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb.This book dealt with the Glen Ridge Rape of a mentally disabled girl by a group of popular high school students and the town (Glen Ridge, New Jersey) that rallied around them. Lauded by The New York Times as a notable book of the year, as well as an Edgar Award finalist, Our Guys was made into a television movie starring Ally Sheedy and Eric Stoltz. Lefkowitz taught journalism at City College, Duke University and Columbia University. He died 21 May 2004 of thymus gland cancer.
  • Stephen A. Kent, is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He researches new religious movements, and has published research on several such groups including the Children of God (also known as The Family), the Church of Scientology, and newer faiths operating in Canada.
  • Gustave Le Bon

    Gustave Le Bon

    Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (French: [ɡystav lə bɔ̃]; 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.A native of Nogent-le-Rotrou, Le Bon qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Paris in 1866. He opted against the formal practice of medicine as a physician, instead beginning his writing career the same year of his graduation. He published a number of medical articles and books before joining the French Army after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Defeat in the war coupled with being a first-hand witness to the Paris Commune of 1871 strongly shaped Le Bon's worldview. He then travelled widely, touring Europe, Asia and North Africa. He analysed the peoples and the civilisations he encountered under the umbrella of the nascent field of anthropology, developing an essentialist view of humanity, and invented a portable cephalometer during his travels. In the 1890s, he turned to psychology and sociology, in which fields he released his most successful works. Le Bon developed the view that crowds are not the sum of their individual parts, proposing that within crowds there forms a new psychological entity, the characteristics of which are determined by the "racial unconscious" of the crowd. At the same time he created his psychological and sociological theories, he performed experiments in physics and published popular books on the subject, anticipating the mass–energy equivalence and prophesising the Atomic Age. Le Bon maintained his eclectic interests up until his death in 1931. Ignored or maligned by sections of the French academic and scientific establishment during his life due to his politically conservative and reactionary views, Le Bon was critical of democracy and socialism. Le Bon's works were influential to such disparate figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini, Sigmund Freud and José Ortega y Gasset, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin.
  • Jack Goldstone

    Jack Goldstone

    Jack A. Goldstone (born September 30, 1953) is an American sociologist, political scientist, and world historian, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 150 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the “California school” in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization. He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.Goldstone is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor of Public Policy and Eminent Scholar in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Arlington Virginia, In 2016 he was the Elman Family Professor of Public Policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Director of the HKUST Institute for Public Policy. In 2013-2015 he was the founding director of the Research Laboratory in Social Macrodynamics at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. He has also worked as a consultant of the US government, for example, serving as chair of the National Research Council's evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Research Laboratory in Political Demography and Macrosocial Dynamics at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. His academic awards include the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, for 'Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,' and the Myron Weiner award for lifetime scholarly achievement from the International Studies Association. He has also won the Arnaldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, and seven awards for 'best article' in the fields of Comparative/Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements. He has won fellowships from the Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Australian Research School of Social Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Sociological Research Association. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Visiting Lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, the Crayborough Lecturer at Leiden University, and a Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar.
  • Richard Sennett

    Richard Sennett

    Richard Sennett (born 1 January 1943) is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world. He has been a Fellow of The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
  • Ezra Feivel Vogel (traditional Chinese: 傅高義; simplified Chinese: 傅高义; pinyin: Fù Gāoyì; born July 11, 1930) is a Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University and has written on Japan, China, and Asia generally.
  • Orlando Patterson (born 5 June 1940) is a Jamaican-born American historical and cultural sociologist known for his work regarding issues of race in the United States, as well as the sociology of development. His book Freedom, Volume One, or Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.
  • Karl Mannheim (born Károly Manheim, 27 March 1893 – 9 January 1947) was a influential German sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He was a founding father of classical sociology, as well as idea of sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is known for Ideology and Utopia (1929) wherein he argues that ideologies are representative of the true nature of a society, and that, in trying to achieve a utopia, the dogmas of ideology affect the intellectual integrity of theories of philosophy and theories of history.
  • Eugene (Eugenios) Trivizas, (born 1946) is a Greek sociologist and writer of children's books. For his lasting contribution as a children's writer, Trivizas was a finalist for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006.
  • Nathan Glazer

