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• 
  

• Amitai Etzioni
  Amitai Etzioni ((ah-me-tie et-zee-oh-nee), born Werner Falk, 4 January 1929, Cologne, Germany) is a German-Israeli-American sociologist.
  In 1933, Amitai Etzioni was only four years old when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. He was separated from his family but reunited with them by the year 1947. In that time, Etzioni lived a year in Athens, went to Palestine, lived on a cooperative farm and went to boarding school. In 1950, he was enrolled in a special academic institute established by Martin Buber after having dropped out of tenth grade three years earlier to join Palmach (an elite commando unit of the Haganah). In 1951, he attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he studied classical and contemporary works in Sociology, completing both BA and MA degrees.
  
  wn.com/Amitai_Etzioni
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  Antonio Negri
  Antonio Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.
  Negri is best known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia. As one of the most popular theorists of Autonomism, he has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
  He was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing terrorist groupRed Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), involved in the May 1978 assassination of Aldo Moro, two-time Prime Minister of Italy, and leader of the Christian-Democrat Party, among others. Voice evidence suggested Negri made a threatening phone call on behalf of the BR, but the court was unable to conclusively prove his ties. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing terrorism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
  
  wn.com/Antonio_Negri
• Fredric Jameson
  Fredric Jameson (born 14 April 1934) is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Political Unconscious, and Marxism and Form.
  Jameson is currently William A. Lane Professor in The Program in Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. In 2012, the MLA gave Jameson their sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.
  Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Haverford College in 1954, where his professors included Wayne Booth, he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence, Munich and Berlin, where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy, including the rise of structuralism. He returned to America the following year to pursue a doctoral degree at Yale University, where he studied under Erich Auerbach.
  
  wn.com/Fredric_Jameson
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  Gary Becker
  Gary Stanley Becker (born December 2, 1930) is an American economist. He is a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a professor at the Booth School of Business. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. He is currently a Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
  Becker was one of the first economists to branch into what were traditionally considered topics belonging to sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and drug addiction (see Rational addiction). He is known for arguing that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility maximizing. His approach can include altruistic behavior by defining individuals' utility appropriately. He is also among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital. Becker is also credited with the "rotten kid theorem". He is married to Guity Nashat, a historian of the Middle East whose research interests overlap his own.
  
  wn.com/Gary_Becker
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  Georg Simmel
  Georg Simmel (March 1, 1858 – September 28, 1918) was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.
  Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?', presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship; form becoming content, and vice versa, dependent on the context. In this sense he was a forerunner to structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences. With his work on the metropolis, Simmel was a precursor of urban sociology, symbolic interactionism and social network analysis.
  An acquaintance of Max Weber, Simmel wrote on the topic of personal character in a manner reminiscent of the sociological 'ideal type'. He broadly rejected academic standards, however, philosophically covering topics such as emotion and romantic love. Both Simmel and Weber's nonpositivist theory would inform the eclectic critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
  
  wn.com/Georg_Simmel
• Guy Debord
  Guy Ernest Debord (December 28, 1931 – November 30, 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International (SI). He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
  Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931. Guy's father, Martial, was a pharmacist who died due to illness when Guy was young. Guy's mother, Paulette Rossi, sent Guy to live with his grandmother in her family villa in Italy. During World War II, the Rossis left the villa and began to travel from town to town. As a result, Guy attended high school in Cannes, where he began his interest in film and vandalism. As a young man, Debord actively opposed the French war in Algeria and joined in demonstrations in Paris against it.
  Debord joined the Letterist International when he was 19. The Letterists were led dictatorially by Isidore Isou until a widely agreed upon schism ended Isou's authority. This schism birthed several factions of Letterists, one of which was decidedly led by Debord upon Gil Wolman's unequivocal recommendation. In the 1960s, Debord led the Situationist International group, which influenced the Paris Uprising of 1968. Some consider his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) to be a catalyst for the uprising.
  
  wn.com/Guy_Debord
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  Harrison White
  Harrison Colyar White (March 21, 1930 – ) is the emeritus Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. White is an influential scholar in the domain of social networks. He is credited with the development of a number of mathematical models of social structure including vacancy chains and blockmodels. He has been a leader of a revolution in sociology that is still in process, using models of social structure that are based on patterns of relations instead of the attributes and attitudes of individuals. He has investigated and modeled persistent social formations like persons and organizations. White and his students have been able to observe and measure the patterns of relationships that appear as social constructs and have taken some of what we have known by common sense and measured it empirically. They have shown that some of our common sense notions are not correct.
  The most comprehensive documentation of his theories can be found in the book Identity and Control, first published in 1992. A major rewrite of the book appeared in June 2008. White is currently involved in sociolinguistics and business strategy as well as sociology.
  
