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The Most Famous

SOCIOLOGISTS from Russia

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This page contains a list of the greatest Russian Sociologists. The pantheon dataset contains 54 Sociologists, 2 of which were born in Russia. This makes Russia the birth place of the 8th most number of Sociologists behind Austria and Canada.

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Russian Sociologists of all time. This list of famous Russian Sociologists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Pitirim Sorokin

1. Pitirim Sorokin (1889 - 1968)

With an HPI of 63.50, Pitirim Sorokin is the most famous Russian Sociologist.  His biography has been translated into 43 different languages on wikipedia.

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (; Russian: Питири́м Алекса́ндрович Соро́кин; 4 February [O.S. 23 January] 1889 – 10 February 1968) was a Russian American sociologist and political activist, who contributed to the social cycle theory.

Photo of Georges Gurvitch

2. Georges Gurvitch (1894 - 1965)

With an HPI of 56.79, Georges Gurvitch is the 2nd most famous Russian Sociologist.  His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Georges Gurvitch (Russian: Гео́ргий Дави́дович Гу́рвич; October 20, 1894, Novorossiysk – December 12, 1965, Paris) was a Russian-born French sociologist and jurist. One of the leading sociologists of his times, he was a specialist of the sociology of knowledge. In 1944 he founded the journal Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie. He held a chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. An outspoken advocate of Algerian decolonization, Gurvitch and his wife were the victim of terrorist attack by the far-right nationalist group, L'O.A.S on June 22, 1962. Their apartment was destroyed by a bomb, and they took refuge for a time at the house of painter Marc Chagall. Gurvitch is an important figure in the development of sociology of law. Like other legal sociologists, he insisted that law is not merely the rules or decisions produced, interpreted and enforced by agencies of the state, such as legislatures, courts and police. Groups and communities of various kinds, whether formally structured or informally organised, produce regulation for themselves and others, which can properly be considered law from a sociological standpoint. Gurvitch's legal pluralism is, however, far more rigorous and radical than that of most legal sociologists and locates an immense variety of types of law in the various kinds of sociality—or social interaction—that he distinguished in his writings. He saw the need to stress the reality and significance of social law and social rights, in opposition to what he termed individual law. His Bill of Social Rights, drafted at the end of World War II was an attempt to state a blueprint of a legal framework of social law for a postwar world in which the idea of human rights had become newly powerful. The sociologist and ideologue of the 1979 Iranian revolution Ali Shariati studied under Gurvitch in the 1960s during his studies in France at the University of Sorbonne.

Pantheon has 2 people classified as sociologists born between 1889 and 1894. Of these 2, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased sociologists include Pitirim Sorokin and Georges Gurvitch.

Deceased Sociologists

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