About Vilhelm Aubert

Professor Vilhelm Aubert (1922-1988) was one of Norway's leading social researchers and sociologists.

Aubert was educated as a lawyer and was Norway's first sociologist of law. He was also a founder of the Institute for Social Research (ISF).

Professor Vilhelm Aubert

During and after WWII, Vilhelm Aubert was active in the intellectual community around Arne Naess, as were other prominent sociologists including Harriet Holter, Stein Rokkan and Erik Rinde. They constituted a productive and innovative group that had a major influence on the develop of social science in Norway in the post-war period.

It was specifically the work of this group that led to the establishment of ISF in 1950 as an independent interdisciplinary research institution. From 1950 until the mid 1960s ISF constituted the central Norwegian research centre within sociology, philosophy, political science and psychology, and the institute enjoyed great national and international recognition.

Vilhelm Aubert was connected with ISF until 1963, when he took up a professorship in social justice at the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. From 1971 he was professor of sociology at the Department of sociology (now the Department of Sociology and Human Geography) at the University of Oslo.

Aubert contributed to establishing sociology as an academic discipline at the University of Oslo and wrote several of the most used Norwegian textbooks in sociology and social justice.Some of his most important texts are collected in the book Continuity and Development in Law and Society, which was published after his death in 1989. His collection of essays

The Hidden Society (1965) was an important contribution to the debate on theory and method in Scandinavian sociology.

 

Published Nov. 9, 2016 1:39 PM - Last modified Mar. 25, 2021 12:30 PM