The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#4201
Harold D. Clarke
#4202
Ben Bowen Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Sir Ben Bowen Thomas was a Welsh civil servant and university President. He served as Permanent Secretary to the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Education from 1945 to 1963, and was President of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1964 to 1975. In June 1977 Thomas was awarded an Honorary Degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University.
Go to Profile#4203
Victor L. Berger
1860 - 1929 (69 years)
Victor Luitpold Berger was an Austrian–American socialist politician and journalist who was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America. Born in the Austrian Empire and present-day Romania, Berger immigrated to the United States as a young man and became an important and influential socialist journalist in Wisconsin. He helped establish the so-called Sewer Socialist movement. Also a politician, in 1910, he was elected as the first Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a district in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Go to Profile#4204
William Mather Lewis
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
William Mather Lewis was an American teacher, university president, local politician, and a state and national government official. He was mayor of Lake Forest, Illinois from 1915 to 1917, President of George Washington University from 1923 to 1927 and the President of Lafayette College from 1927 to 1945.
Go to Profile#4205
John Williams
1752 - 1806 (54 years)
John Williams was an American physician and politician from Salem, New York. He was most notable for his service in the United States House of Representatives from 1795 to 1799. Life Williams was born in Barnstaple, Devonshire, England in September 1752. He received a liberal education, studied medicine and surgery in St. Thomas' Hospital, London, and served for one year as surgeon’s mate on an English man-of-war. He immigrated to America in 1773 and settled in New Perth, Charlotte County, New York , where he engaged in an extensive medical practice. He married Susanna Turner, and they had four children.
Go to Profile#4206
Ferdinand de Lesseps
1805 - 1894 (89 years)
Ferdinand Marie, Comte de Lesseps was a French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869 joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and times between Europe and East Asia.
Go to Profile#4207
Eduard Sachau
1845 - 1930 (85 years)
Carl Eduard Sachau was a German orientalist. He taught Josef Horovitz and Eugen Mittwoch. Biography He studied oriental languages at the Universities of Kiel and Leipzig, obtaining his PhD at Halle in 1867. Sachau became a professor extraordinary of Semitic philology and a full professor at the University of Vienna, and in 1876, a professor at the University of Berlin, where he was appointed director of the new Seminar of Oriental languages .
Go to Profile#4208
Cristoforo Negri
1809 - 1896 (87 years)
Cristoforo Negri was an Italian geographer, economist and diplomat. Biography Cristoforo Negri was born in Padua in 1809. He became a professor of constitutional law at the University of Padua. Following the upheavals of 1848 he fled to Piedmont, where he was appointed to the consular division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Vincenzo Gioberti. He was confirmed in this position by Massimo d'Azeglio. From 1859 he held various government posts in the course of which he visited many cities in the Mediterranean to develop Italian political and economic relationships.
Go to Profile#4209
James Roscoe Day
1845 - 1923 (78 years)
The Rev. James Roscoe Day, D.D., L.L.D. was an American Methodist minister, educator and chancellor of Syracuse University. Early life and education Day was born in Whitneyville, Maine, on October 17, 1845 to Thomas and Mary Plummer Hillman Day. He attended Maine Wesleyan Seminary and then studied at Bowdoin College but had to stop due to poor health; he eventually received his degree in 1874. He married Anna E. Richards of Auburn, Maine in 1873. In 1872, he was ordained a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church and served as a pastor at Bath, Maine, from 1872 to 1874; Portland, Maine, fr...
Go to Profile#4210
John Graham, 1st Viscount Dundee
1648 - 1689 (41 years)
John Graham, 7th of Claverhouse, 1st Viscount Dundee was a Scottish soldier and nobleman, a Tory and an Episcopalian. He was responsible for policing southwest Scotland during and after the religious unrest and rebellion of the late 17th century, and went on to lead the Jacobite rising of 1689.
Go to Profile#4211
Ted Hill
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
Edward Fowler Hill was an Australian barrister, lawyer and communist activist. He was chairman of the Communist Party of Australia from 1964 to 1986. History Hill was born on 23 April 1915 in Mildura, Victoria to James and Alice Hill. He attended school at Hamilton High School, where his father was head teacher. After leaving school he worked as a clerk for Bill Slater, a local barrister who was also the local Labor Member of Parliament. In 1933 he moved to Melbourne to study law at the University of Melbourne. Despite being awarded for his academic knowledge he did not finish his legal degree until 1981.
