Index Of Sociologists

Index Of Sociologists

There have been many influential sociologists who have contributed to the development of sociological thought.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith is the Father of Economics and also the Father of Capitalism. Adam Smith wrote the classic works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Both the books are considered earliest modern works of economics. Adam Smith introduced his theory of absolute advantage. Adam Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow, teaching moral philosophy and during this time, wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Adam Smith laid the foundations of classical free market economics, entering his name in every index of Sociologists. 

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe Brown

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was an English social anthropologist who developed the theory of structural functionalism and coadaptation. Radcliffe-Brown founded the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford. Radcliffe-Brown brought French sociology, and David Émile Durkheim to British anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown argued for a 'natural science of society'.

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown claimed that there was an independent role for social anthropology here, separate from psychology, though not in conflict with it. This was because psychology was to be the study of individual mental processes, while social anthropology was to study processes of interaction between people.

Alfred Schutz

Alfred Schutz was born in Austria, but emigrated to the United States in 1939 where he taught and wrote part-time, only taking a full-time academic post in 1952. His main publications are: Collected Papers (1971); The Phenomenology of the Social World (1972); and, with T. Luckman, The Structures of the Life- World (1974). Alfred Schutz was influential in the development of phenomenological sociology in the English-speaking world. In a dispute with Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schutz did much to advance and clarify the problems of action theory and Verstehen. His posthumous works included an analysis of the role of relevance in structuring the life-world (Schutz, 1970).

Alfred Schutz was primarily interested in three problems: he wanted to construct an adequate theory of social action, partly based on a critique of M. Weber; he carried out a series of investigations into the constitution of the life-world; he tried to investigate the manner in which a sociology which took human action as important could be scientific.

Husserl's theory of intentionality and his idea of intersubjectivity and of the Lebenswelt were to guide his thought and to give it its specific character. 'Experiencing Multiple Realities: Alfred Schutz’s Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning' offers a theoretical investigation into the general problem of reality as a multiplicity of ‘finite provinces of meaning’, as developed in his works. 

A critical introduction to Schutz’s sociology of multiplex realities as well as a sympathetic re-reading and reconstruction of his project.

Alfred Schutz studied law and the social sciences in Vienna nounder such famous scholars as Ludwig von Mises, Othmar Spann, Hans Kelsen, Friedrich von Wiesser. 

Alfred Schutz published his main work in 1932: Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Done Einleitung in die verstehende (verstehen) Soziologie. In this work he undertook to trace the origin of categories peculiar to the social sciences in the fundamental facts of the life of consciousness, thus establishing a connection between Weber's verstehende Soziologie and Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.

The methodological aspects of the sciences of man which were familiar to him were circumscribed by the critique of naturalism, the reflection of conscious life on itself, the understanding of significations, ideation.

It became Alfred Schutz's aim to establish a rigorous philosophical foundation for these aspects and he pursued this ideal throughout his life.

On Husserl's invitation, Alfred Schutz went to Freiburg to join in investigations with a group of phenomenologists in whose work the founder of phenomenological sociology placed much hope. Husserl appreciated the collaboration of the young philosopher and asked him to become his assistant.

Alfred Weber

Alfred Weber was born in Erfurt and raised in Charlottenburg.

Alfred Weber was a German economist, sociologist and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography. 

Alfred Weber lived during the period when sociology became a separate field of science. 

Alfred Weber contributed theories for analyzing social change in Western civilization as a confluence of civilization, social processes and culture.

Greatly influenced by the work of Émile Durkheim, Alfred Weber saw institutions as the key to maintaining the global social order of a society, analogous to the organs of a body, and his studies of social function examine how customs aid in maintaining the overall stability of a society. 

Weber’s Location Triangle (1909): Alfred Weber’s work is considered the foundation of modern location theories and a basic P-median location problem. One of its core assumptions is that firms will choose a location to minimize their total costs.

Alice S Rossi

Alice S. Rossi was a feminist and sociologist. Rossi, along with a group that included Betty Friedan, founded the National Organization for Women. 

Alice S. Rossi focused mainly on the status of women at work and in the family. Her writings helped to build the foundations of the feminist movement. Alice S. Rossi's early advocacy of abortion and reproductive rights caused her to gain a lot of national attention. One of her main academic pursuits was the study of people's lifecourse from youth to age, particularly in the case of women. Professor Alice S. Rossi was the 74th president of the American Sociological Association.

Her most influential feminist article was “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal.” First presented in 1963 at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, it was published the next year in the academy's journal Daedalus. 

Professor Alice S. Rossi argued that for women motherhood had become a full-time occupation, a state of affairs that hurt not only women but also the larger society in which they lived.

For the well-being of both the women and the culture, Alice S. Rossi wrote, parity of the sexes is essential. This article's publication coincided with the publication the same year of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which dealt with similar issues. Professor Rossi's argument was considered subversive at the time.

Rossi argued that the cultural divide between men and women was not the product of socialization alone, as the prevailing view held, but was partly rooted in inborn biological differences between the sexes. 

Professor Rossi joined the University of Massachusetts faculty, where she was appointed the Harriet Martineau professor of Sociology. She remained there from 1974 until her retirement in 1991, at which point she became an emerita professor.