  wn.com/Harrison_White
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  James Samuel Coleman
  James Samuel Coleman (May 12, 1926 – March 25, 1995) was a renowned American sociologist, theorist and empirical researcher. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association. Coleman studied the sociology of education, public policy, and was one of the earliest users of the term "social capital". His Foundations of Social Theory influenced sociological theory. His The Adolescent Society (1961) and "Coleman Report" (Equality of Educational Opportunity, 1966) were two of the most heavily cited books in educational sociology. The landmark Coleman Report helped transform educational theory, reshape national education policies, and influenced public and scholarly opinion regarding the role of schooling in determining equality and productivity in the United States.
  The son of James and Maurine Coleman, he spent his early childhood in Bedford, Indiana, and then moved to Louisville, Kentucky. After graduating in 1944, he enrolled to a small school in Virginia but left to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After he was discharged, he transferred to Purdue University. Coleman received his bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University in 1949, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1955, where he came under the influence of Paul Lazarsfeld.
  
  wn.com/James_Samuel_Coleman
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  Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas ( /ˈjɜrɡən/ or /ˈjʊərɡən ˈhɑːbərmɑːs/;German: [ˈjʏʁɡən ˈhaːbɐmaːs]; born June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist, geographer and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of "rationalization" originally set forth by Max Weber. While influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, and even poststructuralism, many of the central tenets of Habermas' thought remain broadly Marxist in nature. Global polls identified him as one of the leading intellectuals of the present day.
  
  wn.com/Jürgen_Habermas
• Karl Polanyi
  Karl Paul Polanyi (Polányi Károly Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈpolaːɳi ˈkaːɾoj]; born October 25, 1886, Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire – April 23, 1964, Pickering, Ontario) was a Hungarian philosopher, political economist and economic historian known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and his book, The Great Transformation. Polanyi is remembered today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, which emphasized the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This view ran counter to mainstream economics but was popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science.
  Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned. Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology. His theories eventually became the foundation for the economic democracy movement. His daughter Kari Polanyi-Levitt is Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal.
  
  wn.com/Karl_Polanyi
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  Laurent Thévenot
  Professor Laurent Thévenot (born 1949) is Directeur d'études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (at the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale), and Senior researcher at the Centre d'Etudes de l'Emploi.
  He co-authored, with Luc Boltanski, of "On Justification. The Economies of Worth" (2006, Princeton University Press) which analyzes the most legitimate repertoires of evaluation governing political, economic and social relationships. It has been influential in the new French social sciences, and in the so-called “Convention Theory”, a strand of Institutional Economics. He also co-edited two books concerning new approaches of action, the practical engagement of objects and social cognition: Les objets dans l'action, and Cognition et information en société.
  More recently, Laurent Thévenot developed collaborative and comparative research (in Western and Eastern cultures) on the political and moral grammars of making things and issues common, and he co-edited with Michèle Lamont Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States. He recently published about Engagement Regimes and the various formes of social reality and realised (with French and Russian social scientists) a comparative research program between France and Russia. See also French Pragmatism
  
  wn.com/Laurent_Thévenot
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  Louis Althusser
  Louis Pierre Althusser (French pronunciation: [altyˈsɛʁ]; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
  Althusser was a longtime member—although sometimes a strong critic—of the French Communist Party. His arguments and thesis were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the "cult of personality" and of ideology.
  Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism.
  Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. During one of his bouts, he killed his wife by strangling her.
  