Go to Profile#4212
Antonio Possevino
1533 - 1611 (78 years)
Antonio Possevino was a Jesuit protagonist of Counter Reformation as a papal diplomat and a Jesuit controversialist, encyclopedist and bibliographer. He was the first Jesuit to visit Muscovy, Sweden, Denmark, Livonia, Hungary, Pomerania, and Saxony in amply documented papal missions between 1578 and 1586 where he championed the enterprising policies of Pope Gregory XIII.
Go to Profile#4213
Brian Houghton Hodgson
1800 - 1894 (94 years)
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himalayas, and several birds were named after him by others such as Edward Blyth. He was a scholar of Newar Buddhism and wrote extensively on a range of topics relating to linguistics and religion. He was an opponent of the British proposal to introduce English as the official medium of instruction in Indian schools.
Go to Profile#4214
Jean-Jacques Dessalines
1758 - 1806 (48 years)
Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a Haitian revolutionary, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, and the first ruler of an independent Haiti under the 1805 constitution. Initially regarded as governor-general, Dessalines was later named Emperor of Haiti as Jacques I by generals of the Haitian Revolution Army and ruled in that capacity until being assassinated in 1806. He has been referred to as the father of the nation of Haiti.
Go to Profile#4215
Bernard Brodie
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Bernard Brodie was an American military strategist well known for establishing the basics of nuclear strategy. Known as "the American Clausewitz," and "the original nuclear strategist," he was an initial architect of nuclear deterrence strategy and tried to ascertain the role and value of nuclear weapons after their creation.
Go to Profile#4216
Georgy Chicherin
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and a Soviet politician who served as the first People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Soviet government from March 1918 to July 1930.
Go to Profile#4217
Edward Granville Browne
1862 - 1926 (64 years)
Edward Granville Browne FBA was a British Iranologist. He published numerous articles and books, mainly in the areas of history and literature. Life Browne was born in Stouts Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire, England, the son of civil engineer Benjamin Chapman Browne and his wife, Annie. He was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, Burnside's School in Berkshire, Eton College, and the Newcastle College of Physical Science. He then read natural sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He also studied Arabic with Edward Henry Palmer and William Wright, Persian with Edward Byles Cowell, and Turkish with Sir James Redhouse, motivated by an interest in the Turkish people.
Go to Profile#4218
Andrei Kirilenko
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Andrei Pavlovich Kirilenko was a Soviet statesman from the start to the end of the Cold War. In 1906, Kirilenko was born at Alexeyevka in Belgorod Oblast to a Ukrainian working-class family. He graduated in the 1920s from a local vocational school, and again in the mid-to-late 1930s from the Rybinsk Aviation Technology Institute. He became a member of the All-Union Communist Party in 1930. As many like him, Kirilenko climbed up the Soviet hierarchy through the "industrial ladder"; by the 1960s, he was vice-chairman of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic .
Go to Profile#4219
Richard Allen
1760 - 1831 (71 years)
Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of the United States' most active and influential black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church , the first independent Black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia.
Go to Profile#4220
Wesley R. Fishel
1919 - 1977 (58 years)
Wesley R. Fishel was a professor of political science at Michigan State University. He is best known for his involvement in the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group, where he served as the Chief Advisor from 1956 to 1958. Fishel was an active proponent of America's influence in Vietnam, and was a close friend of South Vietnam's leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. He continued working as a professor at MSU until his death in 1977.
Go to Profile#4221
G. Homer Durham
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
George Homer Durham was an American academic administrator and was a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1977 until his death. Early life Durham was born in Parowan, Utah, and was raised in Salt Lake City. As a boy in grade school, he met and became lifelong friends with future LDS Church president Gordon B. Hinckley. As a young man, Durham served as a missionary for the LDS Church in the British Mission, where he served as president of the mission's Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association. At the start of his mission, Durham's mission president was John A.
