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.
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#3901
Louise Overacker
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Louise Overacker was an American political scientist. She specialized in the study of money in politics, United States presidential primaries, and comparative party systems, particularly those of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She was one of the first professors to teach government at Wellesley College, where she was a faculty member from 1925 until 1957, and helped to establish the Wellesley Department of Political Science in 1940.
Go to Profile#3902
Walter Rice Sharp
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Walter Rice Sharp was an American political scientist. He was born on January 25, 1896. Sharp attended Wabash College. Upon graduation, he served in the United States military as an infantry captain. After the end of World War I, Sharp enrolled at Yale University. Further graduate study at the University of Bordeaux in France was funded by the American Field Service Fellowship awarded in 1920. Sharp received a doctorate in law in 1922, and returned to the United States. He taught at Washington and Lee University from 1923 to 1924, then joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty for fifteen years.
Go to Profile#3903
Paul H. Appleby
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Paul Henson Appleby was an American journalist, public servant, and educator. He was the editor of Iowa Magazine in Waterloo, Iowa from 1920 to 1924. The four years following saw him as an editorial writer for the Des Moines Register and Tribune. In 1928, he moved to Virginia and published the News-Journal in Radford, Virginia. In 1933, he became Assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. By 1940, he was the Undersecretary of Agriculture and in 1944 he became Assistant Director of the Budget for the United States. He left Washington DC to work for the radio station KIRO, ret...
Go to Profile#3904
Bernard B. Fall
1926 - 1967 (41 years)
Bernard B. Fall was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Austria, he moved with his family to France as a child after the Anschluss. He started fighting for the French Resistance at the age of 16 and later for the French Army during World War II.
Go to Profile#3905
F. S. Northedge
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Frederick Samuel Northedge was a British Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Early life He attended Bemrose Grammar School in Derby. Northedge then read classics at Merton College, Oxford, before moving on to study international relations at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#3906
Mercer Cook
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Will Mercer Cook , popularly known as Mercer Cook, was a diplomat and professor. He was the first American ambassador to the Gambia after it became independent, appointed in 1965 while also still serving as ambassador to Senegal. He was also the second American ambassador to Niger.
Go to Profile#3907
Francis D. Wormuth
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Francis Dunham Wormuth was an American lawyer and teacher, having been a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.
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Alexander Nikuradse
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Alexander Nikuradse , also known by his pseudonym Al. Sanders, was a Georgian-German physicist and Nazi political scientist. Born in Samtredia, Georgia, Russian Empire, he was sent by the Georgian government to complete his studies in Berlin. Nikuradse remained in Berlin and became a German citizen after the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia. Being in staunch opposition to Soviet rule in Georgia, he was actively involved in Georgian émigré activities, and had close Nazi connections. Since their common days as Soviet exiles in Munich in the early 1920s, he had been on friendly terms with Alfred Rosenberg whose views on the Caucasus were largely shaped under Nikuradse's influence.
Go to Profile#3909
Dolf Sternberger
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Dolf Sternberger was a German philosopher and political scientist at the University of Heidelberg. Dolf Sternberger is known for his concept of citizenship in contemporary German political thought, and for coining the term "constitutional patriotism" in 1979, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Go to Profile#3910
Robert K. Carr
1908 - 1979 (71 years)
Robert Kenneth Carr was an American scholar in the field of government/political science. His main area of interest and expertise was in the field of civil liberties/civil rights, and he did the bulk of his writing while on the faculty of Dartmouth College. Carr also served as the executive secretary of President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Civil Rights. He was the primary author of the committee's landmark report, "To Secure These Rights" , which spotlighted the need for more rigorous federal enforcement of civil rights. He served as president of Oberlin College, Ohio, from 1960–1970.
Go to Profile#3911
Morton Grodzins
1917 - 1964 (47 years)
Morton M. Grodzins was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, as well as a dean of the school and an editor at Chicago University Press. He is known for coining the term "tipping point" in studies of white flight, such as "Metropolitan Segregation" and The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem . His theories related to Tipping Point were later made famous by Malcolm Gladwell and his book, "The Tipping Point." His book Americans Betrayed was the first major study criticizing the Japanese-American internment during World War II, based on his and others' work at the Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Study at University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3912
Turrell V. Wylie
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Turrell Verl "Terry" Wylie was an American scholar, Tibetologist, sinologist and professor known as one of the 20th century's leading scholars of Tibet. He taught as a professor of Tibetan Studies at the University of Washington and served as the first chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. Wylie founded the Tibetan Studies program at the University of Washington, the first of its kind in the United States, setting a major precedent for future programs and research in the field. His system for rendering the Tibetan language in Latin script, known as Wylie transliteration, ...