  wn.com/Louis_Althusser
• Luc Boltanski
  Luc Boltanski (born 1940) is the leading figure in the new "pragmatic" school of French sociology. He is a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and the founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale. His work has significantly influenced sociology, political economy and social and economic history. He is the brother of artist Christian Boltanski.
  He contributed to the start of the "political and moral sociology" framework. Political and moral sociology has gradually developed as a research programme — in the sense proposed by Imre Lakatos — around a conceptual nucleus looking to construct a theory of action based on Émile Durkheim's theory of moral fact, revising the inheritance of ‘methodological structuralism’ from the point of view of dynamics and processes. The research program stresses how, in many conflicts, the characteristics of the disputants change during the course of the conflict.
  His most recent work deals with the links between detective novels and the emergence of the nation state
  
  wn.com/Luc_Boltanski
• Mark Granovetter
  Professor Mark Granovetter is an American sociologist at Stanford University who has created theories in modern sociology since the 1970s. He is best known for his work in social network theory and in economic sociology, particularly his theory on the spread of information in social networks known as "The Strength of Weak Ties" (1973).
  Granovetter (born 1943) earned an A.B. at Princeton University (1965) and a Ph.D at Harvard University (1970). At Harvard he studied under the supervision of Harrison White. He is currently the Joan Butler Ford Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford and was formerly the department chair of sociology. He worked at Northwestern University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Johns Hopkins University.
  Granovetter's paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" is a highly influential sociology paper, with over 19,000 citations according to Google Scholar (by December 2011). In marketing, information science, or politics, weak ties enable reaching populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties. The concepts and findings of this work were later published in the monograph Getting A Job, an adaptation of Granovetter's doctoral dissertation at Harvard University's Department of Social Relations, with the title: "Changing Jobs: Channels of Mobility Information in a Suburban Population" (313 pages).
  
  wn.com/Mark_Granovetter
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  Max Horkheimer
  Max Horkheimer (February 14, 1895 – July 7, 1973) was a German-Jewish philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason (1947) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, supported and made other significant works possible.
  Horkheimer was born in the Zuffenhausen district of Stuttgart, then capital of the Kingdom of Württemberg within the German Empire, to a wealthy Jewish family. Due to parental pressure, Horkheimer left secondary school at the age of sixteen to work in his father's factory. In 1916, his manufacturing career ended and he was drafted into World War I. After World War I, he enrolled at Munich University, where he studied philosophy and psychology. After university, Horkheimer moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he studied under Hans Cornelius. There, he met Theodor Adorno, several years his junior, with whom he would strike a lasting friendship and a fruitful collaborative relationship.
  
  wn.com/Max_Horkheimer
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  Max Weber
  Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber (German pronunciation: [ˈmaks ˈveːbɐ]; 21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself.
  Weber was a key proponent of methodological antipositivism, presenting sociology as a non-empiricist field which must study social action through interpretive means based upon understanding the meanings and purposes that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.
  Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularization, and "disenchantment" that he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity. Weber argued that the most important difference among societies is not how people produce things but how people think about the world. In Weber’s view, modern society was the product of a new way of thinking. Weber is perhaps 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. Weber proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. 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 would go on to examine the religions of China, the religions of India and ancient Judaism, with particular regard to the apparent non-development of capitalism in the corresponding societies, as well as to their differing forms of social stratification.
  
  wn.com/Max_Weber
• Michael Mousseau
  Michael J. Mousseau (born 1964) is an American political scientist whose research and teaching is focused on international relations and comparative politics, in particular the link between economic conditions, institutions, and conflict. He is the creator of economic norms theory, which identifies how sustained and equal opportunity in a market can create popular interests in liberal democracy, and peace within and between nations. He advocates that wealthy countries make aggressive efforts towards bringing widespread economic opportunity to lesser developed countries, which he argues would result in a just and permanent global peace.
  Michael Mousseau earned his Ph.D. from Binghamton University in 1998, after several years of ethnographic research in many regions, including the Middle East (1984), Central America (1985 and 1987), the Soviet Union (1991), East Africa (1991), the Indian sub-continent (1992), and China (1992). He joined Koç University in 1998, where he is today at the rank of full professor. He has been a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center International Security Program, Harvard University (2005–2006), and the United Nations Studies Program, Yale University (2003).
  
  wn.com/Michael_Mousseau
• Nicos Poulantzas
  Nicos Poulantzas (Greek: Νίκος Πουλαντζάς; 21 September 1936, Athens, Greece  – 3 October 1979, Paris, France) was a Greek Marxist political sociologist. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading Structural Marxist and, while at first a Leninist, eventually became a proponent of eurocommunism. He is most well known for his theoretical work on the state. But he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of the dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s (e.g. Franco's rule in Spain, Salazar's in Portugal, and Papadopoulos's in Greece).
  Poulantzas studied law in Greece and moved to France where he completed a doctorate in the philosophy of law. He taught sociology at the University of Paris VIII from 1968 until his death. He was married to the French novelist Annie Leclerc and had one daughter. He killed himself in 1979 by jumping from the window of a friend's flat in Paris.
  