Go to Profile#4222
Richard Olaf Winstedt
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Sir Richard Olaf Winstedt , or more commonly R. O. Winstedt, was an English Orientalist and colonial administrator with expertise in British Malaya. Life and career Winstedt was born in Oxford and educated at Magdalen College School and New College, Oxford, from which he received an MA. His brother was Eric Otto Winstedt, a Latinist and gypsiologist.
Go to Profile#4223
Edward Denison Ross
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Sir Edward Denison Ross was an orientalist and linguist, specializing in languages of the Middle East, Central and East Asia. He was the first director of the University of London's School of Oriental Studies from 1916 to 1937.
Go to Profile#4224
Matthew Prior
1664 - 1721 (57 years)
Matthew Prior was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner. Early life Prior was probably born in Middlesex. He was the son of a Nonconformist joiner at Wimborne Minster, East Dorset. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr Richard Busby. After his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel Row. Here, Lord Dorset found him reading Horace, and set him to translate an ode. He did so well that the Earl offered to contribute to the continuation of his education at Westminster.
Go to Profile#4225
Frederick C. Mosher
1913 - 1990 (77 years)
Frederick Camp "Fritz" Mosher was a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia who strongly influenced a generation of scholars in public administration with his many writings, and government administrator. Mosher was an important member of the second generation of public administration scholars along with his close friend, Dwight Waldo, and others who helped define the modern structure and function of the field as taught in hundreds of PA programs around the world.
Go to Profile#4226
Tetsuji Morohashi
1883 - 1982 (99 years)
Tetsuji Morohashi was an important figure in the field of Japanese language studies and Sinology. He is best known as chief editor of the Dai Kan-Wa jiten, a comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, or kanji.
Go to Profile#4227
John Erskine, Earl of Mar
1675 - 1732 (57 years)
John Erskine, 23rd and 6th Earl of Mar, KT , was a Scottish Jacobite who was the eldest son of Charles, 22nd and 5th Earl of Mar , from whom he inherited estates that were heavily loaded with debt. He was the 23rd Earl of Mar in the first creation of the earldom. He was also the sixth earl in the seventh creation . He was nicknamed Bobbing John, for his tendency to shift back and forth from faction to faction, whether from Tory to Whig or Jacobite to Hanoverian. Deprived of office by the new king in 1714, Mar raised the standard of rebellion against the Hanoverians; at the battle of Sheriffmuir in November 1715, Mar's forces outnumbered those of his opponent, but victory eluded him.
Go to Profile#4228
John Archibald Fairlie
1872 - 1947 (75 years)
John Archibald Fairlie was a Scottish-born political scientist who spent his professional career in the United States. Biography Fairlie was born in Glasgow, Scotland in October 1872. He moved with his family to Jacksonville, Florida in 1881 at age eight. He graduated from Jacksonville High School in 1887. He attended Harvard University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1895 and a Master of Arts degree in 1896. He enrolled at the Columbia University School of Political Science in 1897, earning a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1898. After spending a year as the secretary to the Roose...
Go to Profile#4229
Wilhelm Tomaschek
1841 - 1901 (60 years)
Wilhelm Tomaschek, or Vilém Tomášek was a Czech-Austrian geographer and orientalist. He is known for his work in the fields of historical topography and historical ethnography. Born at Olmütz, in Moravia, he received his education at the University of Vienna , afterwards working as a teacher in gymnasiums at Sankt Pölten and Vienna. On the strength of the first volume of Centralasiatische Studien, he was named an associate professor of geography at the University of Graz in 1877. In 1881 he attained the rank of full professor, and in 1885, was appointed chair of historical geography at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#4230
Joseph E. Johnson
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Joseph Esrey Johnson was an American government official who served with both the United States Department of State and the United Nations. Born in Virginia, Johnson received his educatation at Harvard University. He was instructor in history at Bowdoin College and Williams College, becoming Associate Professor at the latter in 1938. In 1942 he joined the wartime State Department. Johnson became chief of the department's Division of International Security Affairs in 1945, having served as acting chief from 1944.