Alice S. Rossi was called a monster, an unnatural woman and an unfit mother, as she recalled in interviews afterward. Her article can be found in the anthology “Life Cycle and Achievement in America” (Harper & Row, 1969), edited by Rose Laub Coser.

Ali Shariati 

Ali Shariati Mazinani was an Iranian revolutionary and sociologist who focused on the sociology of religion. 

Ali Shariati Mazinani was the most influential Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century and has been called the ideologue of the Iranian Revolution.

Alvin Ward Gouldner

Alvin Ward Gouldner was Professor of sociology at Amsterdam and Max Weber Professor of Sociology at Washington University. His early works Patterns of Industrial Bureaucry and Wildcat Strike explored aspects of Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy in relation to strikes, management aud control. Alvin Ward Gouldner wa concerned with the possibilities for progressive social change, with the role of intellectuals in directing and contributing to change in The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979). Alvin Ward Gouldner called upon sociologists to be more reflexive about their theories and role in society in The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (1976).

Andre Gunder Frank

Andre Gunder Frank was a sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory and world-systems theory. Gunder Frank  rejected Marx's stages of history.

Andrew M Greeley

Andrew M. Greeley was a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago. He published a number of academic works that included Unsecular Man, The Persistence of Religion (1972) and The American Catholic: A Social Portrait (1977).

Anthony Giddens

Anthony Giddens is known for his theory of structuration and his view of modern societies. He is the author of more than 34 books. Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities.

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist philosopher and writer. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937.

Arnold Gehlen

Arnold Gehlen was a conservative German philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist.

Alva Erskine Belmont

Alva Erskine Belmont was a women's suffrage activist. She was known for her energy, strong opinions, and willingness to challenge convention. She was elected president of the NWP, an office she held until her death.

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science. Comte's work attempted to remedy the social disorder caused by the French Revolution, which he believed indicated imminent transition to a new form of society. He sought to establish a new social doctrine based on science, which he labelled positivism.

Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour, French sociologist and anthropologist was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.

Charles Horton Cooley

Cooley's looking-glass self describes the process wherein individuals base their sense of self on how they believe others view them. Using social interaction as a type of “mirror,” people use the judgments they receive from others to measure their own worth, values, and behavior. Behavior and self esteem are dictated by a person's predictions of how they’ll be perceived by others.

Charles Spurgeon Johnson

Johnson's 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. He was a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. 

Charles Tilly

Charles Tilly has been described as "the founding father of 21st-century sociology". Tilly published on topics such as urban sociology, state formation, democracy, social movements, and inequality.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a humanist, an advocate for social reform, and an eugenicist. She launched her career as an author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, "The Yellow Wallpaper." 

She was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics.

Gilman was an utopian feminist a kind served as a role model for future generations of feminists.

Chester Irving Barnard

Chester Irving Barnard's book, The Functions of the Executive, sets out a theory of organization and of the functions of executives in organizations. 

Chester Irving Barnard viewed organizations as systems of cooperation of human activity, According to Barnard, organizations are generally not long-lived because they do not meet the two criteria necessary for survival: effectiveness and efficiency.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. Claude Levi Strauss's observations culminated in his book Tristes Tropique which established him as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. 

Claude Levi-Strauss's ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."

Clifford James Geertz

Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist and sociologist, who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology. Clifford James Geertz was considered the most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States.

Clifford James Geertz served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Corrado Gini

Corrado Gini was an Italian statistician and demographer who developed the Gini Coefficient, a measure of the income inequality in a society. Gini was a proponent of organicism. Corrado Gini's organicist theories of nations and natality (birth rate) had a profound impact.

Corrado Gini influenced policies of Italian Fascism. As a eugenicist, Gini led an expedition to survey Polish populations, among them the Karaites.

Gini was throughout the 20s a supporter of fascism, and expressed his hope that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy would emerge as victors in WW2. He never supported any measure of exclusion of the Jews. Corrado Gini was a proponent of organicism and saw nations as organic in nature.

Daniel Bell

Daniel Bell was an American sociologist and professor at Harvard University.

Daniel Bell is known for his contributions to the study of post-industrial thesis. 

Daniel Bell has been hailed as "one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era". Daniel Bell's three best known works are The End of Ideology, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

Kerry Townsend has stated, "Frank Tannenbaum’s theory, dramatization of evil, explains the making of a criminal and the lure of criminal behavior."

Daniel Defert

Daniel Defert was a French sociologist and HIV/AIDS activist. Partner to the late Paul Michel Foucault, Defert co-founded France's first AIDS advocacy group, AIDES, following Foucault's death from complications related to the disease. Defert is the heir to Foucault's estate. It was Foucault's death from AIDS, a disease about which little was known at the time, that led Daniel Defert to enter the field of AIDS activism. After the death of his partner Michel Foucault from complications related to AIDS, Defert founded AIDES, the first AIDS awareness organization in France. The name invokes the French word for "help" as well as the English acronym for the disease. Defert served as president of AIDES from 1984 to 1991.

David Emile Durkheim

Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.

David Hume

Hume crcreat a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places Hume with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiricist.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859 – 1938) was a German philosopher of Jewish origin, who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, 

Edmund Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl's thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.

Edvard Alexander Westermarck

Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. His thesis, The History of Human Marriage, was first published as a book in 1891. Edvard Alexander Westermarck critiqued Christian institutions and Christian ideas on the grounds that they lacked foundation. 

