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,
#4351
Lionel Curtis
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Lionel George Curtis CH was a British official and author. He advocated British Empire Federalism and, late in life, a world state. His ideas concerning dyarchy were important in the development of the Government of India Act 1919 and more generally, his writings influenced the evolution of the Commonwealth of Nations.
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Henry Bartle Frere
1815 - 1884 (69 years)
Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Baronet, was a British colonial administrator. He had a successful career in India, rising to become Governor of Bombay . However, as High Commissioner for Southern Africa , he implemented a set of policies which attempted to impose a British confederation on the region and which led to the overthrow of the Cape's first elected government in 1878 and to a string of regional wars, culminating in the invasion of Zululand and the First Boer War . The British Prime Minister, Gladstone, recalled Frere to London to face charges of misconduct; Whitehall officiall...
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James Harrington
1611 - 1677 (66 years)
James Harrington was an English political theorist of classical republicanism. He is best known for his controversial publication The Commonwealth of Oceana . This work was an exposition of an ideal constitution, a utopia, designed to facilitate the development of the English republic established after the regicide, the execution of Charles I in 1649.
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Wolfgang Abendroth
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Wolfgang Walter Arnulf Abendroth was a German socialist, jurist, and political scientist. He was born in Elberfeld, now a part of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia. Abendroth was a radical social democrat and an important contributor to the constitutional foundation of post-World War II West Germany. In 1943 he was forcibly drafted into one of the 999th Division's "probation units" and while stationed in Greece he deserted to the Greek People's Liberation Army . After the war he briefly held a Law professorship in East Germany. However, in 1948 he left for West Germany with his family, refu...
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Władysław Gomułka
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Władysław Gomułka was a Polish Communist politician. He was the de facto leader of post-war Poland from 1947 until 1948, and again from 1956 to 1970. Born in 1905 in Galicia, Gomulka was of proletarian origin. A plumber from the age of fourteen, he joined the revolutionary movement, made propaganda in the trade unions and suffered the rigours of the Witos government, then of the Pilsudski dictatorship. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he was imprisoned in Lwow, but was later released. He moved to Warsaw and became one of the most energetic organisers of the resistance against the Nazis.
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James Russell Lowell
1819 - 1891 (72 years)
James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the fireside poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets that rivaled the popularity of British poets. These writers usually used conventional forms and meters in their poetry, making them suitable for families entertaining at their fireside.
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Max Shachtman
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany. Beginnings Shachtman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated with his family to New York City in 1905.
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Bruno Kreisky
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Bruno Kreisky was an Austrian social democratic politician who served as Foreign Minister from 1959 to 1966 and as Chancellor from 1970 to 1983. Aged 72 at the end of his chancellorship, he was the oldest Chancellor after World War II. His 13-year tenure was the longest of any Chancellor in republican Austria.
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Thomas Cromwell
1485 - 1540 (55 years)
Thomas Cromwell , briefly Earl of Essex, was an English statesman and lawyer who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540, when he was beheaded on orders of the king, who later blamed false charges for the execution.
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Paul Samuel Reinsch
1869 - 1923 (54 years)
Paul Samuel Reinsch , was an American political scientist and diplomat. He played an influential role in developing the field of international relations. Career overview Reinsch was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin of German-American parents. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1892, attended the school of law there, and after graduating in 1894, was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Milwaukee for some time.
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Kurt Riezler
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Kurt Riezler was a German philosopher and diplomat. A top-level cabinet adviser in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, he negotiated Germany's underwriting of Russia's October Revolution and authored the 1914 September Program which outlined German war aims during World War I. The posthumous publication of his secret notes and diaries played a role in the "Fischer Controversy" among German historians in the early 1960s.
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William Clark
1770 - 1838 (68 years)
William Clark was an American explorer, soldier, Indian agent, and territorial governor. A native of Virginia, he grew up in pre-statehood Kentucky before later settling in what became the state of Missouri.
