The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#1
Bảo Đại
#61
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Bảo Đại , born Nguyễn Phúc/Phước Vĩnh Thụy , was the 13th and final emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, the last ruling dynasty of Vietnam. From 1926 to 1945, he was emperor of Annam and de jure monarch of Tonkin, which were then protectorates in French Indochina, covering the present-day central and northern Vietnam. Bảo Đại ascended the throne in 1932.
Go to Profile#2
Manuel Noriega
#97
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno was a Panamanian dictator, politician and military officer who was the de facto ruler of Panama from 1983 to 1989. An authoritarian ruler who amassed a personal fortune through drug trafficking operations, Noriega had longstanding ties with the United States intelligence agencies before the U.S. invasion of Panama removed him from power.
Go to Profile#3
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#146
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński , known as Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman, while elements of liberal idealism have also been identified in his outlook. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
Go to Profile#4
Mikhail Gorbachev
#112
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to the country's dissolution in 1991. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 and additionally as head of state beginning in 1988, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990 and the only President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s.
Go to Profile#5
Abdullah Öcalan
#222
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Abdullah Öcalan , also known as Apo , is a political prisoner and founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party . Öcalan was based in Syria from 1979 to 1998. He helped found the PKK in 1978, and led it into the Kurdish–Turkish conflict in 1984. For most of his leadership, he was based in Syria, which provided sanctuary to the PKK until the late 1990s.
Go to Profile#6
Robert Mueller
#44
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert Swan Mueller III is an American lawyer who served as the sixth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2001 to 2013. A graduate of Princeton University and New York University, Mueller served as a Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam War, receiving a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart. He subsequently attended the University of Virginia School of Law. Mueller is a registered Republican in Washington, D.C., and was appointed and reappointed to Senate-confirmed positions by presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
Go to Profile#7
Liu Xiaobo
#320
Overall Influence
1955 - 2017 (62 years)
Liu Xiaobo was a Chinese literary critic, human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and was involved in campaigns to end communist one-party rule in China. He was arrested numerous times, and was described as China's most prominent dissident and the country's most famous political prisoner. On 26 June 2017, he was granted medical parole after being diagnosed with liver cancer; he died a few weeks later on 13 July 2017.
Go to Profile#8
George F. Kennan
#238
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men."
Go to Profile#9
Samuel P. Huntington
#253
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.
Go to Profile#10
Jonas Savimbi
#582
Overall Influence
1934 - 2002 (68 years)
Jonas Malheiro Savimbi was an Angolan revolutionary, politician, and rebel military leader who founded and led the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola . UNITA waged a guerrilla war against Portuguese colonial rule from 1966 to 1974, then confronted the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola during the Angolan Civil War. Savimbi was killed in a clash with government troops in 2002.
Go to Profile#11
George Tenet
#364
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
George John Tenet is an American intelligence official and academic who served as the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#12
Roméo Dallaire
#685
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Roméo Antonius Dallaire is a Canadian retired politician and military officer who was a senator from Quebec from 2005 to 2014, and a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Armed Forces. He notably was the force commander of UNAMIR, the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and for trying to stop the genocide that was being waged by Hutu extremists against Tutsis. Dallaire is a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and co-director of the MIGS Will to Intervene Project.
Go to Profile#13
Joseph Nye
#602
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. is an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of "smart power" became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration.
Go to Profile#14
Daniel Ellsberg
#282
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.
Go to Profile#15
Francis Fukuyama
#205
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer. Fukuyama is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man , which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle and become the final form of human government, an assessment met with numerous and substantial criticisms. In his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity , he modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics.
Go to Profile#16
Robert D. Putnam
#464
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert David Putnam is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences.
Go to Profile#17
David Petraeus
#313
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Howell Petraeus is a retired United States Army general and public official. He served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from September 6, 2011, until his resignation on November 9, 2012. Prior to his assuming the directorship of the CIA, Petraeus served 37 years in the United States Army. His last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force and commander, U.S. Forces – Afghanistan from July 4, 2010, to July 18, 2011. His other four-star assignments include serving as the 10th commander, U.S. Central Command from October 13, ...
