Edward Westermarck

Edvard Westermarck was a Finnish sociologist, social anthropologist, and philosopher born in Helsinki in 1862. He became one of Finland’s best-known scholars internationally and worked across several fields, especially the study of marriage, family life, and moral ideas.

He is especially remembered for arguing against the old theory that early humans lived in complete sexual promiscuity, proposing instead that pair-bonding and the family were basic parts of human society. His major books include The History of Human Marriage and The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, and his name is also attached to the “Westermarck effect,” the idea that people raised closely together in childhood are less likely to feel sexual attraction toward one another.

Westermarck taught in both Finland and Britain, including at the London School of Economics, and also served as the first rector of Åbo Akademi University. He spent years doing fieldwork in Morocco, bringing firsthand observation into debates that had often been based only on theory, and that mix of wide learning and real-world research helped make him an unusually influential scholar of his time.