Go to Profile#3913
Billy Dudley
1931 - 1980 (49 years)
Billy Joseph Stanley Oritsesaninomi Dudley was a leading Nigerian political scientist, working mostly at the University of Ibadan , which he joined in 1959. Until late 1962, he was on the staff of the Extra Mural Department of UI, and from 1960 to 1962 he was based in Zaria, where he began the research that he later supplemented with research in London, England, during periods of leave in 1961, 1963, and 1965, each lasting several months. His resulting PhD was published in 1968 as Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria. He became a Professor at UI in 1971 and Head of department in 1972.
Go to Profile#3914
Peter A. Boodberg
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Peter Alexis Boodberg was a Russian-American scholar, linguist, and sinologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley for 40 years. Boodberg was influential in 20th century developments in the studies of the development of Chinese characters, Chinese philology, and Chinese historical phonology. He has been described as "one of the most original and commanding scholars" of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#3915
Daniel Cosío Villegas
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Daniel Cosío Villegas was a Mexican prominent economist, essayist, historian, and diplomat. Cosío Villegas was born in Mexico City. After studying one year in engineering and two years of philosophy, he received a B.A. in Law from the National University and took several courses in economics at Harvard, Wisconsin and Cornell. Later, he received master's degrees from the London School of Economics and the École libre de sciences politiques of Paris .
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Vera Micheles Dean
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Vera Micheles Dean was a Russian American political scientist. She was the head of research for the Foreign Policy Association, one of the leading think tanks of the 1940s and 1950s, where she became one of the leading authorities in international affairs during that period.
Go to Profile#3917
Joel Andreas
1900 - Present (126 years)
Joel Andreas is an American author and college professor. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California in Los Angeles, and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which he joined in 2003. His research interests include political contention, social inequality, and social change in China today.
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Eleanor Lansing Dulles
1895 - 1996 (101 years)
Eleanor Lansing Dulles was an American writer, professor, and United States government employee. Her background in economics and her familiarity with European affairs enabled her to fill a number of important State Department positions.
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George Hubbard Blakeslee
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
George Hubbard Blakeslee was an academic, professor of history and international relations at Clark University, and a founder of the Journal of Race Development, the first American journal devoted to international relations. This journal was later renamed the Journal of International Relations, which in turn was merged with Foreign Affairs.
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Roy Peel
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Roy Victor Peel was a political scientist and academic, and the director of the United States Census Bureau from 1950 to 1953. Early life and education Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1896, Peel's service in World War I interrupted his college education; he was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Service. After the war, he completed his B.A., graduating from Augustana College in 1920. From there, Peel moved between teaching and post-graduate education, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1927.
Go to Profile#3921
Walter Liebenthal
1886 - 1982 (96 years)
Walter Liebenthal , was a German philosopher and sinologist who specialized in Chinese Buddhism. He translated many philosophical works from Pali, Sanskrit and specially from Chinese into German. Based upon his extensive research in Indian Buddhism and Chinese religion, one of his main conclusions was that early Chinese Buddhism through Ch'an was not a Chinese version of Indian Buddhism, but rather, that it developed from Taoism, a Chinese religion. Indian concepts are present, but at the core it represents a Chinese perspective.
Go to Profile#3922
Edward J. Bloustein
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Edward Jerome Bloustein was the 17th President of Rutgers University serving from 1971 to 1989. Biography He was born in New York City, and he graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1942. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University in 1948 and subsequently traveled to the University of Oxford as a Fulbright scholar and received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1950. Returning to the United States, he taught philosophy briefly at Brooklyn College and spent close to a year in Washington, DC with the O...
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Manning J. Dauer
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Manning Julian Dauer was an American political scientist. Early life Dauer was born in 1909 in North Carolina. He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois .
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John Bellerby
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
John Rotherford Bellerby was a British economist. Born in York, Bellerby was educated at York Grammar School, the University of Leeds, and Harvard University. He served in World War I with the York Rifles and Machine Gun Corps, becoming a major.
