Westermarck’s Research Programme of Sociology

Edward Westermarck (1862–1939) lectured and studied sociology in two countries for several decades around 1900. Westermarck had a clear understanding of sociology and its object of study, which is reflected in his teaching and research. At the beginning of chapter, I describe Westermarck’s life, personality, and teaching of sociology in Finland and Britain. I then focus on the key features of Westermarck’s sociology and his debt to eighteenth-century Scottish moral sentimentalism and Darwinian evolutionism. In the final part of the chapter, I examine Westermarck’s methodological thinking, especially the comparative method he uses in his works on morality and marriage. The chapter shows that despite many connections and continuities, Westermarck’s approach differs in many ways from the nineteenth century sociocultural evolutionism.