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,
#4201
Johann David Michaelis
1717 - 1791 (74 years)
Johann David Michaelis was a German biblical scholar and teacher. He was member of a family that was committed to solid discipline in Hebrew and the cognate languages, which distinguished the University of Halle in the period of Pietism. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
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Friedrich Rückert
1788 - 1866 (78 years)
Johann Michael Friedrich Rückert was a German poet, translator, and professor of Oriental languages. Biography Johann Michael Friedrich Rückert was born 16 May 1788 in Schweinfurt and was the eldest son of a lawyer, Johann Adam Rückert, and his wife, Maria Barbara . He was educated at the local Gymnasium and at the universities of Würzburg and Heidelberg. From 1816 to 1817, he worked on the editorial staff of the Morgenblatt at Stuttgart. Nearly the whole of the year 1818 he spent in Rome, and afterwards he lived for several years at Coburg , where he married Luise Wiethaus-Fischer in 1821.
Go to Profile#4203
Richard Wilhelm
1873 - 1930 (57 years)
Richard Wilhelm was a German sinologist, theologian and missionary. He lived in China for 25 years, became fluent in spoken and written Chinese, and grew to love and admire the Chinese people. He is best remembered for his translations of philosophical works from Chinese into German that in turn have been translated into other major languages of the world, including English. His translation of the I Ching is still regarded as one of the finest, as is his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower; both were provided with introductions by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was a persona...
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Otto Franke
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
Otto Franke was a German diplomat, sinologist, and historian. He was the preeminent German sinologist of his time, called the "Nestor of German Sinology" by Hellmut Wilhelm. He served as a diplomat at the German embassy to the Qing empire for 13 years, before becoming the inaugural Sinology Chair at the University of Hamburg and then at the University of Berlin. His five-volume Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches , though unfinished because of World War II, remains the standard history of China in Germany decades after its publication. His son Wolfgang Franke was also a well-known sinologist ...
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Frederic Austin Ogg
1878 - 1951 (73 years)
Frederic Austin Ogg was an American political scientist. Biography Ogg was born at Solsberry, Indiana, in 1878. He graduated from DePauw University and took post graduate courses at Indiana and Harvard universities. After several years spent in teaching in high schools and colleges, he became associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in 1914, and full professor in 1917. He was a member of many economic and historical societies.
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Harry Pollitt
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Harry Pollitt was a British communist who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain from July 1929 to September 1939 and again from 1941 until his death in 1960. Pollitt spent most of his life advocating communism. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, Pollitt was an adherent particularly of Joseph Stalin even after Stalin's death and disavowal by Nikita Khrushchev. Pollitt's acts included opposition to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and Polish–Soviet War, support for the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, both support and opposition...
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David R. Mayhew
#4208
Martin Haug
1827 - 1876 (49 years)
Martin Haug was a German orientalist. Biography Haug was born at Ostdorf , Württemberg. He became a pupil in the gymnasium at Stuttgart at a comparatively late age, and in 1848 he entered the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, where he studied oriental languages, especially Sanskrit. He afterwards attended lectures at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, and in 1854 settled as Privatdozent at the University of Bonn. In 1856 he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he assisted Bunsen in his literary undertakings.
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Gustaf Dalman
1855 - 1941 (86 years)
Gustaf Hermann Dalman was a German Lutheran theologian and orientalist. He did extensive field work in Palestine before the First World War, collecting inscriptions, poetry, and proverbs. He also collected physical articles illustrative of the life of the indigenous farmers and herders of the country, including rock and plant samples, house and farm tools, small archaeological finds, and ceramics. He pioneered the study of biblical and early post-biblical Aramaic, publishing an authoritative grammar and dictionary , as well as other works. His collection of 15,000 historic photographs and 5,...
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Spark Matsunaga
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Spark Masayuki Matsunaga was an American politician and attorney who served as United States Senator for Hawaii from 1977 until his death in 1990. Matsunaga also represented Hawaii in the U.S. House of Representatives and served in the Hawaii territorial house of representatives. A member of the Democratic Party, Matsunaga introduced legislation that led to the creation of the United States Institute of Peace and to reparations to Japanese-American World War II detainees.
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Arthur Twining Hadley
1856 - 1930 (74 years)
Arthur Twining Hadley was an American economist who served as President of Yale University from 1899 to 1921. Biography Hadley was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of James Hadley, Professor of Greek at Yale 1851–1872, and his wife, née Anne Loring Morris. He graduated from Yale College in 1876, where he was a member of DKE and Skull and Bones, and received prizes in English, classics and astronomy. He then studied political science at Yale , and at the University of Berlin under Adolph Wagner. He was a tutor at Yale in 1879–1883, instructor in political science in 1883–1886, professo...