  wn.com/Nicos_Poulantzas
• Paul DiMaggio
  Paul Joseph DiMaggio (born 10 January 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American educator, and professor of sociology at Princeton University since 1992.
  A graduate of Swarthmore College, DiMaggio earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard in 1979. He was the executive director of Yale's program on nonprofit organizations (1982-87), and through 1991 he was a professor in the sociology department at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1984-85) and at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). He also served on the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and on the board of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.
  DiMaggio's major works have been in the study of organizations and the formation of "high culture" in the U.S. His recent research explores social inequality in the Internet.
  The world of organizations, DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell have argued, is heavily influenced by "institutional isomorphism": organizations adopt business practices not because they are efficient (per se), but because they furnish legitimacy in the eyes of outside stakeholders - lenders, government regulators, shareholders, etc. DiMaggio asserts that the need to maintain the confidence of poorly-informed outside parties means that organizations are less creative and innovative in their practices. DiMaggio also claims this pattern can be seen in nonprofit groups and government agencies that imitate the language and styles of the corporate world in order to appear more efficient.
  
  wn.com/Paul_DiMaggio
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  Ralph Miliband
  Ralph Miliband (7 January 1924 – 21 May 1994), born Adolphe Miliband, was a Belgian-born British sociologist known as a prominent Marxist thinker. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with Edward Palmer Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.
  Miliband was born in Belgium, to working class Polish-Jewish immigrants, but fled to Britain in 1940 to avoid persecution after Nazi Germany invaded. Learning to speak English and enrolling at the London School of Economics, he became involved in left-wing politics, and made a personal commitment to the cause of socialism at the grave of Karl Marx. After serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he gained British citizenship and settled down in London in 1946.
  During the 1960s, he arose as a prominent member of the New Left movement in Britain, which was critical of established Stalinist governments in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. He published several noted books on Marxist theory and the criticism of capitalism, such as Parliamentary Socialism (1961) and Marxism and Politics (1977).
  
  wn.com/Ralph_Miliband
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  Raymond Williams
  Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.
  Born in Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted Labour while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. It was not a Welsh-speaking area: he described it as "Anglicised in the 1840s". There was, nevertheless, a strong Welsh identity. "There is the joke that someone says his family came over with the Normans and we reply: 'Are you liking it here?'".
  He attended King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny. His teenage years were overshadowed by the rise of Nazism and the threat of war. He was 14 when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and was very conscious of what was happening through his membership of the local Left Book Club. He also mentions the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, originally published in Britain by the Left Book Club.
  
  wn.com/Raymond_Williams
• Richard Swedberg
  Richard Swedberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and works since 2002 at the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. He received a PhD in sociology from Boston College (1978); he also holds a law degree ("juris kandidat") from Stockholm University (1970). Swedberg's two specialties are social theory and economic sociology. The focus in his work on social theory is currently on theorizing or how to learn to theorize. As to economic sociology, he has been a contributor to this field since its renewal in the mid-1980s ("new economic sociology"). Swedberg has written extensively on the works by Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter and is currently working on bringing signs into the analysis of the economy. He is the author of e.g. Economics and Sociology (1990), Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (1998) and Tocqueville's Political Economy (2009). His edited work includes (with Neil Smelser) Handbook of Economic Sociology (1994, 2005) and Sociology of Economic Life (with Mark Granovetter (1992, 2001, 2011). His vitae as well as some of his writings are available at his webpage at Cornell University.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Swedberg
• Viviana Zelizer
  Viviana A. Zelizer, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, is a prominent economic sociologist who focuses on the attribution of cultural and moral meaning to the economy. A constant theme in her work is economic valuation of the sacred, as found in such contexts as life insurance settlements and economic transactions with sexual intimates.
  
  wn.com/Viviana_Zelizer
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  Walter Benjamin
  Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (German pronunciation: [ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn]; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
  His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Benjamin
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  Émile Durkheim
  David Émile Durkheim (French pronunciation: [emil dyʁˈkɛm], [dyʁˈkajm]) (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
  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 Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the 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 amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
  
  wn.com/Émile_Durkheim

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