Go to Profile#4231
Reginald Bassett
1901 - 1962 (61 years)
Reginald Bassett was an English historian and Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics. Career Having left school to become a solicitor's clerk, at the age of 25 Bassett won a scholarship to study for a diploma at Ruskin College, Oxford, and from there proceeded to New College, Oxford. He was a lecturer under the Extra-Mural Studies Delegacy of the University of Oxford, lecturing mainly in Sussex. From 1945-50 he was a tutor at the London School of Economics for a course designed for students from trade unions. He was lecturer in political science from 1950 to 1953, Re...
Go to Profile#4232
Aloys Sprenger
1813 - 1893 (80 years)
Aloys Sprenger was an Austrian Orientalist. Sprenger studied medicine, natural sciences as well as oriental languages at the University of Vienna. In 1836 he moved to London, where he worked with the Earl of Munster on the latter's Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften bei den mohammedanischen Völkern, ‘History of Military Science among the Muslim Peoples’, and thence in 1843 to Calcutta, where he became principal of Delhi College. In this capacity he had many textbooks translated into Hindustani from European languages.
Go to Profile#4233
Gerhard von Mende
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
Gerhard von Mende was a Baltic German who was head of the Caucasus division at the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territory, or Ostministerium, in Nazi Germany. He was a scholar on Asiatic and Muslim minorities within the Soviet Union and was considered the pioneer of mobilising them as a fifth column against the Communists, while being one of their staunchest advocates within Nazi Germany and post-war West Germany. Following World War II, he established the Research Service Eastern Europe through financing by the West German foreign office, a company which replicated his activities ...
Go to Profile#4234
Lydia Maria Child
1802 - 1880 (78 years)
Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.
Go to Profile#4235
Edward Henry Palmer
1840 - 1882 (42 years)
Edward Henry Palmer , known as E. H. Palmer, was an English orientalist and explorer. Biography Youth and education Palmer was born in Green Street, Cambridge the son of a private schoolmaster. He was orphaned at an early age and brought up by an aunt. He was educated at The Perse School, and as a schoolboy showed the characteristic bent of his mind by picking up the Romani language and a great familiarity with the life of the Romani people. From school he was sent to London as a clerk in the city. Palmer disliked this life, and varied it by learning French and Italian, mainly by frequenting...
Go to Profile#4236
David Jayne Hill
1850 - 1932 (82 years)
Rev. David Jayne Hill was an American academic, diplomat and author. He was president of Bucknell College and Rochester University, both in upstate New York. Early life The son of Baptist minister David T. Hill, David Jayne Hill was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on June 10, 1850. He graduated from Bucknell University in 1874 and was professor of rhetoric there from 1877 to 1879. In 1878 he received his Master of Arts degree, and he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He also undertook graduate studies at the University of Berlin and the University of Paris.
Go to Profile#4237
Alva Belmont
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Alva Erskine Belmont , known as Alva Vanderbilt from 1875 to 1896, was an American multi-millionaire socialite and women's suffrage activist. She was noted for her energy, intelligence, strong opinions, and willingness to challenge convention.
Go to Profile#4238
Earl Browder
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Earl Russell Browder was an American politician, spy for the Soviet Union, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA . Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s.
Go to Profile#4239
Hermann Brockhaus
1806 - 1877 (71 years)
Hermann Brockhaus was a German Orientalist born in Amsterdam. He was a leading authority on Sanskrit and Persian languages. He was the son of publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus and brother-in-law to composer Richard Wagner. In 1870 he received a combined medal
Go to Profile#4240
Emperor Jing of Han
188 BC - 141 BC (47 years)
Emperor Jing of Han , born Liu Qi , was the sixth emperor of the Han dynasty from 157 to 141 BC. His reign saw the limiting of the power of the feudal kings and princes which resulted in the Rebellion of the Seven States in 154 BC. Emperor Jing managed to crush the revolt and princes were thereafter denied rights to appoint ministers for their fiefs. This move helped to consolidate central power which paved the way for the long reign of his son Emperor Wu of Han.
Go to Profile#4241
Arthur F. Wright
1913 - 1976 (63 years)
Arthur Frederick Wright was an American historian and sinologist. He was a professor of history at Yale University. He specialized in Chinese social and intellectual history of the pre-modern period.
