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).
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#951
Ryan T. Anderson
#24754
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Ryan Timothy Anderson is an American conservative political philosopher who is best known for his opposition to same-sex marriage. He is currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was previously the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Discourse, the Witherspoon Institute's online journal.
Go to Profile#952
Evan McMullin
#14680
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
David Evan McMullin is an American political candidate and former Central Intelligence Agency officer. McMullin ran as an independent in the 2016 United States presidential election and in the 2022 United States Senate election in Utah.
Go to Profile#953
Jocelyn Elise Crowley
#40798
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Jocelyn Elise Crowley is a Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she specializes in family law in the United States. Early life Crowley was born on September 5, 1970, in Englewood, New Jersey. She grew up in Warren Township, New Jersey with her sister Monica Crowley.
Go to Profile#954
Stéphane Dion
#26822
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stéphane Maurice Dion is a Canadian diplomat, academic and former politician who has been the Canadian ambassador to France and Monaco since 2022 and special envoy to the European Union since 2017. Dion was Leader of the Opposition and the leader of the Liberal Party from 2006 to 2008. He served in cabinets as intergovernmental affairs minister , environment minister , and foreign affairs minister .
Go to Profile#955
Kori Schake
#28870
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kori N. Schake is the Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She has held several high positions in the U.S. Defense and State Departments and on the National Security Council. She was a foreign-policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign. Schake is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She serves on the board of advisors of the Alexander Hamilton Society.
Go to Profile#956
Archon Fung
#35312
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Archon Fung , is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Democracy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and co-founder of the Transparency Policy Project. Fung served as an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School from July 1999–June 2004, then as an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School from July 2004–October 2007, and finally as a professor of public policy from October 2007–March 2009 before being named as the Ford Foundation Chair of Democracy and Citizenship in March 2009. In 2015, he was elected to the Common Caus...
Go to Profile#957
Jessica Stern
#24226
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jessica Eve Stern is an American scholar and academic on terrorism. Stern serves as a research professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Earlier she had been a lecturer at Harvard University. She serves on the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law. In 2001, she was featured in Time magazine's series on Innovators. In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on trauma and violence. Her book ISIS: The State of Terror , was co-authored with J.M. Berger.
Go to Profile#958
Joshua A. Fogel
#19099
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Joshua A. Fogel is an American-Canadian Sinologist, historian, and translator who specializes in the history of modern China, especially focusing on the cultural and political relations between China and Japan. He has held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto since 2005. Before that he taught at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara . He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada .
Go to Profile#959
Zvi Gitelman
#21973
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Zvi Gitelman is a professor of Political Science, and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Career Gitelman received a Ph.D., an M.A., and a B.A. degree from Columbia University. He has usually written about the connection of ethnicity and politics especially in former Communist countries. He has also written about Israeli politics, East European politics, as well as Jewish political attitude. Gitelman received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983.
Go to Profile#960
Michael A. Cohen
#24041
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael A. Cohen is an American academic who is the director of the International Affairs Program at The New School. He also works as Advisor to the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires.
Go to Profile#961
Harry Harding
#41597
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Harry Harding is an American political scientist specializing in Chinese politics and foreign affairs. He was the founding dean of the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, and previously served as dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Harding has advised several US Presidents on developments in the PRC; before the Tiananmen Square demonstrations he was brought to Camp David for informal discussions with the George H. W. Bush administration. He has written several books, including China's Second Revolution and A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China Since 1972.
Go to Profile#962
Murat Belge
#9412
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Murat Belge is a Turkish academic, translator, literary critic, columnist, civil rights activist, and occasional tour guide. Career Belge was a member of the organizing committee for a two-day academic conference that started on 24 September 2005, held at Istanbul Bilgi University in Istanbul, titled "Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy". The conference offered an open dispute of the official Turkish account of the Armenian genocide, and was denounced by nationalists as treacherous.
