Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Emile D. Durkheim was born on the evening of April 15, 1858 at Epinal in Lorraine. His mother, Melanie, was a merchant’s daughter and his father was the Rabbi of Epinal and was also Chief Rabbi of the Vosges and Haute-Marne. Emile spent part of his early school years in a rabbinical school destined to

Erving Goffman (1922-1982)

Dr. Erving Goffman received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto in his native Canada in 1945. His master’s and doctorate were granted by the University of Chicago in 1949 and 1953, respectively, where he studied both sociology and social anthropology. While working on his doctorate, he spent a year on one of the

Sir Francis Galton

An English scientist, explorer and anthropologist, Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin and was one of the first to recognize how Darwin’s theory of evolution was going to clash with theology. He coined the word eugenics to denote scientific endeavors to increase the proportion of persons with better than average genes. This was to be

George Herbert Mead

George Herbert Mead was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, on February 27, 1863. He was the second child of Hiram Mead (d. 1881), a Congregationalist minister and pastor of the South Hadley Congregational Church, and Elizabeth Storrs Billings (1832-1917). George Herbert’s older sister, Alice, was born in 1859. In 1870, the family moved to Oberlin,

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Sir Francis Galtonir Francis Galton

An English scientist, explorer and anthropologist, Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin and was one of the first to recognize how Darwin’s theory of evolution was going to clash with theology. He coined the word eugenics to denote scientific endeavors to increase the proportion of persons with better than average genes. This was to be

Herbert Spencer

Ideas – ‘Life under all its forms has arisen by a progressive, unbroken evolution.’ – The law of evolution provides a philosophical generalization capable of scientifically explaining all phenomena. – Evolution is change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity. – As organisms increase in size, they increase in structure, and the progressive differentiation

Jurgen Habermas

Jurgen Habermas (born in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory who has integrated into a comprehensive framework of social theory and philosophy the German philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the Marxian tradition, both the theory of Karl Marx himself as well as the

Henri Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre, the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, was born in 1901. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism. Born in the Landes of South-West France in

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 success

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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 1924,

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 the

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 important

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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 a

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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 that

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 in

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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 innuendoes