Max Weber

Ideas – Society must be understood objectively, a procedure that entails refusing to jump to evaluative conclusions. – An important contribution of the social scientist is to alert us to inconvenient facts and the unintended consequences of human action. – Humankind may be constructing its own iron cage: Ironically and tragically, our own presumed

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Norbert Elias

Elias was born on June 22, 1897 in Breslau in Silesia to Hermann and Sophie Elias. His father was a businessman in the textile industry and his mother a homemaker. He fought in the Prussian army during World War I and then completed his Ph.D. under Richard Hönigswald at the Johannesgymnasium in Breslau in

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Paulo Freire

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, one of the most the influential educational thinkers of the late 20th century, was born in Recife, Brazil, on September 19, 1921. After a brief career as a lawyer, he taught Portuguese in secondary schools from 1941-1947. He subsequently became active in adult education and workers’ training, and became

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Pierre Bourdieu

French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and champion of the anti-globalisation movement, whose work spanned a broad range of subjects from ethnography to art, literature, education, language, cultural tastes, and television. Bourdieu’s most famous book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). It was named one of the 20th century’s 10 most

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Prince Peter Kropotkin

Peter (or Pyotr) Kropotkin was born in Moscow. His father, Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, belonged to the old Russian nobility; his mother, the daughter of a general in the Russian army, had remarkable literary and liberal tastes. In 1857, at the age of fifteen, Kropotkin entered the Corps of Pages at St Petersburg. Only

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Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons is an American sociologist who attempted to integrate all the social sciences into a science of human action. He was converted tofunctionalism under the influence of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. In “The Social System” 1951, Parsons argued that the crucial feature of societies, as of biological organisms, is homeostasis (maintaining a stable state), and

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Thorstein Bunde Veblen

Thorstein Veblen was an American economist and sociologist. Educated at Carleton College, Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, his most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is a biting satire directed at the leisure class. He coined the widely used phrases “conspicuous consumption” and “pecuniary emulation”. Thorstein Veblen began his career

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William Edward Burghardt DuBois

W.E.B. DuBois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At that time Great Barrington had perhaps 25, but not more than 50, Black people out of a population of about 5,000. Consequently, there were little signs of overt racism there. Nevertheless, its venom was distributed through a constant barrage of suggestive

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Albert Otto Hirschman

Maverick economist, Albert Otto Hirschman, was a world traveller: born in Berlin, educated in Paris, London and Trieste (where he obtained his Ph.D.), fought in the French Army in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1941, stayed two years at Berkeley, joined the US Army, joined the Federal Reserve in Washington in 1946,

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Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, Italy, on the island of Sardinia, a relatively remote region of Italy that was mostly ignored by the Italian government in favor of the industrialized north (the problem of Sardinia had previously become part of the political activity of Giuseppe Mazzini in Turin’s senate). He was the fourth

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Benito Mussolini

Mussolini was born in Predappio, near Forli, in Romagna, on July 29, 1883. His father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith, and his mother, Rosa, was a schoolteacher. Like his father, Benito became a fervent socialist. He qualified as an elementary schoolmaster in 1901. In 1902 he emigrated to Switzerland. Unable to find a permanent job

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Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Montesquieu was one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment. Insatiably curious and mordantly funny, he constructed a naturalistic account of the various forms of government, and of the causes that made them what they were and that advanced or constrained their development. He used this account to explain how governments might be

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Che Guevara (Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna)

Ernesto Guevara was born in Argentina on June 14, 1928. He became an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader. “Che” is an Argentine expression for calling someone’s attention, and in some other parts of Latin America, a slang for someone from Argentina. In 1951, Ernesto set off from his home town of Córdoba

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David Easton

American political scientist. Major works of David Easton – A Framework for Political Analysis, Prentice-Hall, 1965 – A Systems Analysis of Political Life, Wiley, 1965; re-issued University of Chicago Press, 1979 – Varieties of Political Theory,(ed.), Prentic-Hall, 1966 – Children in the Political System, (with J. Dennis), McGraw-Hill, 1969; re-issued, University of Chicago Press,

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Eduard Bernstein

Eduard Bernstein was born in Berlin, Germany on 6th January, 1850. The son of Jewish parents, his father was a railroad engineer. Bernstein worked as a bank clerk and in 1872 he joined the Social Democrat Party (SDP). In the 1877 General Election in Germany the SDP won 12 seats. This worried Otto von

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Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels, the eldest son of a successful German industrialist, was born in Barmen on 28th November 1820. As a young man his father sent him to England to help manage his cotton-factory in Manchester. Engels was shocked by the poverty in the city and began writing an account that was published as Condition

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Ideas – To identify the categories inherent in our own subjective thinking is at the same time to identify objective reality’s fundamental character or meaning. – ‘The idea’, ‘reason’, or ‘God’ = the full actualization of which is spirit – is reality’s fundamental character. – The stages both of nature and of human activity

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George Douglas Howard Cole

Born in Cambridge, George Douglas Howard Cole would become one of the leading figures in the Fabian Society, serving as chairman from 1939 to 1946 and 1948 to 1950 and as president from 1952 to 1959. Closely connected to the Guild Socialist Movement, Cole helped found the National Guilds League in 1915. For a

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James Burnham

James Burnham was a popular political theorist, activist and intellectual, known for his work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, which heavily influenced George Orwell’s “1984”. Burnham was a leading American Trotskyist in the 1930s, forming the American Worker’s Party, which was a communist and anti-Stalinist party. He left the party in 1940, distancing

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Jeremy Bentham

Ideas – Human beings are motivated solely by the desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain. – The morality of our actions is determined by their utility. – Happiness is identical with pleasure, unhappiness with pain. – Pleasure alone is intrinsically good (good in itself) and pain alone is intrinsically bad. – We have

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