    Nathan Glazer

    Nathan Glazer (February 25, 1923 – January 19, 2019) was an American sociologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and for several decades at Harvard University. He was a co-editor of the now-defunct policy journal The Public Interest.Known for books such as Beyond the Melting Pot, which deal with race and ethnicity, Glazer was critical of some of the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s. He was often considered neoconservative in his thinking on domestic policy, but remained a Democrat. He described himself as "indifferent" to the neoconservative label with which he is most associated and remarked that it was an appellation not of his choosing.
  • Saskia Sassen (born January 5, 1947) is a Dutch-American sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Sassen coined the term global city.
  • Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Portuguese: [feʁˈnɐ̃dʊ ẽˈʁiki kaʁˈdozʊ]; born June 18, 1931), also known by his initials FHC ([ɛfjaɡaˈse]), is a Brazilian sociologist, professor and politician who served as the 34th President of Brazil from January 1, 1995 to December 31, 2002. He was the first Brazilian president to be reelected for a subsequent term. An accomplished scholar noted for research on slavery and political theory, Cardoso has earned many honors including the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation (2000) and the Kluge Prize from the US Library of Congress (2012).
  • Joyce Ann Ladner (born October 12, 1943) is an American civil rights activist, author, civil servant and sociologist.
  • José Celso Barbosa

    José Celso Barbosa

    Dr. José Celso Barbosa Alcala (July 27, 1857 – September 21, 1921) was a Puerto Rican physician, sociologist and political leader. Known as the father of the Statehood for Puerto Rico movement, Barbosa was the first Puerto Rican, and one of the first persons of African descent to earn a medical degree in the United States.After his return to the island in 1880, Barbosa made many contributions to medicine and public health. He initiated an early form of health insurance, encouraging employers to pay a fee to cover future needs of their employees. In 1900 Barbosa was among the first five Puerto Rican leaders appointed to the Executive Cabinet under Governor Charles H. Allen, in the first civilian government organized by the United States. He served in the Cabinet until 1917. From 1917–1921, Barbosa served in the first elected Puerto Rican Senate.
  • Mahdi Elmandjra

    Mahdi Elmandjra

    Mahdi Elmandjra (Arabic: مهدي المنجرة‎‎; 13 March 1933 – 13 June 2014) was a Moroccan futurologist, economist and sociologist.
  • Marc Williams

    Marc Williams

  • Marcel Mauss

    Marcel Mauss

    Marcel Mauss (French: [mos]; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed 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 book is The Gift (1925).
  • William H. Whyte

    William H. Whyte

    William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte (October 1, 1917 – January 12, 1999) was an American urbanist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher. After his book about corporate culture The Organization Man (1956) sold over two million copies, Whyte turned his attention to the study of human behaviour in urban settings. He published several books on the topic, including The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980).
  • Jonathan Dollimore

    Jonathan Dollimore

    Jonathan G Dollimore (born 1948) is an English social theorist in the fields of Renaissance literature (especially drama), gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), art, censorship, history of ideas, death studies, decadence, and cultural theory.
  • Ziya Gökalp

    Ziya Gökalp

    Mehmed Ziya Gökalp (23 March 1876 – 25 October 1924) was a Turkish sociologist, writer, poet, and political activist. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that reinstated constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("sky hero"), which he retained for the rest of his life. As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the negation of Islamism, pan-Islamism, and Ottomanism as ideological, cultural, and sociological identifiers. In a 1936 publication, sociologist Niyazi Berkes described Gökalp as "the real founder of Turkish sociology, since he was not a mere translator or interpreter of foreign sociology."Gökalp's work was particularly influential in shaping the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; his influence figured prominently in the development of Kemalism, and its legacy in the modern Republic of Turkey. Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly by the sociological view of Émile Durkheim, Gökalp rejected Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism. He advocated a re-Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, by promoting Turkish language and culture to all Ottoman citizenry. He found Greeks, Armenians and Jews to be a foreign body in the national Turkish state. His thought, which popularized Pan-Turkism and Turanism, has been described as a "cult of nationalism and modernization". His nationalist ideals espoused a de-identification with Ottoman Turkey's nearby Arab neighbors, in lieu of a supernational Turkish (or pan-Turkic) identity with "a territorial Northeast-orientation [to] Turkic peoples".
  • Michael Mann

