Morris Ginsberg

Morris Ginsberg (1889 to 1970) was a British sociologist who played a key role in the development of the discipline. Born in Kelmė in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Lithuania, he joined his father in Liverpool at fifteen, later studied at University College London on a scholarship in sociology, and became an assistant to Leonard Hobhouse at the London School of Economics, where he succeeded Hobhouse in 1930 as Martin White Professor of Sociology. He edited The Sociological Review in the 1930s, was founding chairman and first president of the British Sociological Association, and helped draft the 1950 UNESCO statement The Race Question. His work argued that reason can shape feeling and action, and it separated the diversity of moral codes among societies from moral relativism.