Go to Profile#18
Angela Davis
#123
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American revolutionary Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism . She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Go to Profile#19
Elinor Ostrom
#264
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Go to Profile#20
Hussein of Jordan
#440
Overall Influence
1935 - 1999 (64 years)
Hussein bin Talal was King of Jordan from 11 August 1952 until his death in 1999. As a member of the Hashemite dynasty, the royal family of Jordan since 1921, Hussein was a 40th-generation direct descendant of Muhammad.
Go to Profile#21
Jiang Qing
#294
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
Jiang Qing , also known as Madame Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, actress, and major political figure during the Cultural Revolution . She was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party and Paramount leader of China. She used the stage name Lan Ping during her acting career , and was known by many other names. Jiang was best known for playing a major role in the Cultural Revolution and for forming the radical political alliance known as the "Gang of Four".
Go to Profile#22
Herbert A. Simon
#6
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science.
Go to Profile#23
Elie Wiesel
#153
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Go to Profile#24
Samantha Power
#1015
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#25
Robert Keohane
#1085
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#26
Kenneth Waltz
#556
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Kenneth Neal Waltz was an American political scientist who was a member of the faculty at both the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars in the field of international relations. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War.
Go to Profile#27
Avigdor Lieberman
#657
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Avigdor Lieberman is a Soviet-born Israeli politician who served as Minister of Finance between 2021 and 2022, having previously served twice as Deputy Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2008 and 2009 to 2012.
Go to Profile#28
Jean Charest
#574
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
John James "Jean" Charest is a Canadian lawyer and former politician who served as the 29th premier of Quebec from 2003 to 2012 and the fifth deputy prime minister of Canada in 1993. Charest was elected to the House of Commons in 1984 and would serve in several federal cabinet positions between 1986 and 1993. He became the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1993 and remained in the role until he entered provincial politics in 1998. Charest was elected as the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, and his party went on to form government in 2003.
Go to Profile#29
Peter Tatchell
#961
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter Gary Tatchell is an Australian-born British human rights campaigner, best known for his work with LGBTQI+ social movements. Tatchell was selected as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey in 1981. He was then denounced by party leader Michael Foot for ostensibly supporting extra-Parliamentary action against the Thatcher government. Labour subsequently allowed him to stand in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election in February 1983, in which the party lost the seat to the Liberals. In the 1990s he campaigned for LGBT rights through the direct action group OutRage!, which he co-founded.
Go to Profile#30
David Easton
#1069
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist. From 1947 to 1997, he served as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. At the forefront of both the behavioralist and post-behavioralist revolutions in the discipline of political science during the 1950s and 1970s, Easton provided the discipline's most widely used definition of politics as the authoritative allocation of values for the society. He was renowned for his application of systems theory to the study of political science. Policy analysts have utilized his five-fold scheme for studying the policy-making process: input, conversion, output, feedback and environment.
Go to Profile#31
James Q. Wilson
#809
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
James Quinn Wilson was an American political scientist and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board , and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard-MIT.
Go to Profile#32
Abbas Milani
#906
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Abbas Malekzadeh Milani is an Iranian-American historian, educator, and author. Milani is a visiting professor of political science, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In Milani's book, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran , he has found evidence that Persian modernism dates back to more than 1,000 years ago.
Go to Profile#33
Richard Holbrooke
#949
Overall Influence
1941 - 2010 (69 years)
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was an American diplomat and author. He was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world . From 1993 to 1994, he was U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He was long well-known among journalists and in diplomatic circles. Holbrooke became familiar to the wider public in 1995 when, with former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, they brokered a peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia leading to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. Holbrooke was a prime contender to succeed Warren Christo...