Go to Profile#963
Herfried Münkler
#17106
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Herfried Münkler is a German political scientist. He is a Professor of Political Theory at Humboldt University in Berlin. Münkler is a regular commentator on global affairs in the German-language media and author of numerous books on the history of political ideas , on state-building and on the theory of war, such as "Machiavelli" , "Gewalt und Ordnung" , "The New Wars" and "Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States" . In 2009 Münkler was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category "Non-fiction" for Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen .
Go to Profile#964
Roger A. Pielke Jr.
#30331
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Roger A. Pielke Jr. is an American political scientist and professor, and was the director of the Sports Governance Center within the Department of Athletics at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Go to Profile#965
Susan L. Woodward
#41572
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Susan Lampland Woodward is a professor at the Political Science Program at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 2001. She is an expert on Balkan, East European, and post-Soviet affairs, on intervention in civil wars, and on postconflict reconstruction. She is the author of two books, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War , and Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia , about which the reviewer in Foreign Affairs wrote, "Woodward's argument is big and bold, challenging almost every major interpretation, from capitalist assumptions ...
Go to Profile#966
Michael Gunter
#34900
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael M. Gunter is a professor of political science at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee and considered an authority on the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Brendan O’Leary referred to Gunter as, "The doyen of Kurdish political studies in the United States,” while Martin van Bruinessen wrote that Gunter is "probably the most prolific of today’s scholars of Kurdish politics.” Gunter has written or edited more than 15 books on the Kurdish struggle and 2 more criticized for promoting Armenian genocide denial. Two of those books on the Kurds were among the first analyses in English in modern times of the Kurdish unrest in the Middle East.
Go to Profile#967
Danielle Allen
#16619
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Danielle Susan Allen is an American political scientist. She is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also the former Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#968
Daniel Lev
#42178
Overall Influence
1933 - 2006 (73 years)
Daniel Saul Lev was an American political scientist and scholar on Indonesia. Lev was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio. In his youth, he participated in the Golden Gloves competitions for amateur boxing. He graduated from Miami University in 1955 and received his doctorate from Cornell University, where he became a member of the Modern Indonesia Project. Lev first traveled to Indonesia in 1959 and stayed in the country for three years. Because of his experience in Indonesia, Lev became a proponent of law reform after observing the "systematic dismantling" of its legal system under Presiden...
Go to Profile#969
Enrico Letta
#26530
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Enrico Letta is an Italian politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy from April 2013 to February 2014, leading a grand coalition of centre-left and centre-right parties. He was the leader of the Democratic Party from March 2021 to March 2023.
Go to Profile#970
Nikki Keddie
#11489
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Nikki R. Keddie is an American scholar of Eastern, Iranian, and women's history. She is Professor Emerita of History at University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Keddie was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. at Radcliffe College, her M.A. from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught at University of Arizona and Scripps College in Claremont, California, before joining University of California, where she taught mainly Middle Eastern and Iranian history and eventually became full professor.
Go to Profile#971
Sabrina P. Ramet
#23690
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sabrina Petra Ramet is an American academic, educator, editor and journalist. She specializes in Eastern European history and politics and is a Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
Go to Profile#972
Ellis Henican
#21638
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ellis Henican is an American columnist at Newsday and AM New York as well as a political analyst on the Fox News Channel. He hosts a nationally syndicated weekend show on Talk Radio Network and is the voice of "Stormy" on the Cartoon Network series Sealab 2021. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Party's Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat.
Go to Profile#973
William Barber II
#17703
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
William J. Barber II is an American Protestant minister, social activist, professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He is the president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. He also serves as a member of the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and is the chair of its legislative political action committee. From 2006 to 2017, Barber served as p...
Go to Profile#974
Joseph Mifsud
#19411
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Joseph Mifsud is a British/Maltese academic, who had dual citizenship in the United Kingdom and Malta. In 2016, he became involved with George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and was later accused of being a link between that campaign and Russia. In 2018, he was described as missing, and an Italian court listed his location as "residence unknown". According to media reports, he was in Rome as of April 2019.
