Maksim Kovalevsky

Maksim Kovalevsky (1851 to 1916) was a jurist and the main authority on sociology in the Russian Empire. Born into a Ukrainian noble family and raised near Kharkov, he studied in Berlin, Paris and London, where he met Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Herbert Spencer, and from 1878 lectured in law at Moscow, studying the Russian peasant commune and the legal institutions of Caucasian highlanders until he was dismissed in 1886. He was vice-president of the International Institute of Sociology in 1895 and its president in 1905, and was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1914. A social evolutionist who called himself a disciple of Auguste Comte, he joined a historical method with sociological and ethnographic work, defined sociology as the science of the organization and evolution of societies, and counted Pitirim Sorokin among his students.