The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#4301
Cullen B. Gosnell
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Cullen B. Gosnell was an American political scientist. He was the founder and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory University from 1933 to 1951. Early life Cullen Bryant Gosnell was born on December 14, 1893, near Spartanburg, South Carolina. He graduated from Wofford College with a bachelor's degree in 1916. He went on to receive a master's degree from Vanderbilt University in 1920 and a PhD from Princeton University in 1928.
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Thierry Braspenning-Balzacq
1900 - Present (126 years)
Thierry Balzacq is a French scholar specializing in IR Theory, security, and diplomatic studies. He is a professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Paris. He was previously awarded Francqui Research Chair , and held the Tocqueville Chair in IR at the University of Namur.
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Theodore Henry Robinson
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Theodore Henry Robinson was a British biblical scholar who became professor of Semitic languages at University College, Cardiff. Life Robinson was born in Edenbridge, Kent, on 9 August 1881 to the Baptist minister W. Venis Robinson and his wife Emily Jane. After studying at St. John's College, Cambridge, Regent's Park Baptist College and Göttingen University he taught Hebrew and Syriac at Serampore College, Bengal.
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Enoch Crowder
1859 - 1932 (73 years)
Major General Enoch Herbert Crowder, USA was an American Army lawyer who served as the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army from 1911 to 1923. Crowder is most noted for implementing and administering the United States Selective Service Act of 1917, under which thousands of American men were drafted into military service during World War I.
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Henry Courtenay Fenn
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Henry Courtenay Fenn, more commonly known as H. C. Fenn, was an American sinologist and architect of Yale University's Chinese language program. H. C. Fenn was the son of the Reverend Dr. Courtenay Hughes Fenn, missionary to China and compiler of The Five Thousand Dictionary, and his wife Alice Holstein May Fenn, and grew up in Peking. He married Constance Latimer Sargent on January 27, 1925. Fenn was active in the "Yale system" of Chinese grammar developed by himself, George Kennedy, Gardner Tewksbury, Wang Fangyu and others working in the Institute of Far Eastern Languages at Yale in the la...
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Geoffrey Ostergaard
1926 - 1990 (64 years)
Geoffrey Nielsen Ostergaard was a British political scientist best known for his work on the connections between Gandhism and anarchism, on the British co-operative movement, and on syndicalism and workers' control. His books included The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Sarvodaya Movement for Non-Violent Revolution in India , coauthored with Melville Currell, and Nonviolent Revolution in India , both dealing with the Sarvodaya movement. He spent the majority of his academic career at the University of Birmingham.
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Andrew W. Cordier
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Andrew Wellington Cordier was a United Nations official and President of Columbia University. Early life Cordier was born on a farm near Canton, Ohio and attended high school in Hartville, Ohio where he became quarterback of the football team and valedictorian of his graduating class. He graduated in 1922 from Manchester University and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Medieval History at the University of Chicago in 1927. He married the former Dorothy Butterbaugh in 1924. He studied at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Switzerland in 1930–1931 where he made surveys of the situations in the Sudetenland, Danzig, and the Chaco War.
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Ernest B. Price
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Ernest Batson Price was an American diplomat, university professor, military officer, and businessman. He spent over twenty years in China and witnessed first-hand warlord power struggles, the growth of Japanese militarism, America's post-war diplomacy, China's civil war, and the profound social change that followed. As a result of this first-hand experience, Price was one of America's foremost authorities on Chinese language, culture, and politics from the early nineteen twenties through the mid nineteen fifties.
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Virgil Blum
1913 - 1990 (77 years)
Virgil Clarence Blum was an American Jesuit and professor of political science at Marquette University. Early life and education Virgil Clarence Blum was born on March 27, 1913, in Defiance, Iowa, one of twelve children of John and Elizabeth Blum. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1934 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1947. In 1938 Blum received a bachelor's degree in Latin and English from St. Stanislaus Seminary at Florissant, Missouri. In 1945 he earned a master's degree in history and political science from Saint Louis University. Blum returned to Saint Louis University in 1950 for...
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Mabel Palmer
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Mabel Palmer also known as Mabel Atkinson in her first career, was a British-born, suffragist, journalist and lecturer. After her marriage, she began a second career as a South African educator and academic, using her married name. One of her most noted accomplishments came after her retirement from teaching, when she spearheaded a movement to provide university education for non-white students. After providing free courses in her home for a decade, she became director of the segregated courses offered by the Natal University College, serving from 1945 to 1955. After her second retirement, Pa...