Go to Profile#975
Paul A. Goble
#36505
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paul A. Goble is an American analyst, writer and columnist with expertise on Russia. Trained at Miami University and the University of Chicago , he is the editor of four volumes on ethnic issues in the former Soviet Union and has published more than 150 articles on ethnic and nationality questions. Goble served as special adviser on Soviet nationality issues and Baltic affairs to Secretary of State James Baker.
Go to Profile#976
Christian Graf von Krockow
#11652
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Count Christian von Krockow , writing in German as Christian Graf von Krockow, was a German writer and political scientist. Count Christian von Krockow was born in Rumbske near the city of Stolp , Poland, the scion of a historic Pomeranian noble family. In 1945, as the Red Army advanced into the Province of Pomerania, he became a refugee and fled to Hamburg.
Go to Profile#977
Lawrence R. Jacobs
#21370
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Lawrence R. Jacobs is an American political scientist and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. He was appointed the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 2005 and holds the McKnight Presidential Chair. Jacobs has written or edited, alone or collaboratively, 17 books and over 100 scholarly articles in addition to numerous reports and media essays on American democracy, national and Minnesota elections, political communications, health care reform, and economic inequality.
Go to Profile#978
Ron Christie
#23389
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ronald Irvin Christie is an American government relations expert and Republican political strategist, who has also worked as a member of former Vice President Dick Cheney's staff. He is the author of two books, and an occasional guest on various cable news programs. He serves as an adjunct professor at Cornell University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Haverford College. He is currently the CEO of Christie Strategies, a communications and issue management firm that he founded in Alexandria, Virginia.
Go to Profile#979
Joan E. Spero
#33744
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Joan Edelman Spero is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she researches and writes about international philanthropy and its role in the global system. From 2009 to 2010, Ms. Spero was a visiting scholar at the Foundation Center, where she conducted research on the role of American private foundations in U.S. foreign policy and in the global system.
Go to Profile#980
Tom Flanagan
#29277
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Thomas Eugene Flanagan is an American-born Canadian author, conservative political activist, and former political science professor at the University of Calgary. He also served as an advisor to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper until 2004.
Go to Profile#981
Clifford Orwin
#17632
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Clifford Orwin is a Canadian-American professor of ancient, modern, contemporary and Jewish political thought. He is also a prominent writer on contemporary politics and culture. Life career Orwin was born in 1947 in Chicago, Illinois, United States to a Jewish family. He earned B.A. in Modern History from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy with Allan Bloom, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Harvard University under Harvey Mansfield.
Go to Profile#982
Fred Iklé
#21392
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Fred Charles Iklé was a Swiss-American sociologist and defense expert. Iklé's expertise was in defense and foreign policy, nuclear strategy, and the role of technology in the emerging international order. After a career in academia he was appointed director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973–1977, before becoming Under Secretary of Defense for Policy . He was later a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Department of Defense's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a Distinguished Scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Director ...
Go to Profile#983
John McGarry
#34483
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
John McGarry, OC is a political scientist from Northern Ireland. He was born in Belfast and grew up in Ballymena, County Antrim. He is currently Professor of Political Studies and Canada Research Chair in Nationalism and Democracy at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of numerous influential books about ethnic conflict and particularly The Troubles. Many of the books were co-authored with Brendan O'Leary, whom McGarry met when they both attended Saint MacNissi's College.
Go to Profile#984
Burton Watson
#5290
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Burton Dewitt Watson was an American sinologist, translator, and writer known for his English translations of Chinese and Japanese literature. Watson's translations received many awards, including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1982 for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o. In 2015, at age 88, Watson was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation for his long and prolific translation caree...
Go to Profile#985
Tom Nairn
#20555
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Thomas Cunningham Nairn was a Scottish political theorist and academic. He was an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. He was known as an essayist and a supporter of Scottish independence.