Edvard Alexander Westermarck was also a moral relativist and in his two-volume The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas he argued that moral judgements are not rational but are based on emotions and on social approval or disapproval.

Edward Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier was an American sociologist and author. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States in 1939. The dissertation analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. 

The Negro Family in the United States was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. The Negro Family in the United States was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.

Edwin Hardin Sutherland

Edwin Hardin Sutherland was an American sociologist. He is considered as one of the most influential criminologists of the 20th century. Edwin Hardin Sutherland was a sociologist of the symbolic interactionist school of thought and is well known for defining white-collar crime and differential association, a general theory of crime and delinquency. Sutherland earned his Ph.D. in sociology from University of Chicago.

Emily Greene Balch

Emily Greene Balch was an American economist and sociologist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration, as well as reduce juvenile delinquency. She began collaborating with Jane Addams of Chicago. 

Emily Greene Balch became a central leader of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Emily Greene Balch won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. Erich Fromm was one among distinguished sociologists.

Eileen Vartan Barker

Eileen Vartan Barker has dedicated most of her research career to understanding a number of concepts surrounding religion, especially cults and new religious movements and the curious phenomena of brainwashing. Eileen Vartan Barker set this up in relation with the Church of England and the British government. Most of Eileen Vartan Barker's studies and published work concern the Moonies, but a lot of her concepts can apply to any other cult or religion where brainwashing could be used as a tool of control and dependency. Eileen Vartan Barker figures among eminent sociologists of the world.

Erving Goffman

Among distinguished sociologists, Erving Goffman has made a major contribution to the study of social interaction, encounters, gatherings and small groups in Behaviour in Public Places (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), and Relations in Public (1971). Erving Goffman has also made important contributions to role analysis in Encounters (1961). Erving Goffman's main concern has been with the constituents of fleeting, chance or momentary encounters in everyday life. To grasp the orderliness of such meetings, Goffman employed drama as an analogy for the staging of social meetings in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).

Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm had already studied sociology when Hitler rose to power in Germany. Erich Fromm moved to New York where he was able to continue his research. As well as a sociologist, he was also a psychologist and while in the USA, he became a vocal critic of the work of Sigmund Freud. As an Orthodox Jew, Erich Fromm focused on the meaning behind biblical stories, particularly the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Yet Erich Fromm departed in that he saw their actions as both a virtue and indicative of human independence of thought and curiosity. Erich Fromm was one among distinguished sociologists.

Ernest Watson Burgess

Ernest Watson Burgess was a Canadian-American who was into urban sociology. He was a University of Chicago faculty member. Ernest Watson Burgess was hired as an urban sociologist at the University of Chicago. Burgess served as the 24th President of the American Sociological Association. Burgess has been credited with the birth of actuarial dangerousness prediction (Harcourt, 2006). 

Ernest Watson Burgess collaborated with sociologist Robert Park to write a textbook called Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park & Burgess, 1921). This book was the most influential sociology texts ever written. People at the time referred to this book as the Bible of Sociology. Introduction to the Science of Sociology discussed topics such as the history of sociology, human nature, investigating problems, social interaction, competition, conflicts, and assimilation.

Eugen Ehrlich

Eugen Ehrlich was an Austrian legal scholar and sociologist of law. Eugen Ehrlich is widely regarded as one of the founders of the modern field of sociology of law. Ehrlich's experience of the Bukovina's legal culture, where Austrian law and sharply contrasting local custom seemed to co-exist, caused him to question the hierarchical notions of law propounded by such theorists as Hans Kelsen. Ehrlich noted that legal theories that recognized law only as a sum of statutes and court decisions gave an inadequate view of the legal reality of a community.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory. Her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published several books considered "groundbreaking" in the field of queer theory, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Tendencies (1993). Her works reflect an interest in a range of issues, including queer performativity; experimental critical writing; the works of Marcel Proust; non-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Queer culture is LGBT subculture.

Fei Xiaotong

Fei Xiaotong was a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist. Fei was a pioneering researcher and professor of sociology and anthropology, and his studies in the study of China's ethnic groups as well as a social activism was well received.

Fei Xiaotong' works were instrumental in laying a solid foundation for the development of sociological and anthropological studies in China, as well as in introducing social and cultural phenomena of China to the international community.

Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta

Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta was a Nigerian-born novelist. Her works explore the tension between tradition and modernity. She has been characterized as "the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948".

Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). 

Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta features at number 98 of 100 women recognised in August 2018 by BBC History Magazine as having changed the world. On 21 July 2019, which would have been Emecheta's 75th birthday, Google commemorated her life with a Doodle.

Florian Witold Znaniecki

Florian Witold Znaniecki was a Polish philosopher and sociologist. He shifted his focus from philosophy to sociology. He is a major figure in the history of Polish and American sociology, the founder of Polish academic sociology, and of an entire school of thought in sociology. 

Florian Witold Znaniecki won recognition as co-author, with William I. Thomas, of the study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), which is considered the foundati jion of modern empirical sociology. Florian Witold Znaniecki made major contributions to sociological theory, introducing terms such as humanistic coefficient and culturalism. He was the 44th President of the American Sociological Association (for the year 1954.

