The First Finnish Sociologist: A Reappraisal of Edward Westermarck's Work.

The article traces the influence of sociologist Edward Westermarck on the development of sociology. When the first commercial edition of his doctorate thesis--much enlarged by the inclusion of numerous empirical examples was published in 1891, it immediately became a best-seller, a scientific sensation of almost the same order as the Kinsey Report fifty years later. From the very beginning Westermarck was convinced that the emotions which help to maintain the norms which express them moral ideas of a society, developed through man's struggle for survival: through some kind of natural selection they had evolved in a fasion similar to the human genotype. What Westermarck tried to in The History of the Human Marriage was first to prove that the promiscuity hypothesis could not be true and secondly to describe and analyse the multiform ideas and habits which were connected with human sexuality, marriage and family. In most of Westermarck's books there are occasional asides about how he went about collecting his data. When Westermark began his academic studies in 1881, there was not a single university where sociology was taught as an academic subject. At an early state in his scholarly development he became convinced that no normative ethic could be constructed unless it was known which acts people regarded as moral and which they regarded as immoral.