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Julio Jiménez Rueda
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Julio Jiménez Rueda was a Mexican lawyer, writer, playwright and diplomat. Biography Jiménez Rueda studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and graduated in law at the Universidad Nacional de México in 1919. Later on, he was appointed as the director of the Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral of UNAM. He completed a doctoral degree of philosophy and literature in 1935. As a diplomat, he served in Montevideo in 1920, and afterwards in Buenos Aires until 1922. Back in Mexico he was the director of the General Archive of the Nation, and later president of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. In...
Go to Profile#3926
Gabriela Mistral
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga , known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral , was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and Catholic. She was a member of the Secular Franciscan Order or Third Franciscan order.She was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences.
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Henry D. Sokolski
1900 - Present (126 years)
Henry D. Sokolski is the founder and executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank promoting a better understanding of strategic weapons proliferation issues among policymakers, scholars, and the media. He teaches as an adjunct professor at The Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., and at the University of Utah and has an appointment as senior fellow for nuclear security studies at the University of California at San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy.
Go to Profile#3928
Paul E. Kahle
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Paul Ernst Kahle was a German orientalist and scholar. Biography Kahle studied orientalism and theology in Marburg and Halle. He attained his doctorate in 1898. His dissertation on the Samaritan Pentateuch was supervised by . Kahle worked as a Lutheran pastor. He studied Semitic philology in Cairo, between 1908 and 1918. In 1909 he discovered leather puppets near Damietta, Egypt used in medieval puppet drama. In 1918, he was promoted to a full professorship at Gießen University, a chair previously held by Friedrich Schwally. In 1923, he switched to Bonn University, where he developed the Ea...
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Herbert Storing
1928 - 1977 (49 years)
Herbert J. Storing was an American political scientist with broad ranging interests who is best known for reviving the serious study of the American Founding. The constitutional theorist and American politics scholar Walter Berns called him "the most profound man I have encountered in the field of American studies."
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Carlo Conti Rossini
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Carlo Conti Rossini was an Italian orientalist. He was director of the State Treasury from 1917 to 1925, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1921 and Royal Academy of Italy from 1939. He wrote various works on the historical geography of Ethiopia, of which the most famous is Italia ed Etiopia dal trattato di Uccialli alla battaglia d'Adua . He also wrote articles on phonetic Ethiopian . His library is preserved in Rome.
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Christen Jensen
1881 - 1961 (80 years)
Christen Jensen was an American educator who twice served as interim president of Brigham Young University . The two terms were 1939-1940 while Franklin S. Harris was doing work in Iran and then in Nov. 1949-Feb. 1951 between the presidencies of Howard S. McDonald and Ernest L. Wilkinson.
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W. W. Kulski
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Władysław Wszebór Kulski was a Polish political scientist. Kulski was born in Warsaw, Poland. He was educated at the Warsaw School of Law, where he gained a Master of Laws in 1925. In 1927 he was awarded a Doctor Juris from the Paris School of Law. From 1928 until 1945 he was part of the Polish Foreign Service and from 1928 until 1933 he was a member of the League of Nations staff in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 1933 until 1936 Kulski was a Counsellor and then Secretary of the Polish Permanent Delegation to the League and then he was head of the Legal Service at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Thomas Walker Arnold
1864 - 1930 (66 years)
Sir Thomas Walker Arnold was a British orientalist and historian of Islamic art. He taught at Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, later Aligarh Muslim University, and Government College University, Lahore.
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Ray Ginger
1924 - 1975 (51 years)
Raymond Sydney Ginger was an American historian, author, and biographer of wide-ranging scholarship whose special focus was on labor history, economic history, and the epoch often called the Gilded Age. His biography of the American labor leader and socialist Eugene Victor Debs is widely considered definitive, and his account of the Scopes trial has also received high praise. Both titles are still in print, and both, along with many of his other works, have been widely used in college courses across the United States.
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Erich Kordt
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Erich Kordt , was a German diplomat who was involved in the German Resistance to the regime of Adolf Hitler. Early career A convinced Anglophile, Kordt spoke perfect English after gaining a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He joined the German Foreign Office in 1928 and was posted to Geneva and Bern in Switzerland. He then served as Legationsrat in the London Embassy under Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop for whom he developed a personal dislike and a professional disdain. Still, he became a member of the Nazi Party in November 1937. In February 1938, when Ribbentrop became foreign m...