Friedrich Engels

Among distinguished sociologists, Friedrich Engels was a German-English social scientist and father of Marxist theory, along with Karl Marx. The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), was based on personal observations and research, a description of working-class life in industrializing England. In 1848 Friedrich Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto (1848) with Karl Marx, and also helped Marx financially to do research and write Das Kapital. The Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to write a pamphlet explaining the principles of communism. This became The Manifesto of the Communist Party, better known as the Communist Manifesto. It was first published on 21 February 1848 and ends with the famous phrase: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche has been read as the precursor of such varied phenomena as Nazism and postmodernism. Friedrich Nietzsche became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24.

Nietzsche was outraged by the lack of reflexivity among philosophers and scientists who failed to apply to their own thoughts the rigorous questioning they applied to those of others, a reaction which led him twao dispute the supposed rationalism, scientism, and humanism of modern Western societies.

Friedrich Pollock

Friedrich Pollock was a German social scientist and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist theory. Friedrich Pollock was educated in finance 1911 to 1915. During this time he met Max Horkheimer, with whom he became a lifelong friend.

Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals, the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation.

Gabriel Tarde was a prominent contemporary critic of David Emile Durkheim's sociology, but Durkheim's sociology overshadowed Tarde's insights, and it was not until U.S. scholars, such as the Chicago School, took up his theories that they became famous.

George Berkeley

George Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called immaterialism, later referred to as subjective idealism. Immaterialism denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are ideas perceived by the minds and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.

George Berkeley is known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.

George Berkeley took part in efforts to create a home for the city's abandoned children. The Foundling Hospital was founded by Royal Charter in 1739, and George Berkeley is listed as one of its original governors.

George Herbert Mead

George Herbert Mead was a philosopher, sociologist and psychologist. Among distinguished sociologists, George Herbert Mead, through his lectures, came to have a profound effect on the development of symbolic interactionism.

George Herbert Mead's lecture notes were posthumously published in a number of major volumes - Mind, Self and Society, The Philosophy of the Act and The Philosophy of the Present. 

George Herbert Mead's work on symbolic interactionism are the philosophy of pragmatism and social behaviorism. Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of George Herbert Mead's influences can be identified.

Georges Eugène Sorel

Georges Eugène Sorel was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, and later journalist. Georges Eugène Sorel has inspired theories and movements grouped under the name of Sorelianism. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson, and William James.

Georges Eugène Sorel's notion of the power of myth in collective agency inspired socialism, anarchism, Marxism, and Fascism. Together with his defense of violence, it is the contribution for which he is most often remembered.

George Ritzer, Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, and author who studies globalization, metatheory, patterns of consumption, and modern and postmodern social theory.

George Ritzer's major areas of interest are sociological theories and the sociology of work. George Ritzer's idea of McDonaldization is an extension of Max Weber's classical theory of the rationalization of modern society and culture. George Ritzer applied this idea McDonalization to an influential social system in the twenty-first century McDonald's.

George Ritzer argues that McDonald's restaurants have become the better example of current forms of instrumental rationality and its ultimately irrational and harmful consequences on people.

George Ritzer's main theoretical interests lie in metatheory as well as in the theory of rationalization. In metatheory he has written Matatheorizing in Sociology (1991) and earlier books Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science (1975, 1980) and Toward an Integrated Sociological Paradigm (1981). He has written a number of books on rationalization such as Expressing America.

Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel wrote extensively on aesthetics, epistemology, the philosophy of history as well as sociology. Among distinguished sociologists, Georg Simmel's solution was to picture society as a web of social interactions between people.

Georg Simmel's work on the metropolis was a precursor of urban sociology, symbolic interactionism and social network analysis. Both Simmel and Weber's nonpositivist theory would inform the eclectic critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Gerhard Lenski

Gerhard Emmanuel Lenski was an American sociologist known for contributions to the sociology of religion, social inequality, and introducing the ecological-evolutionary theory. 

Gerhard Lenski spent much of his career as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gerhard Lenski was also President of the Southern Sociological Society, 1977–78 and elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lenski was awarded the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award by the American Sociological Association. Gerhard Lenski defined religion as "a system of beliefs about the nature of force(s) ultimately shaping man's destiny and the practices associated therewith, shared by the members of a group.

Gustave Le Bon

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon was a French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics.

Gustave Le Bon is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is a seminal work on crowd psychology. 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.

James Samuel Coleman

James Samuel Coleman and his theory of social capital. He believed that social capital is useful for the cognitive or social development of a child or young person.

James Samuel Coleman discusses three main types of capital: human, physical, and social. Human capital is an individual's skills, knowledge, and experience, which determine their value in society. Physical capital originates from the creation of tools to facilitate production.

In addition to social capital, the three types of investments create the three main aspects of society's exchange of capital.

According to James Samuel Coleman, social capital and human capital are often complementary. By having certain skill sets, experiences, and knowledge, an individual can gain social status and so receive more social capital.

With the exchange of capital, comes James Samuel Coleman's theories on obligations and expectations. He describes the situation of doing favors for someone as "credit slips." Should an individual need a favor, he is essentially giving someone else a credit slip, which signifies that they will be paid back for their goods and/or services. There needs to be a level of trustworthiness in a social environment to be able to believe the obligation will be met. Also believed that the individual needs to take into account the extent of the obligation.

Jane Addams

Jane Addams is seen as a quite remarkable person for her valuable contribution to the discipline. Jane Addams was also a peace protester, a member of the Anti Imperialist League and started a Settlement House in the 1880s after reading inspiring Christian literature and travelling to London to visit Toynbee Hall. 

