Vilhelm Aubert

Johan Vilhelm Aubert (7 June 1922 – 19 July 1988) was an influential Norwegian sociologist. He was a professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo from 1963 to 1971 and at the Department of Sociology from 1971 to 1988. He co-founded the Norwegian Institute for Social Research already in 1950, and has been labelled the "father of Norwegian sociology". In his early life he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance group XU, and while later involved on the radical wing of the Labour Party, he edited the newspaper Orientering.

Early career Vilhelm Aubert was born in Kristiania in 1922. He was the older brother of mathematician Karl Egil Aubert, born 1924. Vilhelm Aubert enrolled at the University of Oslo in 1940, the same year as Norway was invaded by Germany as a part of the Second World War. Aubert became a member of the illegal intelligence organization XU. He was a joint founder of the Norwegian Institute for Social Research (ISF, or Institutt for samfunnsforsking), an independent research institute in Oslo, along with Arne Næss, Eirik Rinde, and Stein Rokkan in 1950.

Aubert was a member of the Labour Party in his younger days. Situated on its left wing, he co-published the pamphlet Tenk en gang til. Tanker om fred og nedrustning in 1952, and was among the founders of the newspaper Orientering. He was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper for some time. The persons in and around this newspaper were excluded from the Labour Party in 1960, He has been criticized for maintaining a thin line between research and activism in some of his works. Aubert's employment of action research has been attributed to his left-wing political stance.