HERBERT SPENCER

(April 27, 1820-December 8, 1903)

An english sociologist and philosopher, an

early advocate of the theory of evolution,
who achieved an influential synthesis of
knowledge, advocating the preeminence
of the individual over society and
of science over religion. His magnum opus
was The Synthetic Philosophy (1896),
a comprehensive work containing volumes
on the principles
of biology, psychology, morality,
and sociology. He is best remembered for
his doctrine of social Darwinism, according to which the principles of
evolution, including natural selection, apply to human societies, social
classes, and individuals as well as to biological species developing
over geologic time. In Spencer’s day social Darwinism was invoked to
justify laissez-faire economics and the minimal state, which were thought to
best promote unfettered competition between individuals and the gradual
improvement of society through the “survival of the fittest,” a term that
Spencer himself introduced.

KARL MARX
(May 5, 1818-March 14, 1883)

A revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and

economist. He published (with Friedrich
Engels) Manifest der Kommunistischen
Partei (1848), commonly known as The
Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated
pamphlet in the history of the socialist
movement. He also was the author of the
movement’s most important book, Das
Kapital. These writings and others by Marx
and Engels form the basis of the body of
thought and belief known as Marxism.
 PIERRE BOURDIEU
(August 1.1930 –January 23 2002)

A French sociologist who was a

public intellectual in the tradition of Émile
Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre. Bourdieu’s concept
of habitus (socially acquired dispositions) was
influential in recent
postmodernist humanities and social sciences.
Bourdieu was born into a working-class family
in southern France. He attended a secondary
school in Pau before transferring to a more
prestigious school in Paris. He was later
admitted to the École Normal Supérieure,
where he studied philosophy under Louis
Althusser. He then taught at a lycée in Moulins (1954–55).

ÉMILE DURKHEIM
(April 15, 1858-November 15, 1917)
He was a French sociologist. 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.[3][4]
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.[5] 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.
 ROBERT K. MERTON
(July 4, 1910-February 23, 2003)

American sociologist whose diverse interests

included the sociology of science and the
professions, sociological theory, and
mass communication.
After receiving a Ph.D. from Harvard
University in 1936, Merton joined the school’s
faculty. In his first work in the sociology of
science, Science, Technology and Society in
Seventeenth Century England (1938), he
studied the relationship between Puritan
thought and the rise of science. He next
served on the faculty of Tulane
University (1939–41) and then accepted an
appointment at Columbia University (1941), where he became a full professor in
1947 and was named Giddings Professor of Sociology in 1963. He served as
associate director of the university’s Bureau of Applied Social Research (1942–
71), which had opened under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld one year before
Merton’s arrival. The two men’s work was complementary: Lazarsfeld combined
quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, along with his logic of
concept clarification, and thereby influenced Merton’s orientation to historical
studies. Moreover, Merton’s gift for theory influenced Lazarsfeld’s philosophical
grasp of sociology. Their academic collaboration, from 1941 to 1976,
strengthened the standards of training for the social sciences.
 MARGARET MEAD
(December 16, 1901-November 15, 1978)

American anthropologist whose great fame

owed as much to the force of her personality
and her outspokenness as it did to the quality
of her scientific work.

Mead entered DePauw University in 1919 and

transferred to Barnard College a year later.
She graduated from Barnard in 1923 and
entered the graduate school of Columbia
University, where she studied with and was
greatly influenced by anthropologists Franz
Boas and Ruth Benedict (a lifelong friend).
Mead received an M.A. in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1929. In 1925, during the first of
her many field trips to the South Seas, she gathered material for the first of her 23
books, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; new ed., 2001), a perennial best
seller and a characteristic example of her reliance on observation rather than
statistics for data. The book clearly indicates her belief in cultural determinism, a
position that caused some later 20th-century anthropologists to question both
the accuracy of her observations and the soundness of her conclusions.
 FRANZ BOAS
(July 9, 1858-December 22, 1942)

German-born American anthropologist of the

late 19th and early 20th centuries, the founder
of the relativistic, culture-centred school of
American anthropology that became
dominant in the 20th century. During
his tenure at Columbia University in New York
City (1899–1942), he developed one of the
foremost departments of anthropology in the
United States. Boas was a specialist in
North American Indian cultures and
languages, but he was, in addition, the
organizer of a profession and the great
teacher of a number of scientists who
developed anthropology in the United States, including A.L. Kroeber, Ruth
Benedict, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits, and Edward Sapir.

ALFRED RADCLIFFE-BROWN
(January 17, 1881-October 24, 1955)

English social anthropologist of the 20th

century who developed a systematic
framework of concepts and generalizations
relating to the social structures of preindustrial
societies and their functions. He is widely
known for his theory of functionalism and his
role in the founding of British
social anthropology.
Radcliffe-Brown went to the Andaman
Islands (1906–08), where his fieldwork won him
a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. On
an expedition to Western Australia (1910–12),
he concentrated on kinship and family organization. He became director of
education for the kingdom of Tonga (1916) and served as professor of social
anthropology at the University of Cape Town (1920–25), where he founded the
School of African Life and Languages. His study The Andaman Islanders (1922;
new ed. 1964) contained the essential formulation of his ideas and method.
 BRONISŁAW MALINOWSKI
(April 7, 1884-May 16, 1942)
World-famous social anthropologist, traveller,
ethnologist, religion scholar, sociologist and
writer. He is the creator of the school of
functionalism, advocate for intense fieldwork,
and a forerunner of new methods in social
theory.
Malinowski starts university in his hometown,
Kraków, at the Faculty of Philosophy of the
Jagiellonian University. His PhD thesis is
entitled About the Economy of Thinking. He
continues his education at the London School
of Economics. Malinowski spends most of his
professional life in Great Britain, the US, and
the islands of Melanesia.

RUTH BENEDICT
(June 5, 1887-Sept. 17, 1948)

American anthropologist whose theories had

a profound influence on cultural
anthropology, especially in the area
of culture and personality.
Benedict graduated from Vassar College in
1909, lived in Europe for a year, and then
settled in California, where she taught in girls’
schools. In 1914 she returned to New York City.
For some years Benedict sought vainly for an
occupation. In 1919 she enrolled at the New
School for Social Research, where the
influence of Elsie Clews Parsons and Alexander
Goldenweiser led her to study anthropology
under Franz Boas at Columbia University. She approached the field of
anthropology from a strong humanistic background, and even after she
became involved in the field in the 1920s, she continued to write poetry under
the pseudonym Anne Singleton until the early 1930s. From the outset of her
career in social science she conceived of cultures as total constructs
of intellectual, religious, and aesthetic elements.