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Arthur A. Ageton
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Arthur Ainslie Ageton was a naval officer, ambassador, writer, and writing teacher. He was the United States Ambassador to Paraguay from September 9, 1954, to April 10, 1957. He was also a rear admiral in the Navy.
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Julia Grace Wales
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Julia Grace Wales was a Canadian academic known for authoring the Wisconsin Plan, a proposal to set up a conference of intellectuals from neutral nations who would work to find a solution for the First World War.
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Harry Augustus Garfield
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Harry Augustus "Hal" Garfield was an American lawyer, academic, and public official. He was president of Williams College and supervised the United States Fuel Administration during World War I. He was a son of President James A. Garfield.
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Rufus B. von KleinSmid
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid , also spelled Kleinsmidt, was the seventh president of the University of Arizona and the fifth president of the University of Southern California . Life and career Von KleinSmid started his academic career at DePauw University where he was a professor of education and psychology. He became USC's fifth president in 1921. A high priority of his administration was to expand professional training programs, and von KleinSmid also presided over a building program that added nine major structures to the university campus. By the end of his first decade in office, USC ha...
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Julieta Kirkwood
1936 - 1985 (49 years)
María Julieta Kirkwood Bañados was a Chilean sociologist, political scientist, university professor and feminist activist. She is considered one of the founders and impellers of the Chilean feminist movement in the 1980s. She is considered the forerunner of Gender studies in Chile.
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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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Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 - 1527 (58 years)
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince , written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
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Simón Bolívar
1783 - 1830 (47 years)
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco was a Venezuelan military and political leader who led what are currently the countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and Bolivia to independence from the Spanish Empire. He is known colloquially as El Libertador, or the Liberator of America.
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Anton Denikin
1872 - 1947 (75 years)
Anton Ivanovich Denikin was a Russian military leader who served as the acting supreme ruler of the Russian State and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of South Russia during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1923. Previously, he was a general in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I.
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Zheng He
1371 - 1433 (62 years)
Zheng He was a Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat, fleet admiral, and court eunuch during China's early Ming dynasty, and often regarded as the greatest admiral in Chinese history. He was originally born as Ma He in a Muslim family and later adopted the surname Zheng conferred by the Yongle Emperor. Commissioned by the Yongle Emperor and later the Xuande Emperor, Zheng commanded seven expeditionary treasure voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433. According to legend, his larger ships carried hundreds of sailors on four decks and were almost twice ...
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David Ricardo
1772 - 1823 (51 years)
David Ricardo was a British political economist, politician, and member of the Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland. He is recognized as one of the most influential classical economists, alongside figures such as Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and James Mill.
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Vladimir Lenin
1870 - 1924 (54 years)
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.
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Hannah Arendt
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Hannah Arendt was a German-born American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theoristss of the 20th century. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of ev...
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Alexis de Tocqueville
1805 - 1859 (54 years)
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville , usually known as just Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
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Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis
1738 - 1805 (67 years)
Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, KG, PC was a British Army officer, Whig politician and colonial administrator. In the United States and the United Kingdom, he is best known as one of the leading British general officers in the American War of Independence. His surrender in 1781 to a combined American and French force at the siege of Yorktown ended significant hostilities in North America. Cornwallis later served as a civil and military governor in Ireland, where he helped bring about the Act of Union; and in India, where he helped enact the Cornwallis Code and the Permanent Settl...
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Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Admiral of the Fleet Albert Victor Nicholas Louis Francis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma was a British statesman, naval officer, colonial administrator and close relative of the British royal family. Mountbatten, who was of German descent, was born in the United Kingdom to the prominent Battenberg family. He was a maternal uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and a second cousin of King George VI. He joined the Royal Navy during the First World War and was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, in the Second World War. He later served as the last Vicero...
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Carl Schmitt
1888 - 1985 (97 years)
Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism.
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Herbert Spencer
1820 - 1903 (83 years)
Herbert Spencer was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
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Chanakya
375 BC - 283 BC (92 years)
Chanakya was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya or Vishnugupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise, the Arthashastra, a text dated to roughly between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. As such, he is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century.
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Annie Besant
1847 - 1933 (86 years)
Annie Besant was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist, and campaigner for Indian nationalism. She was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She became the first female president of the Indian National Congress in 1917.
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