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 …
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#751
Eliot A. Cohen
#14387
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Eliot Asher Cohen is an American political scientist. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. In 2019, Cohen was named the 9th Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding the former dean, Vali Nasr. Before his time as dean, he directed the Strategic Studies Program at SAIS. Cohen "is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field", according to international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Go to Profile#752
C. Christine Fair
#22845
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Carol Christine Fair is an American political scientist. She is an associate professor in the Security Studies Program within the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her work is primarily focused on counter-terrorism and South Asian topics.
Go to Profile#753
Henrik Enderlein
#21800
Overall Influence
1974 - 2021 (47 years)
Henrik Enderlein was a German economist and political scientist. He was president and professor of political economy at the Hertie School in Berlin and founding director of the Jacques Delors Centre at the Hertie School. He held degrees from Sciences Po, Columbia University and earned his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. From 2001 to 2003, he worked as an economist at the European Central Bank. He held visiting professorships at Harvard Kennedy School and at Duke University .
Go to Profile#754
Amrita Narlikar
#20045
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Amrita Narlikar is the president of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is also an Honorary Fellow of Darwin College , a non-resident senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation , a Distinguished International Fellow of the Indian Association of International Studies .
Go to Profile#755
Édouard Balladur
#11897
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Édouard Balladur is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France under François Mitterrand from 29 March 1993 to 17 May 1995. He unsuccessfully ran for president in the 1995 French presidential election, coming in third place.
Go to Profile#756
Meg Russell
#26797
Overall Influence
Meg Russell is a constitutional scholar of British politics. She is Professor of British and Comparative Politics at University College London. Biography Russell worked in the House of Commons and for the British Labour Party before taking up a role with UCL at the Constitution Unit. In 2006 she was awarded the Richard Rose Prize from the Political Studies Association. She has served as an advisor to the Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee. Russell is a senior fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe research institute and an Associate of the Institute for Government.
Go to Profile#757
Peter Dreier
#19611
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter Dreier is an American urban policy analyst, author, liberal commentator, leftist and college political science professor. He is the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.
Go to Profile#758
Fahrettin Altun
#17560
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Fahrettin Altun is a Тurkish politician, researcher, academic, member of the Justice and Development Party and head of media and communications in the Turkish presidency. Education and early life Altun studied Istanbul University Department of Sociology, graduating in 1998. He then studied at Mimar Sinan University and received his PhD from Istanbul University in 2006. His doctoral thesis was titled “A Comparative Analysis of Media Theories of McLuhan and Baudrillard”. Besides he has been involved in the Turkish government think tank Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research .
Go to Profile#759
Manuel García Pelayo
#26544
Overall Influence
1909 - 1991 (82 years)
Manuel García Pelayo , prominent Spanish political scientist and jurist. He was the founder of the modern Department of Political Science of the Central University of Venezuela and was elected President of the Constitutional Court of Spain in 1980.
Go to Profile#760
Michael Freeden
#9390
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael Freeden is a Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. Between 2013 and 2015, he was Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is a leading theorist of ideology and the founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies.
Go to Profile#761
Stuart Rothenberg
#18867
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stuart Rothenberg is an American editor, publisher, and political analyst. He is best known for his biweekly political newsletter The Rothenberg Political Report, now known as Inside Elections. He was also a regular columnist at Roll Call and an occasional op-ed contributor to other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Orlando Sentinel.
Go to Profile#762
Chuan Leekpai
#18666
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Chuan Leekpai is a Thai politician who is the former President of the National Assembly of Thailand as well as the Speaker of the Thai House of Representatives from 2019 to 2023. Previously he served as the Thai prime minister in 2 terms from 20 September 1992 to 19 May 1995 and again from 9 November 1997 to 9 February 2001.
Go to Profile#763
Yair Hirschfeld
#19893
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Yair Hirschfeld is an Israeli lecturer at the University of Haifa. Hirschfeld was a key architect of the Oslo Accords in 1993. He was born in Vienna and has been a strong supporter of the two-state solution, and has urged the Palestinian National Authority and the Israeli government to accept some form of this solution.