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Pierre Leroux
1797 - 1871 (74 years)
Pierre Henri Leroux was a French philosopher and political economist. He was born at Bercy, now a part of Paris, the son of an artisan. Life His education was interrupted by the death of his father, which compelled him to support his mother and family. Having worked first as a mason and then as a compositor, he joined P. Dubois in the foundation of Le Globe which became in 1831 the official organ of the Saint-Simonian community, of which he became a prominent member. In November of the same year, when Prosper Enfantin became leader of the Saint-Simonians and preached the enfranchisement of women and the functions of the couple-prêtre, Leroux separated himself from the sect.
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Paul Pelliot
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
Paul Eugène Pelliot was a French Sinologist and Orientalist best known for his explorations of Central Asia and his discovery of many important Chinese texts such as the Dunhuang manuscripts. Early life and career Paul Pelliot was born on 28 May 1878 in Paris, France, and initially intended to pursue a career as a foreign diplomat. Accordingly, he studied English as a secondary school student at La Sorbonne, then studied Mandarin Chinese at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes . Pelliot was a gifted student, and completed the school's three-year Mandarin course in only two years. His ...
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Guillermo Miller
1795 - 1861 (66 years)
William Miller known throughout Hispanic America as Guillermo Miller, was an English-born soldier who participated in several South American revolutions, and then became a diplomat. Biography Born December 2, 1795 in Wingham, Kent, Miller was fluent in several languages by the age of seventeen, when he enrolled in the British army to fight in the Napoleonic Wars, taking part in the Siege of Badajoz and Battle of Vittoria under the Duke of Wellington. In September 1817, hearing of the wars in Latin America, he set sail for Buenos Aires to join San Martín's Army of the Andes. He took part in Sa...
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Petru Groza
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Petru Groza was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian politician, best known as the first Prime Minister of the Communist Party-dominated government under Soviet occupation during the early stages of the Communist regime in Romania, and later as the President of the Presidium of the Great National Assembly from 1952 until his death in 1958.
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James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, , was a British academic, jurist, historian, and Liberal politician. According to Keoth Robbins, he was a widely traveled authority on law, government, and history whose expertise led to high political offices culminating with his successful role as ambassador to the United States, 1907–13. His intellectual influence was greatest in The American Commonwealth , an in-depth study of American politics that shaped the understanding of America in Britain and in the United States as well.
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Herbert Giles
1845 - 1935 (90 years)
Herbert Allen Giles was a British diplomat and sinologist who was the professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge for 35 years. Giles was educated at Charterhouse School before becoming a British diplomat in China. He modified a Mandarin Chinese romanization system established by Thomas Wade, resulting in the widely known Wade–Giles Chinese romanization system. Among his many works were translations of the Analects of Confucius, the Lao Tzu , the Chuang Tzu, and, in 1892, the widely published A Chinese–English Dictionary.
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Frances Perkins
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Frances Perkins was an American workers-rights advocate who served as the fourth United States Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position. A member of the Democratic Party, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her longtime friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped make labor issues important in the emerging New Deal coalition. She was one of two Roosevelt cabinet members to remain in office for his entire presidency .
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Francis Burton Harrison
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Francis Burton Harrison was an American statesman who served in the United States House of Representatives and was appointed governor-general of the Philippines by President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. Harrison was a prominent adviser to the president of the Philippine Commonwealth, as well as the next four presidents of the Republic of the Philippines. He is the only former governor-general of the Philippines to be awarded Philippine citizenship.
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Charles Edward Merriam
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Charles Edward Merriam Jr. was an American professor of political science at the University of Chicago, founder of the behavioral approach to political science, a trainer of many graduate students, a prominent intellectual in the Progressive Movement, and an advisor to several US Presidents. Upon his death, The New York Times called him "one of the outstanding political scientists in the country".
