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.
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#4151
Willmoore Kendall
1909 - 1968 (59 years)
Willmoore Bohnert Kendall Jr. was an American conservative writer and a professor of political philosophy. Early life and education Kendall was born March 5, 1909, in Konawa, Oklahoma. His father, who was blind, was a Southern Methodist minister who preached in Konawa and other local towns. At age two, Kendall learned to read by playing with a typewriter. Graduating from high school at age 13, Kendall enrolled at Northwestern University before transferring to the University of Tulsa. In 1920, Kendall graduated from the University of Oklahoma at age 18. In 1927, under the pseudonym Alan Monk, Kendall wrote his first book, Baseball: How to Play It and How to Watch It.
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Walter F. Dodd
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Walter Fairleigh Dodd was a professor in the political science department at Johns Hopkins University who wrote "one of the most important books on the process of amending state constitutions." Biography He graduated from Florida State College in 1898, and received a Bachelors in Science from John B. Stetson University in 1901. At the University of Chicago, he was a Fellow, 1902–1904, and received a Ph.D. in 1905. In 1904–1907, he was in charge of the section of foreign law in the Library of Congress. He held a research appointment at Johns Hopkins in 1908–1910, in 1910–1911 was associate in ...
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Luther Carrington Goodrich
1894 - 1986 (92 years)
Luther Carrington Goodrich was an American sinologist and historian of China. A prolific author, he is perhaps best remembered for his work on the Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644. Life Luther Carrington Goodrich was born on September 21, 1894, in Tongzhou, a southeastern suburb of Beijing, where his parents were serving as Protestant missionaries. His father, Chauncey Goodrich , had published A Pocket Dictionary and Pekingese Syllabary in 1891 and among the nephews of Chauncey's great-grandfather Josiah were a US Senator and US Representative.
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Adolf Sturmthal
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Adolf Fox Sturmthal was a U.S. political scientist, sociologist and journalist of Austrian birth who specialised in labour studies and international relations. Biography Sturmthal earned a PhD in Political Science in 1925 at Vienna University. He was chairman of the Association of Austrian Social Democratic Students and Academics. He moved to Zurich in 1926 to assist Friedrich Adler, the secretary of the Labour and Socialist International, and was editor of International Information. In 1933 and 1934 he organised international aid for German and Austrian socialist refugees from the Austrofascist Dollfuss and Nazi regimes.
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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.
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Carlton J. H. Hayes
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes was an American historian, educator, diplomat, devout Catholic and academic. A student of European history, he was a leading and pioneering specialist on the study of nationalism. He was elected as president of the American Historical Association over the opposition of liberals and the more explicit Anti-Catholic bias that defined the academic community of his era. He served as United States Ambassador to Spain in World War II. Although he came under attack from the CIO and others on the left that rejected any dealings with Francoist Spain, Hayes succeeded in his...
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Gerard Clauson
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Sir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson was an English civil servant, businessman, and Orientalist best known for his studies of the Turkic languages. The eldest son of Major Sir John Eugene Clauson, Gerard Clauson attended Eton College, where he was Captain of School, and where, at age 15 or 16, he published a critical edition of a short Pali text, "A New Kammavācā" in the Journal of the Pali Text Society. In 1906, when his father was named Chief Secretary for Cyprus, he taught himself Turkish to complement his school Greek. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in classics, receiving his d...
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A. Leo Oppenheim
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Adolf Leo Oppenheim , one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of his generation was editor-in-charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute from 1955 to 1974 and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
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Martin Wight
1913 - 1972 (59 years)
Robert James Martin Wight was one of the foremost British scholars of international relations in the twentieth century. He was the author of Power Politics , as well as the seminal essay "Why Is There No International Theory?" . He was a teacher of some renown at both the London School of Economics and the University of Sussex, where he served as the founding Dean of European Studies.
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Franz Neumann
1900 - 1954 (54 years)
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German political activist, Western Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of Nazism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 to 1945. During the Second World War, Neumann spied for the Soviet Union under the code-name "Ruff". Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political scienc...
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Elmer Eric Schattschneider
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Elmer Eric Schattschneider was an American political scientist. Life and career Schattschneider was born in Bethany, Minnesota. He received his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Pittsburgh and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He taught at Columbia, the New Jersey College for Women , and Wesleyan University . Schattschneider was president of the American Political Science Association for 1956–1957 and is the namesake of its award for the best dissertation in the field of American politics. He died in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
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Godfrey Rolles Driver
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver , known as G. R. Driver, was an English Orientalist noted for his studies of Semitic languages and Assyriology. He is considered the "most distinguished British Hebraist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".
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Stein Rokkan
1921 - 1979 (58 years)
Stein Rokkan was a Norwegian political scientist and sociologist. He was the first professor of sociology at the University of Bergen and a principal founder of the discipline of comparative politics. He founded the multidisciplinary Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, which encompassed sociology, economics and political science and which had a key role in the postwar development of the social sciences in Norway.
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Homer H. Dubs
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Homer Hasenpflug Dubs was an American sinologist and polymath. Though best known for his translation of sections of Ban Gu's Book of Han, he published on a wide range of topics in ancient Chinese history, astronomy and philosophy. Raised in China as the son of missionaries, he returned to the United States and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy . He taught at University of Minnesota and Marshall College before undertaking the Han shu translation project at the behest of the American Council of Learned Societies. Subsequently, Dubs taught at Duke University, Columbia University and Hartford Seminary.
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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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Allen Schick
Allen Schick is a governance fellow of the Brookings Institution and also a professor of political science at the Maryland School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park. He is known as an authority on budget theory and the federal budget process, in particular. His book, Congress and Money: Budgeting, Spending, and Taxing, won the D.B. Hardeman Prize in 1982.
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Hans Morgenthau
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Hans Joachim Morgenthau was a German-American jurist and political scientist who was one of the major 20th-century figures in the study of international relations. Morgenthau's works belong to the tradition of realism in international relations theory; he is usually considered among the most influential realists of the post-World War II period. Morgenthau made landmark contributions to international relations theory and the study of international law. His Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, went through five editions during his lifetime and was widely adopted as a textbook in U.S.
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Edwin Borchard
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Edwin Montefiore Borchard was an American international legal scholar, jurist, and Sterling Professor at the Yale Law School. He was a leading advocate of innocence reform and compensation for victims of wrongful conviction as well as the use of declaratory judgments. His work in international law emphasized non-intervention and neutrality.
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Philip Jessup
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Philip Caryl Jessup , also Philip C. Jessup, was a 20th-century American diplomat, scholar, and jurist notable for his accomplishments in the field of international law. Early life and education Philip Caryl Jessup was born on January 5, 1897, in New York, New York. He was the grandson of Henry Harris Jessup In 1919, he received his undergraduate A.B. degree from Hamilton College. In 1924, he received a law degree from Yale Law School. In 1927, he received a doctorate from Columbia University.
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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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Owen Lattimore
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Owen Lattimore was an American Orientalist and writer. He was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1938 to 1963. He was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations there from 1939 to 1953. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on American policy in Asia.
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Karl August Wittfogel
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Karl August Wittfogel was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. He was originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, but after the Second World War, he was an equally fierce anticommunist.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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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