Jane Addams came to understand the vital part they played in cultural connections and to integrating settlers into 19th century America.

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard's works are often associated with postmodernism, specifically post-structuralism. Jean Baudrillard was originally critical of the neglect of consumption in Marxist economic theory. 

Jean Baudrillard later turned to the analysis of the production, exchange and consumption of signs and symbols in a consumer society.

Jean Baudrillard argues that the electronic media of communication falsify social relations which become merely simulations of social reality.

Jane Adams was concerned to understand the nature of mass society and mass communication mass society. Because social reality is a simulation, he claims that society becomes hyperreal.

Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary Continental philosophy and author of 26 books and many articles.

Lyotard was a director of the International College of Philosophy which was founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt.

"I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages. 

A case of differend between two parties takes place when the regulation of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom." - Lyotard, Jean-François (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. University of Minnesota Press.

Jean Piaget

According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget was "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing." This then led to the emergence of the study of development as a major sub-discipline in psychology. By the end of the 20th century, Piaget was second only to B. F. Skinner as the most cited psychologist of that era.

Jeremy Bentham

Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong."

González 2012, p. 81 writes, "In sum, with Hume's agnosticism and Bentham's atheism, the fundamental voluntarist thesis about the gulf between the divine and the human mind reaches new depths, and this serves to reinforce and radicalize the rejection, begun by Pufendorf, of Grotian rights-theory as the appropriate means of formulating the conventionalist theory of the moral life."

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. Jeremy Bentham is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Jeremy Bentham was a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. Jeremy Bentham advocated individual and economic freedom, freedom of expression, equality of condition and equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and also the decriminalising of homosexual acts.

Bentham was a sharp critic of legal fictions. Jeremy Bentham was an atheist. Crimmins 1990, p. 283 notes, "Making allowance for Adams's cautious phrasing, this is a concise statement of Bentham's secular positivism, but it is also important to note the conviction with which Bentham held his atheism." Jeremy Bentham contrbuted immensely to society and atheism.

Jeremy Rifkin

Jeremy Rifkin is the architect of the Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change.

The Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and now is being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission.

The Huffington Post reported from Beijing in October 2015 that "Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has not only read Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Third Industrial Revolution, but taken it to heart", he and his colleagues having incorporated ideas from this book into the core of the country's thirteenth Five-Year Plan.

According to EurActiv, "Jeremy Rifkin is an American economist and author whose best-selling Third Industrial Revolution arguably provided the blueprint for Germany's transition to a low-carbon economy, and China's strategic acceptance of climate policy."

Jeremy Rifkin is an economic and social theorist. Jeremy Rifkin published The Third Industrial Revolution; How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. The book was a New York Times best-seller, and has been translated into 19 languages. 500,000 copies were printed in China.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the newly-elected premier of China, Li Keqiang is a fan of Rifkin and had "told his state scholars to pay close attention" to Jeremy Rifkin's book. Jeremy Rifkin's 2004 book, The European Dream, was an international bestseller and winner of the 2005 Corine International Book Prize in Germany for the best economics book of the year.

Jessie Shirley Bernard

We can sum up her contribution to sociology in her own words: "I am concerned, as any fair-minded person must be, with the effects of sex, sex typing and sexism on the position of women in our profession and in our society; but I am also concerned, as any dedicated sociologist must be, with its effects on our discipline as well. Important as are the costs to women of the male bias in sociology, on which a considerable literature exists, I am concerned here not with them but rather with the costs of this bias to the discipline itself. I am not, therefore asking what sociology can do for women - for example, by filling in the gaps in our knowledge about them, itself a significant contribution - but rather what women (and sympathetic male colleagues) can do for sociology."

Jessie Shirley Bernard was a forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive.

John Locke

John Locke is known as the "Father of Liberalism". John Locke is considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon. John Locke is also equally important to social contract theory. 

John Locke's work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. John Locke is recognized as the founder of British empiricism and the author of the first systematic exposition and defense of political liberalism.

John Maynard Keynes

When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it stated that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." 

The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." John Maynard Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.

Keynes ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian Economics.

John Maynard Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was published in 1936. John Maynard Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II.

Keynes argued that aggregate demand, or the total spending in the economy, determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment.

John Montgomery Cooper

John Montgomery Cooper was an American priest, anthropologist, and sociologist. He was a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America and from 1934 to 1949 served as chairman of the first Department of Anthropology in a Catholic university.

Cooper, in his anthropological fieldwork, specialized in studying the Indians of South America and Native Americans of North America.

Cooper founded the academic journal Primitive Man, which was renamed Anthropological Quarterly in 1953. In a hearing before the United States Senate in 1945, To Permit all people from India residing in the United States to be Naturalized, Cooper recorded that: "The people of India are predominantly Caucasoid. Their features, hair texture, hairiness, the shape of the nose, mouth, and so on, are all distinctly Caucasoid".

His original fieldwork was in the Tête de Boule of Ottawa. John Montgomery Cooper took research trips to study Native American tribes who spoke Algonquian languages, making several visits to the Great Plains and northeastern Canada.