Go to Profile#986
Anne Norton
#22522
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Anne Norton is an American professor of political science and comparative literature. She is also known for her controversial anti-Semitic views. Early life As a child, Norton lived and traveled throughout the world with her family because her father was an officer in the U.S. Navy.
Go to Profile#987
Lynn Vavreck
#29346
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Lynn Vavreck is an American political scientist and columnist. She is the Marvin Hoffenberg Chair in American Politics and Public Policy at University of California, Los Angeles and a contributing columnist to The New York Times.
Go to Profile#988
Murray Bookchin
#8257
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Murray Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment , Post-Scarcity Anarchism , The Ecology of Freedom , and Urbanization Without Cities . In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted w...
Go to Profile#989
Andrew Hurrell
#20799
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Andrew James Hurrell, FBA is a leading British scholar of international relations. He is currently a senior research fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, having previously been Montague Burton Professor of International Relations from 2008 to 2021.
Go to Profile#990
Clarissa Rile Hayward
#49542
Overall Influence
Clarissa Rile Hayward is an American political scientist and political philosopher, currently a professor in political science at Washington University in St. Louis with affiliations in American culture studies, urban studies, and philosophy. Hayward studies the theory of political power, how political phenomena relate to theories of identity, and urban politics in the United States.
Go to Profile#991
Albert Wohlstetter
#16790
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Albert James Wohlstetter was an American political scientist noted for his influence on U.S. nuclear strategy during the Cold War. He and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter, an accomplished historian and intelligence expert, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan on November 7, 1985.
Go to Profile#992
Takashi Inoguchi
#42695
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Takashi Inoguchi is a Japanese academic researcher of foreign affairs and international and global relationships of states. He is currently the president of the University of Niigata Prefecture, and a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.
Go to Profile#993
Guido Goldman
#32820
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Guido Goldman was a Swiss-born American academic and philanthropist known for advancing post–World War II US-Germany academic and cultural relations. He was a co-founder of the German Marshall Fund and also set up the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#994
Timothy Geithner
#19463
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Timothy Franz Geithner is an American former central banker who served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009, following service in the Clinton administration. Since March 2014, he has served as president and managing director of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm headquartered in New York City.
Go to Profile#995
James H. Ammons
#25485
Overall Influence
James H. Ammons is an American educator, who is the Chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans. He served as president of Florida A&M University from July 2, 2007, until his resignation took effect on July 16, 2012. He is a native Floridian who grew up in the heart of Florida's citrus belt. He graduated from Winter Haven High School in 1970 and entered Florida A&M University on the Thirteen College Curriculum Program during the fall semester of 1970. Ammons was appointed Chancellor at Southern University in New Orleans January 8, 2021.
Go to Profile#996
Wangari Maathai
#22374
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Wangarĩ Muta Maathai was a Kenyan social, environmentalal, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Go to Profile#997
Nadim Shehadi
#40848
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nadim Shehadi is the current Executive Director of Lebanese American University's New York Headquarters & Academic Center and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House where he was formerly head of the Middle East program. He was previously director of The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Go to Profile#998
Max Nemni
#30350
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Max Nemni is a Canadian political scientist and writer, best known for a series of biographies of former Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau which he cowrote with his wife Monique Nemni. He is a retired professor of political science at Université Laval, and a former coeditor of Cité Libre.
Go to Profile#999
Karen Dawisha
#36063
Overall Influence
1949 - 2018 (69 years)
Karen Dawisha was an American political scientist and writer. She was a professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and the director of The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.
Go to Profile#1000
Annette Baker Fox
#21606
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Annette May Baker Fox was an American international relations scholar, who spent much of her career at Columbia University's Institute of War and Peace Studies. She was a pioneer in the academic study of small powers and middle powers and the books and articles she wrote on that subject are highly regarded in the field. She was director of the institute's Canadian Studies Program from 1977 to 1984.
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