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William T. R. Fox
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
William Thornton Rickert Fox , generally known as William T. R. Fox , was an American foreign policy professor and international relations theoretician at the Columbia University . He is perhaps mostly known as the coiner of the term "superpower" in 1944. He wrote several books about the foreign policy of the United States of America and the United Kingdom . He was a pioneer in establishing international relations, and the systematic study of statecraft and war, as a major academic discipline. National security policy and an examination of civil-military relations were also focuses of his interests and career.
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M. Carey Thomas
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Martha Carey Thomas was an American educator, suffragist, and linguist. She was the second president of Bryn Mawr College, a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Early life and education Thomas was born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 2, 1857. She was the daughter of James Carey Thomas and Mary Thomas. She was conceived "in full daylight", because her father, a doctor, thought this would diminish the chance of his wife miscarrying.
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Thomas F. Bayard
1828 - 1898 (70 years)
Thomas Francis Bayard was an American lawyer, politician and diplomat from Wilmington, Delaware. A Democrat, he served three terms as the United States Senator from Delaware and made three unsuccessful bids for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland appointed him Secretary of State. After four years in private life, he returned to the diplomatic arena as Ambassador to Great Britain.
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Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington
1618 - 1685 (67 years)
Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington, KG, PC was an English statesman. A supporter of the Royalists during the English Civil War, he joined the royal family in exile before returning to England at the Restoration in 1660. He gained political influence over the following decade and became one of Charles II's key advisors as a member of the Cabal ministry from 1668. He was impeached in 1674. He was a leading figure in the Court faction in the Parliament of England, a grouping which would evolve into the Tories.
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Subramania Bharati
1882 - 1921 (39 years)
C. Subramania Bharathi was a Tamil writer, poet, journalist, Indian independence activist, social reformer and polyglot. He was bestowed the title "Bharathi" for his excellence in poetry. He was a pioneer of modern Tamil poetry and is considered one of the greatest Tamil literary figures of all time. He is popularly known by his mononymous title "Bharathi/ Bharathiyaar," and also by the other title "Mahakavi Bharathi" . His numerous works included fiery songs kindling patriotism during the Indian Independence movement. He fought for the emancipation of women, against child marriage, vehemently opposed the caste system, and stood for reforming society and religion.
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Hirata Atsutane
1776 - 1843 (67 years)
was a Japanese scholar, conventionally ranked as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku studies, and one of the most significant theologians of the Shintō religion. His literary name was , and his primary assumed name was . He also used the names , , and . His personal name was .
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Claudia Jones
1915 - 1964 (49 years)
Claudia Vera Jones was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the United States, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and Black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major Black newspape...
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Duff Cooper
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, , known as Duff Cooper, was a British Conservative Party politician and diplomat who was also a military and political historian. First elected to Parliament in 1924, he lost his seat in 1929 but returned to Parliament in the 1931 Westminster St George's by-election, which was seen as a referendum on Stanley Baldwin's leadership of the Conservative Party. He later served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty. In the intense political debates of the late 1930s over appeasement, he first put his trust in the League of Nations, and later realised that war with Germany was inevitable.
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William Muir
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Sir William Muir was a Scottish Orientalist, and colonial administrator, Principal of the University of Edinburgh and Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Provinces of British India. Life He was born at Glasgow the son of William Muir , a merchant, and Helen Macfie . His older brother was John Muir, the Indologist and Sanskrit scholar. He was educated at Kilmarnock Academy, the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Haileybury College. In 1837 he entered the Bengal civil service. Muir served as secretary to the governor of the North-West Provinces, and as a member of the Agra revenue board, and during the Mutiny he was in charge of the intelligence department there.
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Henry Highland Garnet
1815 - 1882 (67 years)
Henry Highland Garnet was an American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. Having escaped as a child from slavery in Maryland with his family, he grew up in New York City. He was educated at the African Free School and other institutions, and became an advocate of militant abolitionism. He became a minister and based his drive for abolitionism in religion.