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Wendy Wood
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Wendy Wood, born Gwendoline Emily Meacham, was a campaigner for Scottish independence. An eccentric and colourful figure, she was also a gifted artist, sculptor and writer, and her theatrical political activism often created controversy.
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Mohan Sinha Mehta
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Mohan Singh Mehta was founder of Vidya Bhavan group of institutions and Seva Mandir in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Life Mohan Singh Mehta was born in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, on 20 April 1895 to Jeewan Singh Mehta. His wife’s name was Hulas Kumari Mehta and he had one son, Jagat Singh Mehta, who became Foreign Secretary in the Government of India.
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Thomas Lynch
1700 - 1684 (-16 years)
Sir Thomas Lynch was the English governor of Jamaica on three separate occasions in the 17th century . He was also chief justice of Jamaica for a time. Life He was the son of Theophilus Lynch Esq of Rixton Hall in Lancashire , fourth son of William Lynch Esq of Cranbrook in Kent, and of his wife Judith, eldest daughter of Royal chaplain and Bishop of London John Aylmer. He served under Robert Venables in the army which went out to Jamaica in 1655. In January 1661, after a period back in England he was appointed provost-marshal of the island for life.
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Hugh Gladney Grant
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Hugh Gladney Grant was an American diplomat from the state of Alabama. Grant was educated at Samford University in Homewood, Alabama. He later taught at Auburn University, , before entering government service.
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Werner Krauss
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Werner Krauss was a German university professor . During the 1940s he became a political activist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. In 1943 he was found guilty of preparing to commit high treason and condemned to death. Following the intervention of influential fellow-intellectuals the sentence was commuted to a five-year prison term in 1944.
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Gustav Weil
1808 - 1889 (81 years)
Gustav Weil was a German orientalist. Biography Weil was born in Sulzburg, then part of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Being destined for the rabbinate, he was taught Hebrew, as well as German and French; and he received instruction in Latin from the minister of his native town. At the age of twelve he went to Metz, where his grandfather was rabbi, to study the Talmud. For this, however, he developed very little taste, and he abandoned his original intention of entering upon a theological career. In 1828 he entered the University of Heidelberg, devoting himself to the study of philology and history; at the same time he studied Arabic under Umbreit.
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James D. Theberge
1930 - 1988 (58 years)
James Daniel Theberge was a United States ambassador to Nicaragua and Chile . Early life and education He was born in Oceanside, New York, and received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1952, an M.A. from Oxford University in 1960, and did graduate work at Heidelberg University. He later received an M.P.A. from Harvard University in 1965. He was a Littauer Fellow at Harvard.
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William Robertson Smith
1846 - 1894 (48 years)
William Robertson Smith was a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar, professor of divinity, and minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He was an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica and contributor to the Encyclopaedia Biblica. He is also known for his book Religion of the Semites, which is considered a foundational text in the comparative study of religion.
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Morris Jastrow Jr.
1861 - 1921 (60 years)
Morris Jastrow Jr. was a Polish-born American orientalist and librarian associated with the University of Pennsylvania. Biography He was born in Warsaw in Congress Poland, and came to Philadelphia in 1866 when his father, Marcus Jastrow, a renowned Talmudic scholar, accepted a position as Rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom. He was educated in the schools of Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1881. His original intention was to become a rabbi. For this purpose, he carried on theological studies at the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe, the new...
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George H. Jackson
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
George H. Jackson was an American lawyer, consul, and political activist. He is sometimes confused with George Henry Jackson , who was elected to the Ohio State House of Representatives in 1892 and who was appointed treasurer at the founding meeting of the Niagara Movement.
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Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt was a German orientalist and historian. He specialized in Urartian research, and was co-author of Corpus Inscriptionum Chaldicarum, a corpus of Urartian inscriptions.
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Arthur von Rosthorn
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Arthur von Rosthorn was an Austrian diplomat and sinologist. He obtained his education in Vienna and Oxford, where he was a student of sinologist James Legge. From 1883 to 1893 he was associated with the Seezollverwaltung in China. In 1895 he received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig, and afterwards worked for the Austrian diplomatic service; serving as a legation secretary and counselor in China, and later as an envoy in Tehran and Beijing . In 1922 he was named an honorary professor at the University of Vienna, where up until 1939, he taught classes in Chinese language, litera...
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Edmund Castell
1606 - 1685 (79 years)
Edmund Castell was an English orientalist. He was born at Tadlow, in Cambridgeshire. At the age of fifteen he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, gaining his BA in 1624-5 and his MA in 1628. Appointed Professor of Arabic in 1666, with the full title 'Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic'. He moved to St John's in 1671, because of the valuable library there. His great work, the Lexicon Heptaglotton Hebraicum, Chaldaicum, Syriacum, Samaritanum, Aethiopicum, Arabicum, et Persicum , took him eighteen years to complete, working from sixteen to eighteen hours a day. He employed fourteen assistant...