Go to Profile#34
Oliver North
#719
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Oliver Laurence North is an American political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. A veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a National Security Council staff member during the Iran–Contra affair, a political scandal of the late 1980s. It involved the illegal sale of weapons to the Khomeini regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran to encourage the release of American hostages then held in Lebanon. North formulated the second part of the plan, which was to divert proceeds from the arms sales to support the Contra rebel groups in Nicaragua, sales which had been specifically prohibited under the Boland Amendment.
Go to Profile#35
Charles Tilly
#589
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#36
Robert Gilpin
#2106
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Robert Gilpin was an American political scientist. He was Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where he held the Eisenhower professorship.
Go to Profile#37
McGeorge Bundy
#644
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
McGeorge "Mac" Bundy was an American academic who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979. Despite his career as a foreign-policy intellectual, educator, and philanthropist, he is best remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Go to Profile#38
Suisheng Zhao
#1946
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Suisheng Zhao is a professor of Chinese politics and foreign policy at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He serves as director of the school's Center for China–US Cooperation, and is the founding editor and the editor-in-chief of the multidisciplinary Journal of Contemporary China.
Go to Profile#39
Mohammad Javad Zarif
#1261
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mohammad Javad Zarif Khansari is an Iranian career diplomat and academic. He was the foreign minister of Iran from 2013 until 2021 in the government of Hassan Rouhani. During his tenure as foreign minister, he led the Iranian negotiation with P5+1 countries which produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on 14 July 2015, lifting the economic sanctions against Iran on 16 January 2016. On 25 February 2019, Zarif resigned from his post as foreign minister. His resignation was rejected by Ali Khamenei and he continued as foreign minister.
Go to Profile#40
Paul Bremer
#1019
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Lewis Paul Bremer III is an American diplomat. He was the de facto head of state of Iraq as leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority following the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States, from May 2003 until June 2004.
Go to Profile#41
Robert Dahl
#2275
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Robert Alan Dahl was an American political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He established the pluralist theory of democracy—in which political outcomes are enacted through competitive, if unequal, interest groups—and introduced "polyarchy" as a descriptor of actual democratic governance. An originator of "empirical theory" and known for advancing behavioralist characterizations of political power, Dahl's research focused on the nature of decision making in actual institutions, such as American cities. He is the most important scholar associated with th...
Go to Profile#42
Mohamed ElBaradei
#907
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Mohamed Mostafa ElBaradei is an Egyptian law scholar and diplomat who served as the vice president of Egypt on an interim basis from 14 July 2013 until his resignation on 14 August 2013. He was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency , an intergovernmental organization under the auspices of the United Nations , from 1997 to 2009. At the end of his tenure he was appointed “Director General Emeritus of the International Atomic Energy Agency”. He and the IAEA were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for...
Go to Profile#43
John Mearsheimer
#922
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#44
Adam Przeworski
#1299
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Adam Przeworski is a Polish-American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics. He is Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics of New York University. He is a scholar of democratic societies, theory of democracy, social democracy and political economy, as well as an early proponent of rational choice theory in political science.
Go to Profile#45
Brent Scowcroft
#1108
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Brent Scowcroft was a United States Air Force officer who was a two-time United States National Security Advisor, first under U.S. President Gerald Ford and then under George H. W. Bush. He served as Military Assistant to President Richard Nixon and as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He served as Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005, and advised President Barack Obama on choosing his national security team.
Go to Profile#46
Rigoberta Menchú
#1489
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War , and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.
Go to Profile#47
Agnès Callamard
#3226
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Agnès Callamard is a French human-rights activist who is the Secretary General of Amnesty International. She was previously the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
Go to Profile#48
Lawrence Lessig
#161
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 US presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Go to Profile#49
Thomas R. Dye
#4252
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Thomas R. Dye is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Florida State University and was formerly a McKenzie Professor of Government. Dye has described politics as being about who gets scarce governmental resources, where, when, why and how.
Go to Profile#50
Stokely Carmichael
#771
Overall Influence
1941 - 1998 (57 years)
Kwame Ture was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. He was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party , and last as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party .
Go to Profile