    Michael Mann

    Michael Mann FBA (born 1942) is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971. Mann is currently visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge. Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex after graduation. He then became reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal. In 1984, Mann published The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results in the European Journal of Sociology. Fellow scholars responded to Mann's theoretical construct in Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America (2016).Mann's works include The Sources of Social Power (four volumes) and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century. He also published Incoherent Empire, in which he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment in neo-imperialism. The last two volumes of The Sources of Social Power, Global Empires and Revolution 1890-1945 and Globalizations 1945-2011, were published by CUP in 2012 and 2013 respectively. Mann's work has been subject of several books, including J.A. Hall and R. Schroder (eds). The Anatomy of Power: Social Theory of Michael Mann, (Cambridge UP, 2006) and R. Schroder (ed.) Global Powers: Michael Mann's Anatomy of 20th century and Beyond, (Cambridge UP, 2016). Mann was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.
  • Hedwig "Hedy" d'Ancona (Dutch pronunciation: [ɦɛdʋix ɦeːdi dɑŋkoːnaː]; born 1 October 1937) is a retired Dutch politician of the Labour Party (PvdA) and political activist. d'Ancona worked as a television producer for the VARA from June 1962 until September 1965 and as a researcher at the University of Amsterdam from September 1965 until November 1972. d'Ancona also worked as a political activist in the feminism movement and co-founded the feminist action group Man Woman Society in October 1968. d'Ancona worked as editor-in-chief of the feminist magazine Opzij from November 1972 until September 1981. d'Ancona was elected as a Member of the Senate after the Senate election of 1974, taking office on 17 September 1974. After the election of 1981 d'Ancona was appointed as State Secretary for Social Affairs and Employment in the Cabinet Van Agt II, taking office on 11 September 1981. The Cabinet Van Agt II fell just seven months into its term on 12 May 1982 and continued to serve in a demissionary capacity until it was replaced by the caretaker Cabinet Van Agt III on 29 May 1982. d'Ancona returned as Member of the Senate after the resignation of Clovis Cnoop Koopmans, taking office on 31 August 1982. In June 1983 d'Ancona announced that she would not stand for the Senate election of 1983 and continued to serve until the end of the parliamentary term on 13 September 1983. d'Ancona Rooy was elected as a Member of the European Parliament after the European Parliament election of 1984, taking office on 24 July 1984. After the election of 1989 d'Ancona was appointed as Minister of Welfare, Health and Culture in the Cabinet Lubbers III, taking office on 7 November 1989. In April 1994 d'Ancona announced that she would not stand for the election of 1994 but wanted tot return to the European Parliament. On 16 July 1994 d'Ancona resigned as Minister of Welfare, Health and Culture after she was elected again as a Member of the European Parliament, serving from 19 July 1994 until 20 July 1999.
  • Ludwik Dorn

    Ludwik Dorn

    Ludwik Stanisław Dorn ([ˈludvʲik ˈdɔrn], born 5 June 1954 in Warsaw) is a Polish conservative politician, former Deputy Prime Minister and member of Sejm elected on 5 November 2007.
  • Florestan Fernandes

    Florestan Fernandes

    Florestan Fernandes (22 July 1920 – 10 August 1995) was a Brazilian sociologist and politician. He was also elected federal deputy twice.
  • Bruno Latour

    Bruno Latour

    Bruno Latour (; French: [latuʁ]; born 22 June 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became Professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006–2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017. He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.Latour is best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation, 1993), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987). Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist approaches to the philosophy of science, Latour has diverged significantly from such approaches. He is best known for withdrawing from the subjective/objective division and re-developing the approach to work in practice. Latour said in 2017 that he is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that some of the authority of science needs to be regained. Along with Michel Callon and John Law, Latour is one of the primary developers of actor–network theory (ANT), a constructionist approach influenced by the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the generative semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, and (more recently) the sociology of Émile Durkheim's rival Gabriel Tarde. Latour's monographs earned him a 10th place among most-cited book authors in the humanities and social sciences for the year 2007.
  • Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill (July 15, 1941 – August 21, 2010), who normally went only by his surname, Fogwill, was an Argentine short story writer, novelist, and businessman. He was a distant relative of the novelist Charles Langbridge Morgan. He was the author of Malvinas Requiem, one of the first narratives to deal with the Falklands War. Fogwill died on August 21, 2010, from a pulmonary dysfunction.
  • Alessandro Orsini

    Alessandro Orsini

    Alessandro Orsini is an Italian sociologist. He is a Professor of political sociology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and also teaches at the LUISS “Guido Carli” University of Rome.
  • Nikolas Rose

    Nikolas Rose

    Nikolas Rose is a prominent British sociologist and social theorist. He is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (previously Social Science, Health & Medicine) at King's College London, having joined King's in January 2012 to found this new Department. Previously he was the James Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, director and founder of LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society from 2002 to 2011, and Head of the LSE Department of Sociology (2002–2006). He was previously Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he had been Head of the Department of Sociology, Pro-Warden for Research and Head of the Goldsmiths Centre for Urban and Community Research and Director of a major evaluation of urban regeneration in South East London.
  • Lynn McDonald

    Lynn McDonald

    Lynn McDonald (born July 15, 1940) is a university professor, climate activist and former Member of Parliament. She is a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and was the New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament for Broadview—Greenwood from 1982 until 1988. McDonald is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Guelph.
  • Evandro Costa Milhomen

    Evandro Costa Milhomen

    EVANDRO MILHOMEN http://www.camara.gov.br/internet/deputado/Dep_Detalhe.asp?id=520258PCdoB /AP - Gabinete: 419 - Anexo: IV - Fone: 3215-5419 - Fax: 3215-2419dep.evandromilhomen@camara.gov.br