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Edgar Lane
1923 - 1964 (41 years)
Edgar Lane was a professor of political science at the University of California Santa Barbara. He was the author and editor of many scholarly articles, book reviews, and a book on lobbying reform. He made substantial contributions to the regulation of lobbying by assisting the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities .
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Henri Massé
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Henri Massé was a 20th-century French orientalist. He was first professor of Arabic and Persian literatures at the faculté des lettres d'Alger, then professor of Persian language at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes of Paris , of which he was administrator from 1948 to 1958 and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
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Samuel Beal
1825 - 1889 (64 years)
Samuel Beal was an Oriental scholar, and the first Englishman to translate directly from the Chinese the early records of Buddhism, thus illuminating Indian history. Life and work Samuel Beal was born in Devonport, Devon, and went to Kingswood School and Devonport. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1847. He was the son of a Wesleyan minister, reverend William Beal; and brother of William Beal and Philip Beal who survived a shipwreck in Kenn Reef.
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Hermann von der Hardt
1660 - 1746 (86 years)
Hermann von der Hardt was a German historian and orientalist. He was born at Melle, in Westphalia . He studied oriental languages at the universities of Jena and Leipzig, and in 1690 he was called to the chair of oriental languages at Helmstedt. He resigned his position in 1727, but lived at Helmstedt until his death.
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William C. F. Robinson
1834 - 1897 (63 years)
Sir William Cleaver Francis Robinson was an Irish colonial administrator and musical composer, who wrote several well-known songs. He was born in County Westmeath, Ireland, and was educated at home and at the Royal Naval School. He joined the Colonial Office service in 1858 and became the president of Montserrat in 1862.
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Ambrose Burnside
1824 - 1881 (57 years)
Ambrose Everett Burnside was an American army officer and politician who became a senior Union general in the Civil War and three-time Governor of Rhode Island, as well as being a successful inventor and industrialist.
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Gustav Haloun
1898 - 1951 (53 years)
Gustav Haloun was a Czech sinologist. He studied in Vienna under Arthur von Rosthorn and in Leipzig under August Conrady from where he received his Dr. phil. in 1923. He obtained habilitation at Charles University in Prague where he lectured in 1926-1927. Afterwards he taught at Halle University , and Göttingen University , before becoming Chair of Chinese Language and History at Cambridge University, succeeding Arthur Christopher Moule and preceding Edwin G. Pulleyblank in that position.
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William O. Hall
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
William Oscar Hall was the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia from 1967 to 1971, during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Biography William O. Hall was born May 22, 1914, in Roswell, New Mexico. He moved with his family to Prineville, Oregon, when he was seven years old. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon in 1936, pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and served in the U.S. Foreign Service thereafter. He worked in the consular service, the United Nations, and the Agency for International Development.
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Pierre Beaumarchais
1732 - 1799 (67 years)
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a French polymath. At various times in his life, he was a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary .
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Spenser Wilkinson
1853 - 1937 (84 years)
Henry Spenser Wilkinson was the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford University. While he was an English writer known primarily for his work on military subjects, he had wide interests. Earlier in his career he was the drama critic for London's Morning Post.
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Harold W. Chase
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Harold William Chase was an American professor of political science. He was also a major general in the United States Marine Corps Reserve who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs in the administration of President Jimmy Carter.
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William Miller Collier
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
William Miller Collier was United States Ambassador to Spain from 1905 to 1909, the president of George Washington University from 1918 to 1921, and United States Ambassador to Chile from 1921 to 1928.
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Pier Paolo Vergerio
1498 - 1565 (67 years)
Pier Paolo Vergerio , the Younger, was an Italian papal nuncio and later Protestant reformer. Life He was born at Capodistria , Istria, then part of the Venetian Republic and studied jurisprudence in Padua, where he delivered lectures in 1522. He also practiced law in Verona, Padua, and Venice. In 1526, he married Diana Contarini, whose early death was at least a partial cause of his entering upon an ecclesiastical career.
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Patrick Doyle
1892 - 1921 (29 years)
Patrick Doyle was one of six men hanged in Mountjoy Prison on the morning of 14 March 1921. He was aged 31 and lived at St. Mary's Place, Dublin. He was one of The Forgotten Ten. Background Doyle was involved in an arms raid on Collinstown Aerodrome in 1919. Together with Frank Flood, he was involved in planning several attempts to free Kevin Barry from Mountjoy in the days before Barry's own execution in November 1920. Flood would later be hanged on the same morning as Doyle.
