NOTABLE PERSONALITIES IN SOCIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY AND

POLITICAL SCIENCE

MAX WEBER

Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber, one of the founding thinkers of sociology, died at the young age of
56. Though his life was short, his influence has been long and thrives today.

To honor his life, we've assembled this tribute to his work and its lasting importance to sociology.
some of his most important theoretical contributions: his formulation of the connection between
culture and economy; conceptualizing how people and institutions come to have authority, and how they
keep it; and, the "iron cage" of bureaucracy and how it shapes our lives. Max Weber's concept of the iron
cage is even more relevant today than when he first wrote about it in 1905.

Simply put, Weber suggests that the technological and economic relationships that organized and grew
out of capitalist production became themselves fundamental forces in society. Thus, if you are born into
a society organized this way, with the division of labor and hierarchical social structure that comes with
it, you can't help but live within this system. As such, one's life and worldview are shaped by it to such an
extent that one probably can't even imagine what an alternative way of life would look like. So, those
born into the cage live out its dictates, and in doing so, reproduce the cage in perpetuity. For this reason,
Weber considered the iron cage a massive hindrance to freedom.
 MARGARET MEAD
Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)
Margaret Mead, a pioneer of cultural anthropology, was born on December 16, 1901, in Philadelphia. She
contributed a lot in understanding the modern concepts of western and American culture. Mead
published several books on contemporary issues and primitive societies. She was a strong supporter of
women's rights. Her most renowned works are Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Growing Up in New
Guinea (1930), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and Blackberry Winter: My
Earlier years (1972).
As an anthropologist, Mead was best known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania,
especially with regard to various aspects of psychology and culture—the cultural conditioning of sexual
behaviour, natural character, and culture change. As a celebrity, she was most notable for her forays into
such far-ranging topics as women’s rights, child rearing, sexual morality, nuclear proliferation, race
relations, drug abuse, population control, environmental pollution, and world hunger.
 THOMAS HOBBES

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is considered by many to be the first political scientist. His political writings
is have been some of the most formative in for the Western world. His observations about the political
world still remain one of the must-reads in philosophy and government. Hobbes’ masterpiece book
Leviathan (1651) is typically assumed to be negative in its view of human nature and how government
works, however, Hobbes is usually grouped into a school of thought known as Realism that believes
human nature cannot be trusted in certain conditions. He is famous for the quote where he says that life
in the natural state which is one of war is “…solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[1] The chapter that
is quoted most often is Chapter 13 which deals with the issue of war within all people and the state of
nature that Hobbes believed all people to have participated in before government and society was
formed. The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is now widely regarded as one of a
handful of truly great political philosophers, whose masterwork Leviathan rivals in significance the
political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls. Hobbes is famous for his early and
elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of
justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among
suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons. He is infamous for having used the social contract
method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—
undivided and unlimited—sovereign power. While his methodological innovation had a profound
constructive impact on subsequent work in political philosophy, his substantive conclusions have served
mostly as a foil for the development of more palatable philosophical positions.