Go to Profile#4242
Francis Grose
1758 - 1814 (56 years)
Lieutenant-General Francis Grose was a British soldier who commanded the New South Wales Corps. As Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales he governed the colony from 1792 until 1794, in which he established military rule, abolished civil courts, and made generous land-grants to his officers. He failed to stamp out the practice of paying wages in alcoholic spirits, with consequent public drunkenness and corruption. Although he helped to improve living conditions to some degree, he was not viewed as a successful administrator.
Go to Profile#4243
Robert Swinhoe
1836 - 1877 (41 years)
Robert Swinhoe FRS was an English diplomat and naturalist who worked as a Consul in Taiwan . He catalogued many Southeast Asian birds, and several, such as Swinhoe's pheasant, are named after him. Biography Swinhoe was born in colonial-era Kolkata where his father, who came from a Northumberland family, was a lawyer. There is no clear record of the date of his arrival in England, but it is known he attended the University of London, and in 1854 joined the China consular corps.
Go to Profile#4244
Thomas Cooper
1759 - 1839 (80 years)
Thomas Cooper was an Anglo-American economist, college president and political philosopher. Cooper was described by Thomas Jefferson as "one of the ablest men in America" and by John Adams as "a learned ingenious scientific and talented madcap." Dumas Malone stated that "modern scientific progress would have been impossible without the freedom of the mind which he championed throughout life." His ideas were taken very seriously in his own time: there were substantial reviews of his writings, and some late eighteenth-century critics of materialism directed their arguments against Cooper, rath...
Go to Profile#4245
Jan Rypka
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Jan Rypka, PhDr., Dr.Sc. was a prominent Czech orientalist, translator, professor of Iranology and Turkology at Charles University, Prague. Jan Rypka was a participant in Ferdowsi Millenary Celebration in Tehran in 1934.
Go to Profile#4246
Horace Walpole
1717 - 1797 (80 years)
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford , better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician. He had Strawberry Hill House built in Twickenham, southwest London, reviving the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors. His literary reputation rests on the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto , and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. They have been published by Yale University Press in 48 volumes. In 2017, a volume of Walpole's selected letters was published.
Go to Profile#4247
Daniel David Luckenbill
1881 - 1927 (46 years)
Daniel David Luckenbill was an American assyriologist and professor at the University of Chicago. Publications Complete bibliography:John A. Maynard: In Memoriam: A Bibliography of D. D. Luckenbill. In: The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. 45, 1929, S. 90–93. A Study of the temple documents from the Cassite period. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1907. Thesis PhD Annals of Sennacherib. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1924. Reprint 2005. .Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1926/1927. Mehrfache Reprints.Bd. 1 Historical records of Assyria: from the earliest times to Sargon.Bd.
Go to Profile#4248
Emil Rödiger
1801 - 1874 (73 years)
Emil Rödiger was a German orientalist. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Halle, where in 1830, he became an associate professor of Oriental languages, followed by a full professorship in 1835. He moved to Berlin in 1860, and remained there for the rest of his life.
Go to Profile#4249
Harold Foote Gosnell
1896 - 1997 (101 years)
Harold Foote Gosnell was an American political scientist and writer, known for his research and writings on American politics, elections, and political parties. Gosnell attended the University of Rochester, graduating summa cum laude in 1918. He went on to the University of Chicago, where in 1922 he received his doctorate. He became a professor at Chicago and taught there until 1941. During World War II, he went to Washington, D.C., as a budget analyst and later as an operations officer for the United States Department of State, while he continued to study and write on politics. He served in the federal government until 1960, and was on the faculty at American University.
Go to Profile#4250
Philip Marshall Brown
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Philip Marshall Brown was an American educator and diplomat, born at Hampden, Maine, and educated at Williams College. In 1900–1901, he served as secretary to Lloyd C. Griscom and from 1901 to 1903 was second secretary for the American Legation of Constantinople. He served as Secretary of legation to Guatemala and Honduras, 1903–1907, and as secretary of the American Embassy of Constantinople, 1907–1908. From the latter year to 1910 he was minister to Honduras. Resigning from the diplomatic service, he was appointed instructor in international law at Harvard University in 1912 and in the foll...
Go to Profile