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W. Averell Harriman
1891 - 1986 (95 years)
William Averell Harriman , better known as Averell Harriman, was an American Democratic politician, businessman, and diplomat. The son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, he served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman, and later as the 48th governor of New York. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956, as well as a core member of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
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Albert Terrien de Lacouperie
1844 - 1894 (50 years)
Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie was a French orientalist, specialising in comparative philology. He published a number of books on early Asian and Middle-Eastern languages, initially in French and then in English. Lacouperie is best known for his studies of the Yi Ching and his argument, known as Sino-Babylonianism, that the important elements of ancient civilization in ancient China came from Mesopotamia and that there were resemblances between Chinese characters and Akkadian hieroglyphics.
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Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten
1792 - 1860 (68 years)
Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten was a German orientalist born in Altenkirchen on the island of Rügen. He was the son of ecclesiastic Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten . He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Greifswald, and from 1812 studied Oriental languages in Paris. In 1815 he became an adjunct to the theological and philosophical faculty in Greifswald. From 1817 to 1824 he was a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Jena, and afterwards a professor at Greifswald.
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Allan Pinkerton
1819 - 1884 (65 years)
Allan J. Pinkerton was a Scottish-American cooper, abolitionist, detective, and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the United States and his claim to have foiled a plot in 1861 to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, he provided the Union Army – specifically General George B. McClellan of the Army of the Potomac – with military intelligence, including extremely inaccurate enemy troop strength numbers. After the war, his agents played a significant role as strikebreakers – in particular during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 ...
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Salomon Schweigger
1551 - 1622 (71 years)
Salomon Schweigger was a German Lutheran theologian, minister, anthropologist and orientalist of the 16th century. He provided a valuable insight during his travels in the Balkans, Constantinople and the Middle East, and published a famous travel book of his exploits. He also published the first German language translation of the Qur'an.
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Emily Newell Blair
1877 - 1951 (74 years)
Emily Newell Blair was an American writer, suffragist, feminist, national Democratic Party political leader, and a founder of the League of Women Voters. Biography Early life and ancestors Emily Jane Newell Blair was born in Joplin, Jasper County, Missouri, on January 9, 1877, and died August 3, 1951, in Alexandra, Arlington County, Virginia. She was a daughter of James Patton Newell and Anna Cynthia Gray.
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Max Wexler
1870 - 1917 (47 years)
Max Wexler was a Romanian socialist activist and journalist, regarded as one of the main Marxist theorist of the early Romanian workers' movement. Active in the first Romanian socialist party, the Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party, he became dissatisfied with the party's passivity and its failure to openly support political rights for the Romanian Jews, initiating a separate Jewish socialist group. Following the party's demise, he was one of the main activists for the revival of the socialist movement in Iaşi, introducing to Marxism many future leaders of the Romanian socialist parties.
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John Dowson
1820 - 1881 (61 years)
John Dowson M.R.A.S. was a British indologist. A noted scholar of Hinduism, he taught in India for much of his life. His book Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology remains one of the most comprehensive and authoritative works on the topic.
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William Rosecrans
1819 - 1898 (79 years)
William Starke Rosecrans was an American inventor, coal-oil company executive, diplomat, politician, and U.S. Army officer. He gained fame for his role as a Union general during the American Civil War. He was the victor at prominent Western Theater battles, but his military career was effectively ended following his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863.
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Pausanias the Regent
Pausanias was a Spartan regent and a general. In 479 BC, as a leader of the Hellenic League's combined land forces, he won a pivotal victory against the Achaemenid Empire in the Battle of Plataea. Despite his role in ending the Second Persian invasion of Greece, Pausanias subsequently fell under suspicion of conspiring with the Persian king Xerxes I. After an interval of repeated arrests and debates about his guilt, he was starved to death by his fellow Spartans in 477 BC. What is known of his life is largely according to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Diodorus' Bibliotheca hi...
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John Gagnier
1670 - 1740 (70 years)
John Gagnier was a French orientalist, resident for much of his life in England. Biography Gagnier was born in Paris about 1670, and educated at the College of Navarre. His tutor, Le Bossu, showed him a copy of Brian Walton's 'Polyglott Bible'. This led him to master Hebrew and Arabic. After taking orders he was made a canon regular of the Abbey of St. Genevieve. Finding the life irksome, he retired to England, and ultimately became an Anglican clergyman.
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François Nau
1864 - 1931 (67 years)
François Nau was a French Catholic priest, mathematician, Syriacist, and specialist in oriental languages. He published a great number of eastern Christian texts and translations for the first and often only time.
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