Ferdinand Tönnies was a German sociologist, economist, and philosopher. He was a significant contributor to sociological theory and field studies, best known for distinguishing between two types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. He co-founded the German Society for Sociology together with Max Weber and Georg Simmel and many other founders. He was president of the society from 1909 to 1933, after which he was ousted for having criticized the Nazis. Tönnies was regarded as the first proper German sociologist and published over 900 works, contributing to many areas of sociology and philosophy. Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel are considered the founding fathers of classical German sociology. Though there has been a resurgence of interest in Weber and Simmel, Tönnies has not drawn as much attention.
Robert Michels was a German-born Italian sociologist who contributed to elite theory by describing the political behavior of intellectual elites.
Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician. A class conflict theorist, Dahrendorf was a leading expert on explaining and analysing class divisions in modern society. Dahrendorf wrote multiple articles and books, his most notable being Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) and Essays in the Theory of Society (1968).
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch was a social and political scientist from Prague. He was the Stanfield Professor of International Peace at Harvard University. From 1977 to 1987 he was the Director of Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin.
Peter Wagner is a German social and political theorist. His research brings together social and political philosophy and theory with the comparative-historical sociology of modern societies in Europe, Latin America and southern Africa. He has done comparative research in the history of the social sciences and has contributed to debates about the so-called Axial Age, while his recent work has addressed questions of historical progress and social and political transformations. He is a former Professor of Social and Political Theory at the European University Institute, Florence, and a former Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. At present he is an ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona.
Elmar Altvater was Professor of Political Science at the Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Free University of Berlin, before retiring on 30 September 2004. He continued to work at the Institute, and published articles and books.
Peter Joachim Katzenstein FBA is a German-American political scientist. He is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. Katzenstein has made influential contributions to the fields of comparative politics, international relations, and international political economy.
Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 150 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the "California school" in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization. He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.
William Anthony Gamson was a professor of Sociology at Boston College, where he was also the co-director of the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP). He is the author of numerous books and articles on political discourse, the mass-media and social movements from as early as the 1960s. His influential works include Power and Discontent (1968), The Strategy of Social Protest (1975), Encounters with Unjust Authority (1982) and Talking Politics (2002), as well as numerous editions of SIMSOC.
Manfred G. Schmidt is Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences of the University of Heidelberg.
Andrei S. Markovits is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of many books, scholarly articles, conference papers, book reviews and newspaper contributions in English and many foreign languages on topics as varied as German and Austrian politics, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, social movements, the European right and the European left. Markovits has also worked extensively on comparative sports culture in Europe and North America. In August 2021, Markovits published a memoir entitled The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness.
Donatella della Porta is an Italian sociologist and political scientist, who is Professor of political science and political sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She is known for her research in the areas of social movements, corruption, political violence, police and policies of public order.
Marcel Marius van der Linden was director of research at the International Institute of Social History until 2014, is now Senior Researcher at the Institute, and also holds a professorship dedicated to the history of social movements at the University of Amsterdam.
Jens Beckert is a German sociologist with a strong interest in economic sociology. The author of books on inherited wealth and the social foundations of economic efficiency, he focuses on the role of the economy in society – especially based on studies of markets – as well as organizational sociology, the sociology of inheritance, and sociological theory. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim (1924–1951), Inge Neumann (1955–1973), and Erica Sherover (1976–1979). In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism and entertainment culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.
Benjamin Ziemann is a German historian who lectures at the University of Sheffield. Since 2011, he has been Professor of Modern German History at the Department of History, University of Sheffield.
Werner Bergmann is a German sociologist. He is Professor of Sociology at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin.
Joachim Schuster is a German politician, political scientist and since July 2014. He is Member of the European Parliament (MEP) representing Germany as part of the Party of European Socialists. From 1999 until 2006, Schuster was member of the Bürgerschaft of Bremen. From 2006 until December 2012, State Council in Bremen, first of work, youth and social issues, then of health and science.
Mario Keßler is a German historian.
Ruud Koopmans is a Dutch sociologist and professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on migration, social integration and transnationalization.