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James Wilford Garner
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
James Wilford Garner was an American professor of political science. Biography He graduated from the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1892 and studied at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University , where he was a member of the Dunning School. His dissertation, Reconstruction in Mississippi, though critical of Reconstruction, was regarded by W. E. B. Du Bois as the fairest of the works of the Dunning School.
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Malcolm H. Kerr
1931 - 1984 (53 years)
Malcolm Hooper Kerr was a university professor specializing in the Middle East and the Arab world. An American citizen, he was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, where he died. He served as president of the American University of Beirut until he was killed by gunmen in 1984.
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Thomas Wolsey
1473 - 1530 (57 years)
Thomas Wolsey was an English statesman and Catholic bishop. When Henry VIII became King of England in 1509, Wolsey became the king's almoner. Wolsey's affairs prospered and by 1514 he had become the controlling figure in virtually all matters of state. He also held important ecclesiastical appointments. These included the Archbishop of York—the second most important role in the English church—and that of papal legate. His appointment as a cardinal by Pope Leo X in 1515 gave him precedence over all other English clergy.
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Theodor Heuss
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Theodor Heuss was a German liberal politician who served as the first president of West Germany from 1949 to 1959. His cordial nature – something of a contrast to the stern character of chancellor Konrad Adenauer – largely contributed to the stabilization of democracy in West Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder years. Before beginning his career as a politician, Heuss had been a political journalist.
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Ziauddin Barani
1285 - 1357 (72 years)
Ziauddin Barani was an Indian Muslim political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate located in present-day Northern India during Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah's reign. He was best known for composing the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi , a work on medieval India, which covers the period from the reign of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq to the first six years of the reign of Firoz Shah Tughluq; and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari which promoted a hierarchy among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent, although according to M. Athar Ali it was not based on race or even like the caste system, but taking as a model of ...
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Richard Bourke
1777 - 1855 (78 years)
General Sir Richard Bourke, KCB , was an Irish soldier, who served in the British Army and was Governor of New South Wales from 1831 to 1837. As a lifelong Whig , he encouraged the emancipation of convicts and helped bring forward the ending of penal transportation to Australia. In this, he faced strong opposition from the landlord establishment and its press. He approved a new settlement on the Yarra River, and named it Melbourne, in honour of the incumbent British prime minister, Lord Melbourne.
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A. J. Muste
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Abraham Johannes Muste , usually cited as A. J. Muste, was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. He is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, antiwar movement, and civil rights movement.
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Carlos P. Romulo
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Carlos Peña Romulo Sr. was a Filipino diplomat, statesman, soldier, journalist and author. He was a reporter at the age of 16, a newspaper editor by 20, and a publisher at 32. He was a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines, a general in the US Army and the Philippine Army, university president, and president of the United Nations General Assembly.
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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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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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Paul Fauconnet
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Paul Fauconnet was a French sociologist who is best known as a contributor to the L'Année Sociologique. Fauconnet aggregated in philosophy in 1892 and earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1895. He also earned a further doctorate in law in 1920, although his interest in the law was purely scholarly and he never practiced as a lawyer. He became a professor at the faculty of letters in 1907 at the University of Toulouse and later chargé de cours at the faculty of letters in 1921 in Paris, obtaining a chair in 1932. His dissertation was entitled La responsabilité: Etude de sociologie . It adopt...
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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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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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H. A. R. Gibb
1895 - 1971 (76 years)
Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb , known as H. A. R. Gibb, was a Scottish historian and Orientalist. Early life and education Gibb was born on Wednesday, 2 January 1895, in Alexandria, Egypt, to Alexander Crawford Gibb, the son of John Gibb of Gladstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland, and Jane Ann Gardner of Greenock, Scotland. His father died in 1897, following which his mother took up a teaching position in Alexandria. Hamilton returned to Scotland for his formal education at the age of five: first, four years of private tuition, after which he started at the Royal High School, Edinburgh in 1904, staying until 1912.
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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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Herbert Marcuse
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim , Inge Neumann , and Erica Sherover . In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represen...
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