From his studies there, Cooper wrote many articles about Algonquian culture, customs, and religion. Cooper developed the theory that both the South American and North American Indians were "marginal peoples" who were cultural relics from prehistoric times and had been displaced by subsequent migrations into less desirable living areas. He first publicized this theory in his 1941 book Temporal Sequence and the Marginal Cultures.

José Carlos Mariátegui

Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) is still widely read in Latin America, and called "one of the broadest, deepest, and most enduring works of the Latin American century".

José Carlos Mariátegui, a self-taught Marxist, insisted that a socialist revolution should evolve organically in Latin America based on local conditions and practices, not the result of mechanically applying a European formula.

Mariátegui observed that fascism was a response to deep social crisis, that it based itself on the petty bourgeoisie of town and country, and that it relied heavily on a cult of violence.

According to José Carlos Mariátegui. "Italian fascism represents, clearly, the anti-revolution or, as it is usually called, the counter-revolution. The fascist offensive is explained and is realized in Italy, as a consequence of a retreat or a defeat of the revolution."

He argued that a transition to socialism should be based on traditional forms of collectivism as practiced by the Indians. Mariátegui stated "the communitarianism of the Incas cannot be denied or disparaged for having evolved under an autocratic regime."

José Ortega Gasset

José Ortega y Gasset (1883 – 1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism, and dictatorship.

Gasset's philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" that "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl, his proto-existentialism, and his realist historicism, which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce."

José Ortega y Gasset became a contributor to the newspaper El Sol, where he published, as a series of essays, his two principal works: España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain) and La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses).

Gasset promoted translation of the most important figures and tendencies in philosophy, including Oswald Spengler, Johan Huizinga, Edmund Husserl, Georg Simmel, Jakob von Uexküll, Heinz Heimsoeth, Franz Brentano, Hans Driesch, Ernst Müller, Alexander Pfänder, and Bertrand Russell.

The Revolt of the Masses is Ortega's best known work. He defends the values of meritocratic liberalism reminiscent of John Stuart Mill against attacks from both communists and right-wing populists. Ortega characterized liberalism as a politics of "magnanimity."

According to Ortega y Gasset, philosophy has a critical duty to lay siege to beliefs in order to promote new ideas and to explain reality.

Judith Pamela Butler

Judith Pamela Butler is a philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. Butler uses Sigmund Freud's notion of how a person's identity is modeled in terms of the normal. Butler revises Freud's notion of this concept's applicability to lesbianism, where Freud says that lesbians are modeling their behavior on men, the perceived normal or ideal. Butler instead says that all gender works in this way of performativity and a representation of an internalized notion of gender norms.

Julieta Castellanos

Julieta Castellanos (born 8 January 1954) is a Honduran sociologist and the dean of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) since 2009. 

Castellanos is known for campaigning against violence in Honduras, focusing on both drug cartels and police corruption. She has advocated for both judicial and police reform. Castellanos founded the Observatorio de la Violencia (Violence Observatory) at UNAH in 2004, a center that analyzes crime statistics in Honduras. Julieta Castellanos was a strong advocate for police reform and against violent crime in Hondur.

Castellanos pushed for international commission to oversee a purge of the police. The National Congress of Honduras approved the idea. Castellanos also spoke about gun politics in Honduras. She asked the Honduran armed forces to destroy illegal guns, including AK-47s.

Jurgen Habermas

The main theme of Jurgen Habermas' theory is that valid knowledge can only emerge from a situation of open, free and uninterrupted dialogue. 

Jurgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. In Jurgen Habermas's recent work he has criticized postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In Towards a Rational Society and Theory and Practice Jurgen Habermas argued that the idea of a neutral apolitical science, based on a rigid separation of facts and values, is untenable since questions of truth are inextricably bound up with the political problems of freedom to communicate and to exchange ideas.

Karl Mannheim

Karl Mannheim was an influential German sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He is a key figure in classical sociology, as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Karl Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia (1929/1936), in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide outdated support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and threaten to transform a society. During the War Karl Mannheim was involved in a number of influential intellectual circles: the Galileo Circle founded by Karl Polanyi in which Michael Polanyi also participated, the Social Science Association organised by Oscar Jaszi, and the Sonntagskreis or 'Sunday Circle' led by Gyorgy Lukacs.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, the philosopher, economist, political theorist and socialist revolutionary, is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital. A political revolutionary, social theorist and among distinguished sociologists, Karl Marx was born and educated in Germany. Marx's major works of sociological importance are: The German Ideology, with F. Engels; The Poverty of Philosophy; Manifesto of the Comnunist Party, with F. Engels; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; Capital; and two manuscripts published after his death, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscnpts of 1844 and Grundrisse.

Kate Waller Barrett, née Katherine Harwood Waller, was a prominent Virginia physician, humanitarian, philanthropist, sociologist and social reformer, best known for her leadership of the National Florence Crittenton Mission, which she founded in 1895 with Charles Nelson Crittenton. Her causes included helping the "outcast woman, the mistreated prisoner, those lacking in educational and social opportunity, the voteless woman, and the disabled war veteran." Although comparatively little known today, she was "[o]ne of the most prominent women of her time." From her own experiences as a slaveholder and with Jim Crow laws, Barrett also realized how spirits could be broken by degradation. After her speech at the Democratic National Convention received a standing ovation, she was asked to consider running for Governor of Virginia. Although flattered, she did not pursue the idea due to her declining health.