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Linda Bilmes
#20505
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Linda J. Bilmes is an American economist who is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer Chair in Public Policy and Public Finance at Harvard University. She is a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School where she teaches public policy, budgeting and public finance. She served as Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the US Department of Commerce during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Go to Profile#765
Zeev Maoz
#29873
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ze'ev Maoz is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Correlates of War Project at the University of California, Davis, as well as Distinguished Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. He is the President of the Peace Science Society during 2007-08. Before coming to UC-Davis he was head of the Graduate School of Government and Policy at Tel-Aviv University. He also served as the Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies , as the Academic Director of the M.A. program of the National Defense College of the IDF , and as Chairman of the Department of Politica...
Go to Profile#766
Roger Masters
#12547
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Roger Davis Masters studied at Harvard , served in the U.S. Army , completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and served on the faculty at Yale and then Dartmouth College, with a two-year leave to serve as Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy in Paris . From his retirement in 1998 he was the Nelson A. Rockefeller Professor of Government Emeritus in the Department of Government at Dartmouth.
Go to Profile#767
Stephen K. White
#21709
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Stephen K. White , is James Hart Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on critical social and political theory, philosophy of social science, and continental political thought. He has contributed to several scholarly works on Jürgen Habermas, including The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, which he edited. He is also a past editor of the journal Political Theory.
Go to Profile#768
Patrick Dunleavy
#30273
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Patrick John Dunleavy , is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Public Policy within the Government Department of the London School of Economics . He was also Co-Director of Democratic Audit and Chair of the LSE Public Policy Group. In addition Dunleavy is an ANZSOG Institute for Governance Centenary Chair at the University of Canberra, Australia.
Go to Profile#769
R. Kent Weaver
#39215
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kent Weaver is a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. His focus is on a variety of fields in U.S. political science, including comparative social policy, comparative political institutions, and the politics of expertise. Weaver joined the Georgetown Public Policy Institute in the fall of 2002, after 19 years at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to Brookings, Weaver taught in the Political Science Department at the Ohio State University for several years. He received his B.A. from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in Po...
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Will McCants
#20396
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Will McCants , also known as William Faizi McCants, is a scholar of militant Islamism. He is a fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. An adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, he is a former senior advisor on violent extremism to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Founder and co-editor of the website Jihadica, he is also a former research analyst for CNA, a non-profit organization that encompasses the Center for Naval Analyses and the In...
Go to Profile#771
Frederick Hitz
#15508
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Frederick Porter Hitz is an author and former Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency . Hitz graduated from Princeton University and the Harvard School of Law. Hitz entered the CIA in 1967 as an operations officer. In 1973 Hitz was moved to the State Department, the Department of Defense, and Department of Energy, and then returned to the CIA in 1978. President George H. W. Bush appointed Hitz the first statutory Inspector General of the CIA in 1990.
Go to Profile#772
Aleksander Kwaśniewski
#17059
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Aleksander Kwaśniewski is a Polish politician and journalist. He served as the president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. His tenure as President was marked by modernization of Poland, rapid economic growth , the drafting of a new Polish Constitution , and the accession of Poland to NATO and the European Union . In 2004, he brokered a pro-democratic agreement during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. According to polls, as of 2020 he is considered the best president in Polish history.
Go to Profile#773
Judy Rebick
#18407
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Judy Rebick is a Canadian writer, journalist, political activist, and feminist. Early life Born in Reno, Nevada, Rebick and her family moved to Toronto when she was 9. She became a socialist activist in the 1970s, joining the Revolutionary Marxist Group. She was a member of its successor, the Revolutionary Workers League, and wrote articles for the RWL's newspaper, Socialist Voice, until she left the organization in the early 1980s.
Go to Profile#774
Sumit Ganguly
#36046
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sumit Ganguly is a professor of political science at Indiana University and currently holds that University's Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations, focusing on comparative politics in South Asia.
