Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

Edward Westermarck was a Finnish sociologist who taught at both the University of Helsinki and the London School of Economics. He was a major sociologist in the first third of the twentieth century, even better known and more widely read than Durkheim (Roos 2008). His first important work was The History of Human Marriage (HHM), published in 1891. It was revised several times, the final edition appearing in 1922. His other major work was The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (ODMI), a large two-volume work published in 1906 (volume 1) and 1908 (volume 2). Westermarck was also a diligent fieldworker, spending many years living in Morocco observing social life and publishing several volumes on his studies (e.g., Westermarck 1914, 1926).Westermarck was greatly influenced by Darwin, and in fact the bulk of his theoretical ideas owe a debt to Darwin. Indeed, he was the very first person that we could call a sociobiologist or an evolutionary psychologist, because he was applying Darwinian natural selectionist thinking in almost precisely the same way as modern-day evolutionary psychologists. He was a thinker about a century ahead of his time.The first volume of HHM was devoted to a critique of the celebrated argument developed by several prominent evolutionists of the day, that the earliest humans lived in a state of sexual promiscuity. After an extensive review of evidence, Westermarck ... log in or subscribe to read full text