Kenneth Duva Burke was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray away from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as symbolic action. In "Definition of Man", the first essay of his collection Language as Symbolic Action (1966), Kenneth Duva Burke defined humankind as a symbol using animal. Without our encyclopedias, atlases, and other assorted reference guides, we would know little about the world that lies beyond our immediate sensory experience.

Louis Pierre Althusser

Among distinguished sociologists, Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher born in Algeria. Louis Pierre Althusser attempted to reformulate the base and superstructure model, because he objected to the economic determinism, which he believes is implicit in most accounts of that model. Althusser's concept of ideological state apparatuses was a notion deriving from Antonio Gramsci. Pierre Althusser argues that ideology should be seen as a real social relation, or as a practice, not as an illusion as it is in conversational analysis. Louis Pierre Althusser objects to theories which reduce explanation to the characteristics of individuals or collections of individuals, like social class. Individuals have to be seen as bearers or agents of the social structure of social relations.

Louis Wirth

Among distinguished sociologists, Louis Wirth studied in the United States, where he became a leading sociologist in Chicago sociology during the 1930s. Louis Wirth's doctoral thesis was published as The Ghetto (1925), and he maintained his interests in city life, minority group behavior, and mass media throughout his influential career. Sociologist Louis Wirth is best known as the author of a classic essay on 'Urbanism as a Way of Life.' Louis Wirth's work, 'On Cities and Social Life', was published in 1964.

Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of David Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world.

Martha Beatrice Webb

Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, FBA was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Martha Beatrice 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. In 1932, Martha Beatrice Webb was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA); she was the first woman elected to the fellowship.

Martin Heidegger

Among distinguished sociologists, Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher, critical in Being and Time of abstract theories of human existence because they neglected the concrete, actual, everyday world. He developed a view of this mundane social world which subsequently influenced the sociology of the life-world or everyday life. Heidegger formulated a philosophical methodology for the analysis of texts which contributed to the modern technique of deconstruction. Martin Heidegger's analysis of technological society was an important conservative criticism of capitalism, but his association with fascism has damaged his reputation.

Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer was a leader of the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers and social scientists associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. Horkheimer was the director of the Institute and Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt from 1930–1933, and again from 1949–1958. Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research.

Max Weber

Weber was a German historian, political economist, jurist, and sociologist. Among distinguished sociologists, Max Weber provided a systematic statement of the conceptual framework of the sociological perspective and developed a coherent philosophy of social science, which recognized the essential problems of explanation of social action. Max Weber also contributed to the sociology of religion, urban sociology, the sociology ot music, economic history, the sociology of law, and the analysis of ancient civilization. The major German text, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922), published posthumously has been translated as Economy and Society (1968).

Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann 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. During a sabbatical in 1961, he went to Harvard, where he met and studied under Talcott Parsons, then the world's most influential social systems theorist. Niklas Luhmann dismissed Parsons' theory later on, developing a rival approach of his own.

Norbert Elias

Among distinguished sociologists, Norbert Elias was a German sociologist. Norbert Elias' Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation is now regarded as a classic of historical sociology since its recent publication as The Civilizing Process (1939). It traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. In The Court Society (1969), Norbert Elias studies the evolution of ceremony in the court before the French Revolution, the economic decline of aristocratic society as a result of its internal competition for influence, and the emergence of bourgeois class.

Peter Townsend

Peter Townsend was Professor of Social Policy at the University of Bristol, and author of possibly one of the most extensive surveys in the twentieth-century, Poverty in the United Kingdom. The last position he held was Professor of International Social Policy at the London School of Economics. Peter Townsend was one of the co-founders of the University of Essex.

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and anthropologist. Bourdieu pioneered terminologies such as cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital. Bourdieu is also known for his work in the sociology of culture and cultural studies and education, sociological theories. Pierre Bourdieu worked on diverse set of empirical topics like kinship structure, religion, science, social class, while developing his own paradigm, seeking a pathway out of the opposition between structuralist objectivism and constructivist subjectivism.

Peter Michael Blau

Peter Michael Blau was an American sociologist born in Austria. Peter Michael Blau specialised in organizational and social structures, particular bureaucracy. Peter Michael Blau's theories had many applications within phenomenological sociology, social mobility, occupational opportunity and heterogeneity. Peter Blau was the first to map out the wide variety of social forces, known as “Blau Space”. Blau-space is still used as a guide by sociologists in many areas of sociology. Peter Michael Blau also contributed to social exchange theory and conducted major empirical investigations of occupational structure and the structure of business organizations.

Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf

Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf was a German-British sociologist. Dahrendorf’s contributed immensely to class theory and role theory. Darendorf’s major works include: 'Conflict after Class' (1967); Society and Democracy in Germany (1967); The New Liberty (1975); Life Chances (1979). According to Dahrendorf with democracy came voting for political parties, and increased social mobility. Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf was a an expert on class divisions in modern society. Dahrendorf’s first detailed account of the problem of social inequality in modern societies, his most influential work on social inequality is Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959). Darendorf’s argument is, neither structural functionalism nor Marxism alone provide an acceptable perspective on advanced society.

Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who invented analytical geometry, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Rene Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy. Rene Descartes has often been called the father of modern philosophy, and is largely seen as responsible for the increased attention given to epistemology in the 17th century. He laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Spinoza and Leibniz, and was later opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.