Go to Profile#775
Yoram Hazony
#10915
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Yoram Reuben Hazony is an Israeli-American philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist. He is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He has argued for national conservatism in his 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism and 2020's Conservatism: A Rediscovery.
Go to Profile#776
David Cingranelli
#36407
Overall Influence
David Cingranelli is a professor of Political Science at Binghamton University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He conducts global, comparative, econometric research examining the causes and consequences of variation in government respect for various human rights. His 2007 book with Rodwan Abouharb, Human Rights and Structural Adjustment, demonstrated the negative human rights impacts of World Bank and IMF program lending in developing countries. His current research examines how constitutional design and other factors can provide incentives to politicians to enact policies protecting human rights including labor rights.
Go to Profile#777
Christopher Layne
#17024
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christopher Layne is an American academic specialising in foreign policy. He is currently Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He was previously a professor at the University of Miami. His neorealist position in contemporary global politics is discussed in his 2006 book The Peace of Illusions.
Go to Profile#778
Robert Legvold
#19727
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert Legvold , is an American political scientist, specializing in the international relations of the post-Soviet states. He is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#779
Benjamin I. Schwartz
#21605
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Benjamin Isadore Schwartz was an American academic, political scientist, and sinologist who wrote on a wide range of topics in Chinese politics and intellectual history. He taught at Harvard his entire career, starting in 1950 as an instructor in the departments of history and government. He held the Leroy B. Williams Chair in History and Government from 1975 until he retired in 1987. He was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1979.
Go to Profile#780
Hannah Arendt
#53689
Overall Influence
#781
Richard K. Ashley
#23045
Overall Influence
Richard K. Ashley is a postmodernist scholar of International relations. He is an associate professor at the Arizona State University's School of Politics and Global Studies. Ashley studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was research assistant to Hayward Alker. Initially, Ashley's research was on the balance of power in international relations, particularly in his The Political Economy of War and Peace . He soon began to shift his approach to metatheoretical questions and Critical Theory. By the mid-1980s, Ashley had adopted a p...
Go to Profile#782
Françoise Vergès
#15860
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Françoise Vergès is a French political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism. Vergès was born in Paris, grew up in Réunion and Algeria before returning to Paris to study and become a journalist.
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Philip Norton, Baron Norton of Louth
#17346
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Philip Norton, Baron Norton of Louth, , is an English author, academic and Conservative peer. He has been described as "the United Kingdom's greatest living expert on Parliament" and "a world authority on constitutional issues."
Go to Profile#784
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa
#19533
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Marcelo Nuno Duarte Rebelo de Sousa is a Portuguese politician and academic. He is the 20th and current president of Portugal, since 9 March 2016. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party, though he suspended his party membership for the duration of his presidency. Rebelo de Sousa has previously served as a government minister, parliamentarian in the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic, legal scholar, journalist, political analyst, law professor, and pundit.
Go to Profile#785
Uzi Arad
#16955
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Uzi Arad is an Israeli strategist and a well-known figure in foreign policy, security and strategic circles in Israel and abroad. He is a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. Between 2009 and 2011 Arad served as the National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel, and the head of the Israeli National Security Council.
Go to Profile#786
William Leuchtenburg
#9741
Overall Influence
1922 - Present (102 years)
William Edward Leuchtenburg is an American historian. He is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Go to Profile#787
Mark Pennington
#21425
Overall Influence
Mark Pennington is a British political scientist and economist. He serves as a Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at King's College London. Early life Pennington received a PhD from the London School of Economics. His thesis, dated 1998, was titled Property rights, public choice and urban containment: A study of the British planning system.
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Henry Farrell
#16190
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Henry Farrell is an Irish-born political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught at the University of Toronto and earned his PhD from Georgetown University. His research interests include, trust and co-operation; E-commerce; the European Union; and institutional theory.