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Brutus Coste
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Brutus Coste was a Romanian diplomat whose service was cut short by the Second World War and who spent most of the rest of his life as an anti-communist campaigner in the United States. When U.S. government funding and interest in East European émigrés waned, Coste took up an academic position at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. He did not live to see the fall of the Ceaușescu regime.
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Alfred Eckhard Zimmern
1879 - 1957 (78 years)
Sir Alfred Eckhard Zimmern was an English classical scholar, historian, and political scientist writing on international relations. A British policymaker during World War I and a prominent liberal thinker, Zimmern played an important role in drafting the blueprint for what would become the League of Nations.
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Zurab Avalishvili
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Zurab Avalishvili was a Georgian historian, jurist and diplomat in the service of the Democratic Republic of Georgia . He was also known as Zurab Davidovich Avalov in a Russian manner. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia , into the family of Prince David Avalishvili, he graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1900 and took post-graduate courses at the Department of Law, University of Paris from 1900 to 1903. He became a Docent at the St. Petersburg University in 1904 and a Professor of Public Law at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in 1907. He was an official adviser to the Russian Ministr...
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Ignaty Krachkovsky
1883 - 1951 (68 years)
Ignaty Yulianovich Krachkovsky Krachkovsky was one of the founders of the Soviet school of Arab studies. Krachkovsky is known for authoring the translation of Quran into Russian. His book of recollections Among Arabic Manuscripts was awarded Stalin Prize .
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Walter Hillier
1849 - 1927 (78 years)
Sir Walter Caine Hillier KCMG CB was a British diplomat, academic, author, Sinologist and Professor of Chinese at King's College London. Early life Walter Hillier was born in Hong Kong but educated in England, at Bedford School and at Blundell's School, Tiverton. His father was Charles Hillier, Chief Magistrate, Hong Kong, and British Consul at Bangkok and his mother, Elizabeth, daughter of missionary Walter Medhurst. He was the brother of Edward Guy Hillier, one of the most respected bankers at the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and its long-term manager in Peking .
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Sakuzō Yoshino
1878 - 1933 (55 years)
Sakuzō Yoshino was a Japanese academic, historian, author and professor of political science. Yoshino was active as a political thinker in the Taishō period. He is best known for his formulation of the theory of "Minponshugi," or politics of the people.
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Otto Pretzl
1893 - 1941 (48 years)
Otto Pretzl was a German Arabist-orientalist, who specialized in Koranic studies. From 1912 he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and in 1920 was ordained as a priest in Freising. Afterwards, he studied theology and Oriental languages at the University of Munich, where he later qualified as a lecturer in Old Testament exegesis and Islamic and Semitic languages . In 1934 he became an associate professor at the university, attaining a full professorship during the following year. In 1937 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
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Karl Vilhelm Zetterstéen
1866 - 1953 (87 years)
Karl Vilhelm Zetterstéen was a Swedish professor and orientalist. Biography Zetterstéen was born at Orsa in Dalarna, Sweden. He began his studies at Uppsala University in 1884, became a Ph.D. and docent of Semitic languages in 1895. He also studied under professor Eduard Sachau at the University of Berlin. He was acting professor of Oriental languages at Lund University 1895-1904 and professor of Semitic languages in Uppsala 1904–1931. He became emeritus 1931.
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Adam Smith
1723 - 1790 (67 years)
Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as "The Father of Economics" or "The Father of Capitalism", he wrote two classic works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . The latter, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work that treats economics as a comprehensive system and as an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wea...
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Che Guevara
1928 - 1967 (39 years)
Ernesto Che Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.
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Max Weber
1864 - 1920 (56 years)
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. He was one of the central figures in the development of sociology and the social sciences, and his ideas profoundly influence social theory and research.
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Montesquieu
1689 - 1755 (66 years)
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu , generally referred to as simply Montesquieu , was a French judge, man of letters, historian, and political philosopher. He is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon. His anonymously published The Spirit of Law , which was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States in drafting the U.S.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
1929 - 1968 (39 years)
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A Black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, he led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in t...
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Grigory Zinoviev
1883 - 1936 (53 years)
Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. An Old Bolshevik, Zinoviev was a prominent figure in the leadership of the early Soviet Union and served as chairman of the Communist International from 1919 to 1926.
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Edmund Burke
1729 - 1797 (68 years)
Edmund Burke was an Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher who spent most of his career in Great Britain. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of Parliament between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party.
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