Thinkers Timeline

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century. His full name was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, into a small free Black community in the North, and showed exceptional academic ability from childhood. He became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, in 1895, and also studied at the University of Berlin. He spent his long career at the intersection of scholarship and activism, writing groundbreaking works of sociology and history, co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), editing the influential journal The Crisis for many years, and eventually, in his final years, joining the Communist Party of America and emigrating to Ghana, where he died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five, on the eve of the March on Washington. His most important works include The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was a French sociologist whose work on class, culture, and power made him one of the most influential social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in the village of Denguin in the Béarn region of south-western France, close to the Pyrenees mountains. His family was not wealthy. His father had left school young and worked as a postal employee and then as a small farmer. His mother was a country woman from a similar background. Bourdieu was a clever pupil, and his teachers helped him move up through the French education system — first to the lycée in Pau, then to the elite preparatory classes in Paris, and finally to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy alongside Jacques Derrida and other future major thinkers. His country origins in a Paris of educated elites shaped his whole life and work. He always felt partly out of place in elite circles, and this experience of not quite belonging gave him a special eye for how social distinction actually works. After finishing his studies, he was sent to Algeria as a French army conscript in 1955, during the war for Algerian independence. The experience changed him. He saw colonial oppression first-hand, stayed on to do fieldwork as a sociologist-anthropologist after his military service, and produced his first books about Algerian society under French rule. He returned to France in 1960 and began building the distinctive approach that would occupy the rest of his career. He held posts at Lille and Paris before becoming professor at the Collège de France in 1981 — the highest academic position in France. He founded the Centre for European Sociology and a research journal, both of which became centres of major work. His books include Distinction (1979) on taste and class, Homo Academicus (1984) on the sociology of academia, The Rules of Art (1992) on the literary field, and many others. In his last years he became increasingly politically active, particularly in opposition to what he called neoliberal policies across Europe. He died in Paris in 2002 at the age of seventy-one. His influence on sociology, education, cultural studies, and political theory has continued to grow since his death.

Stuart McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He is one of the founding figures of cultural studies. He was born on 3 February 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica. His family was middle class and mixed race. His parents wanted him to identify as British rather than Jamaican or Black. This early pressure shaped his lifelong interest in identity. In 1951, at nineteen, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He travelled to England and never moved back to live in Jamaica. He later described arriving in Britain as becoming a 'familiar stranger'. He knew the language and the books. But the country did not know him. This in-between position gave him his unique way of seeing things. He studied literature at Oxford but grew bored with traditional academic work. In the 1950s he helped found the New Left Review. This was a journal for socialist thinkers who rejected both Soviet communism and old British Labour politics. In 1964 he joined the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He became its director in 1968. For the next ten years, he turned it into the most important cultural studies centre in the world. In 1979 he moved to the Open University, which taught mostly through TV and correspondence. He wanted to reach ordinary people, not just university students. He stayed there until he retired. He died on 10 February 2014, aged 82. He had suffered from kidney failure for many years.