Thinkers Timeline

Jane Addams was an American sociologist, social reformer, and peace activist. She is one of the founders of American sociology, though she was left out of its history for many years. She was born on 6 September 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois. Her family was wealthy by local standards. Her father was a businessman and a friend of Abraham Lincoln. Her mother died when Jane was two. She studied at Rockford Female Seminary, graduating in 1881. She hoped to become a doctor but her health was fragile. For several years in her twenties, she felt lost. Women of her class were expected to marry and run a home, but she wanted something more meaningful. In 1887 she travelled to Europe with her close friend Ellen Gates Starr. In London they visited Toynbee Hall, a new kind of place where educated people lived among the poor and worked with them. They decided to do something similar in America. In 1889, they opened Hull House in a poor immigrant neighbourhood of Chicago. Hull House gave adult education, childcare, art classes, English lessons, and a safe meeting place for workers and reformers. It became the most famous settlement house in America. Addams lived there for the rest of her life. She wrote eleven books and hundreds of articles. She campaigned for women's right to vote, workers' rights, and peace. She opposed America's entry into the First World War. In 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She died on 21 May 1935, aged 74.

Max Weber (1864-1920) was a German sociologist who wrote about religion, politics, economics, and the nature of modern society. He was born in Erfurt, in central Germany, into a prosperous middle-class Protestant family. His father was a lawyer and National Liberal politician who enjoyed public life. His mother was a devout Calvinist with strong moral convictions. The clash between his father's worldly ambition and his mother's religious seriousness shaped Weber from childhood. He was an extraordinarily serious student who read law, economics, philosophy, and history at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen. He completed his doctorate in 1889 on medieval trading companies and his second doctorate in 1891 on Roman agrarian history. In 1893 he married his cousin Marianne Schnitger, who became a notable sociologist and feminist in her own right and would later edit and promote his work. In his early thirties he seemed set for a great academic career. He became a professor at Freiburg in 1894 and at Heidelberg in 1896. But in 1897, after a violent argument with his authoritarian father — who died shortly afterwards — Weber suffered a severe mental breakdown. For several years he could not read or teach. He took leave from his professorship and spent long periods travelling to recover. Though he regained his capacity for work, he never returned to regular teaching. Instead he wrote intensively from private life for nearly two decades. His major works come mostly from this period. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905) is his most famous book. Economy and Society, an enormous unfinished work on the structure of social life, was edited and published by Marianne after his death. He also wrote major studies on the religions of China and India, on ancient Judaism, on the city, and on politics. He briefly returned to teaching at the end of his life — at Vienna in 1918 and Munich in 1919. He died in Munich in 1920 at the age of fifty-six, probably from the Spanish flu pandemic. His influence has grown continuously since his death. His work is now studied worldwide as foundational for sociology, political science, and the study of religion.

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.

Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist. She is one of the most important thinkers on race, gender, and power in recent decades. She was born on 1 May 1948 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She grew up in a working-class Black family. Her mother was a secretary and her father worked in a factory. She was often the only Black student in her classrooms. This experience shaped her later ideas about being an outsider inside. She studied at Brandeis University and then Harvard, where she earned a Master's degree in teaching in 1970. She worked for several years as a teacher and community educator, including at the Saint Joseph Community School in Roxbury, Boston. She returned to Brandeis for her doctorate in sociology, which she completed in 1984. She taught at the University of Cincinnati for many years. In 2005, she moved to the University of Maryland, where she became Distinguished University Professor of Sociology. Her 1990 book Black Feminist Thought changed her field. It was the first major attempt to set out Black women's ideas as a coherent intellectual tradition. Since then, she has written many other important books including Black Sexual Politics (2004) and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019). In 2009, she became the first Black woman to serve as President of the American Sociological Association, the largest body of sociologists in the world. She is now retired from teaching but continues to write. In 2023, she received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, a major international award. She is one of the most honoured sociologists alive.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian sociologist, historian, and activist of Aymara heritage. She is one of the most important thinkers on colonialism and Indigenous rights in Latin America. She was born in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1949. Her father was Quechua-speaking, her mother Aymara-speaking. At home, Spanish was the main language, though her family's Indigenous roots shaped her whole life. She studied sociology at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz and later earned a master's in anthropology in Lima. Her early adulthood was shaped by Bolivia's violent politics. In the 1970s, the country was ruled by military dictators. Rivera Cusicanqui was arrested and imprisoned for her political activities. Her master's thesis was destroyed in a raid on her home. She went into exile in Argentina while pregnant with her first daughter. These experiences of violence and loss shaped her lifelong commitment to Indigenous and popular movements. When she returned to Bolivia, she became a professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, where she taught sociology for over thirty years. She is now emerita professor there. In 1983 she co-founded the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop), a group that collects and studies the oral histories of Aymara and Quechua communities. She has worked closely with the Katarista Indigenous movement and with coca growers' movements. She writes in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, sometimes mixing languages in a single text. She has written many books and made films. She is known for refusing easy labels. She calls herself a 'sochologist' (a play on 'chola', meaning urban Aymara woman, and 'sociologist'). She has been a harsh critic of how Indigenous struggles are absorbed and changed by Western academics and Bolivian state politics. She is still active and writing in 2026.