Robert King Merton

Robert King Merton is included among the founding fathers of modern day sociology. A Columbia UniversityProfessor Merton won the National Medal of Science. Robert King Merton developed concepts such as "unintended consequences", the "reference group", and "role strain", "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy." Role theory was a central piece of Merton's theory of social groups. Robert King Merton's work was similar to that of David Emile Durkheim in his work 'Suicide' or Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Robert King Merton believed that middle range theories bypassed the failures of larger theories.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes is associated with French structuralism and post-structuralism. Roland Barthes's approach to literature combines sociology, literary criticism, semiology, structural anthropology and Marxism. Roland Barthes has made immense contributions to the analysis of culture, texts and ideology. Roland Barthes used the term "myth" while analyzing the popular culture and consumer culture of post-war France in order to show that "objects were organized into meaningful relationships via narratives that expressed collective cultural values."

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founding father of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud developed theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression. Freud postulated the existence of libido, the energy with which mental process and structures are invested. Sigmund Freud drew on psychoanalysis to contribute to the interpretation and critique of culture. Sigmund Freud along with Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche developed the "school of suspicion." In the Frankfurt School, psychoanalytical theories were used to develop a materialist conception of personality as a companion to Marx's materialist analysis of society. Sigmund Freud interpreted Leonardo da Vinci's paintings psychoanalytically.

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. Simone de Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She was known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism; and for her novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins.

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons had a powerful influence on sociology after the Second World War, particularly in America, although, being a theorist, he was not in the dominant tradition of US empirical evidence research. As often criticized as supported Parsons' work was at the centre of debate in sociological theories until the mid-1970s. Talcott Parsons' aim was nothing less than to provide a conceptual structure for the whole of sociology. Talcott Parsons' starting point is the theory of social action, the essential feature of which is the relationship between actors and features of their environment, social and natural, to which they give meaning.

Theodor Adorno

Theodor Ludwig Adorno was one the foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, and a critic of both fascism and the 'cultural industries', a phenomenon of the modern society in which the masses are being fed what to do, buy or consume through mass campaigning and advertising, giving a sense of false contentment and pushing the citizens into mindless consumer culture. Theodor Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Theodor Adorno spent a great part of his life in his native Germany. Theodor Adorno argued that social theory had to maintain a critical edge.

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general. Thomas Hobbes' main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict.

Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Veblen developed an economic sociology of capitalism that criticized the acquisitiveness and predatory competition of American society and the power of the corporation. In The Theory of the Leisure Class he argued that the dominant class in American capitalism, which he labelled as the 'leisure class', pursued a life-style of conspicuous consumption, ostentatious waste and idleness. Veblen Effects is named after him.

Travis Warner Hirschi

Travis Warner Hirschi is among leading American sociologists and an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. Travis Warner Hirschi helped develop the modern version of the social control theory of crime and also the self-control theory of crime. Travis Warner Hirschi was born in Rockville, Utah. In his 1969 work Causes of Delinquency, Travis Warner Hirschi posited his version of social control theory. Travis Warner Hirschi wrote that social bonds encouraged conforming behavior and prevented most people from committing crimes. Travis Warner Hirschi and Michael Hindelang published a study which showed that IQ and social class were equally predictive of crime. Travis Hirschi's Causes of Delinquency was an important contribution to deviant behavior research.

Travis Warner Hirschi received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Travis Warner Hirschi held positions at the University of Washington, the University of California, Davis, SUNY Albany and the University of Arizona. Travis Warner Hirschi was a fellow and past president of the American Society of Criminology.  In Causes of Delinquency, Hirschi attempts to state and test a theory of delinquency, seeing in the delinquent a person relatively free of the intimate attachments, the aspirations, and the moral beliefs that bind most people to a life within the law. Often listed as a Citation Classic, Causes of Delinquency retains its force and cogency with age.

Ulrich Beck

Distinguished among sociologists, Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist. Ulrich Beck's area of study include modernization, globalization, ecological problems and individualism. Ulrich Beck has been professor for sociology and director of the Institute for Sociology of Munich University and Professor at the London School of Economics. Ulrich Beck delivered new diagnoses to the question: How can social and political thought and action in the face of radical global change be intertwined in a new modernity? According to Beck, all contemporary political thinking emanates from the methodological nationalism of political thought and sociology. According to Beck and Giddens, the traditional industrial class structure of modern society is breaking apart.

William Henry Beveridge

Among distinguished sociologists, William Henry Beveridge was a British economist and social reformer. William Henry Beveridge is well known for his 1942 report titled Social Insurance and Allied Services, and his report served as the basis for the post-World War II welfare state of the Labour government. The report recommended a national health service, social insurance and assistance, family allowances, and full-employment policies. The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. William Henry Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall."

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American civil rights activist, sociologist, and Pan-Africanist. W. E. B. Du Bois played a large role in fighting for full civil rights for people of color around the world. W. E. B. Du Bois was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois also played an important role as the leader of the Niagara Movement. Du Bois figures among eminent sociologists of the world

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish native, and was driven out of his country in the early 1970s by the Communist regime.

Zygmunt Bauman who was a Jew survived through both World War II and communist invasion. 

Zygmunt Bauman dedicated his career to writing social theory on the holocaust, modernity, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity, particularly in relation to rationality and changing social values of the 1980s.

Zygmunt Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism, and also liquid modernity.