Westermarckian Legacy

Edward Westermarck was one of the great classical founders of sociology. As Edmund Leach puts it, ‘Westermarck began to teach a rich combination of theoretical sociology and fieldwork-based social anthropology as early as 1904’ (Leach, 1984, 6), and three years later he became Britain’s first professor of sociology. Before that, at the turn of the 1890s, Westermarck founded sociology in Finland. In the 1910s and 1920s, Westermarck’s students became lecturers and Finland’s first professors of sociology (Pipatti & Ahmajärvi, 2022). In addition, Westermarckian sociology had a central position in Finnish aesthetics, comparative religion, and philosophy. In other Nordic countries, teaching posts and professorships in sociology were established only after the Second World War.