Go to Profile#789
Hadley Arkes
#8103
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Hadley P. Arkes is an American political scientist and the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions emeritus at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1966. He is currently the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#790
Abdullah Abdullah
#29948
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Abdullah Abdullah is an Afghan politician who led the High Council for National Reconciliation from May 2020 until August 2021, when the Afghan government was overthrown by the Taliban. The council had been established to facilitate peace talks between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban insurgents. Abdullah served as the Chief Executive of Afghanistan from September 2014 to March 2020, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 2001 to April 2005. Prior to that, he was a senior member of the Northern Alliance, working as an adviser to Ahmad Shah Massoud. He worked as a...
Go to Profile#791
Jason Sorens
#17760
Overall Influence
Jason Sorens is a Senior Research faculty member for the American Institute for Economic Research also known as, AIER. Previously, Sorens served as director of the Center for Ethics in Society at St. Anselm College and prior to his work with St. Anselm, Sorens was a lecturer in the department of government at Dartmouth College. He has been an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University since 2008. His primary research interests include fiscal federalism, public policy in federal systems, secessionism, and ethnic politics. Sorens received his B.A. in economics and ph...
Go to Profile#792
Rita Laura Segato
#19604
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Rita Laura Segato is an Argentine-Brazilian academic, who has been called "one of Latin America's most celebrated feminist anthropologists" and "one of the most lucid feminist thinkers of this era". She is specially known for her research oriented towards gender in indigenous villages and Latin American communities, violence against women and the relationships between gender, racism and colonialism. One of her specialist areas is the study of gender violence.
Go to Profile#793
Walter Berns
#13065
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Walter Berns was an American constitutional law and political philosophy professor. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University. Early life and career Berns was raised in Chicago, where, as late as 1926, he was impressed by "Union soldiers in the [Memorial Day] parade feebly carrying the standard." He attended Reed College and the General Course at the London School of Economics and Political Science, "where [he] learned little, other than to love London," and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa. World...
Go to Profile#794
Gary Wamsley
#20659
Overall Influence
Gary L. Wamsley is public administration specialist and professor emeritus at Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration and Policy. He is perhaps best known as the coordinating editor of Refounding Public Administration, a work that followed from a well-known public administration paper called the Blacksburg Manifesto. He has also for many years edited the journal Administration & Society.
Go to Profile#795
Meindert Fennema
#23097
Overall Influence
1946 - 2023 (77 years)
Meindert Fennema was a Dutch political scientist and Emeritus Professor of political science, who was attached to the Department of Political Science and the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies of the University of Amsterdam, where he held the chair on Political Theory of Ethnic Relations.
Go to Profile#796
Thomas Pangle
#12853
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Thomas Lee Pangle, is an American political scientist. He holds the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies in the Department of Government and is Co-Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at the University of Toronto and Yale University. He was a student of Leo Strauss.
Go to Profile#797
Loch K. Johnson
#20026
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Loch K. Johnson is Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. He is editor of the journal Intelligence and National Security and has written numerous books on American foreign policy. Johnson was special assistant to the chair of the Senate Select Committee House Subcommittee on Intelligence from 1975 to 1976. He also served as staff director of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence Oversight from 1977 to 1979. In 1995 and 1996, Johnson worked with the chair of the Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence.
Go to Profile#798
Peter R. Neumann
#37679
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Peter R. Neumann is a German journalist and academic who frequently appears on radio and television as an expert on terrorism and political violence. He is the Founding Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence as well as Professor of Security Studies at the War Studies Department of King's College London.
Go to Profile#799
Ron Walters
#27304
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Ronald W. Walters was an American author, speaker and scholar of African-American politics. He was director of the African American Leadership Institute and Scholar Practitioner Program, Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and professor in government and politics at the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#800
Catherine Bertini
#15796
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Catherine "Cathy" Bertini is an American public servant. She is the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. She was the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program from 1992 to 2002. She served as the UN Under-Secretary for Management from 2003 to 2005. Currently she is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and the Chair of the Executive Board of the Crop Trust.
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