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,
#4401
Peter A. Boodberg
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Peter Alexis Boodberg was a Russian-American scholar, linguist, and sinologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley for 40 years. Boodberg was influential in 20th century developments in the studies of the development of Chinese characters, Chinese philology, and Chinese historical phonology. He has been described as "one of the most original and commanding scholars" of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#4402
Daniel Cosío Villegas
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Daniel Cosío Villegas was a Mexican prominent economist, essayist, historian, and diplomat. Cosío Villegas was born in Mexico City. After studying one year in engineering and two years of philosophy, he received a B.A. in Law from the National University and took several courses in economics at Harvard, Wisconsin and Cornell. Later, he received master's degrees from the London School of Economics and the École libre de sciences politiques of Paris .
Go to Profile#4403
Vera Micheles Dean
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Vera Micheles Dean was a Russian American political scientist. She was the head of research for the Foreign Policy Association, one of the leading think tanks of the 1940s and 1950s, where she became one of the leading authorities in international affairs during that period.
Go to Profile#4404
Joel Andreas
1900 - Present (126 years)
Joel Andreas is an American author and college professor. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California in Los Angeles, and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which he joined in 2003. His research interests include political contention, social inequality, and social change in China today.
Go to Profile#4405
Eleanor Lansing Dulles
1895 - 1996 (101 years)
Eleanor Lansing Dulles was an American writer, professor, and United States government employee. Her background in economics and her familiarity with European affairs enabled her to fill a number of important State Department positions.
Go to Profile#4406
George Hubbard Blakeslee
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
George Hubbard Blakeslee was an academic, professor of history and international relations at Clark University, and a founder of the Journal of Race Development, the first American journal devoted to international relations. This journal was later renamed the Journal of International Relations, which in turn was merged with Foreign Affairs.
Go to Profile#4407
Roy Peel
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Roy Victor Peel was a political scientist and academic, and the director of the United States Census Bureau from 1950 to 1953. Early life and education Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1896, Peel's service in World War I interrupted his college education; he was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Service. After the war, he completed his B.A., graduating from Augustana College in 1920. From there, Peel moved between teaching and post-graduate education, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1927.
Go to Profile#4408
Walter Liebenthal
1886 - 1982 (96 years)
Walter Liebenthal , was a German philosopher and sinologist who specialized in Chinese Buddhism. He translated many philosophical works from Pali, Sanskrit and specially from Chinese into German. Based upon his extensive research in Indian Buddhism and Chinese religion, one of his main conclusions was that early Chinese Buddhism through Ch'an was not a Chinese version of Indian Buddhism, but rather, that it developed from Taoism, a Chinese religion. Indian concepts are present, but at the core it represents a Chinese perspective.
Go to Profile#4409
Edward J. Bloustein
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Edward Jerome Bloustein was the 17th President of Rutgers University serving from 1971 to 1989. Biography He was born in New York City, and he graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1942. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University in 1948 and subsequently traveled to the University of Oxford as a Fulbright scholar and received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1950. Returning to the United States, he taught philosophy briefly at Brooklyn College and spent close to a year in Washington, DC with the O...
Go to Profile#4410
Manning J. Dauer
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Manning Julian Dauer was an American political scientist. Early life Dauer was born in 1909 in North Carolina. He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois .
Go to Profile#4411
John Bellerby
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
John Rotherford Bellerby was a British economist. Born in York, Bellerby was educated at York Grammar School, the University of Leeds, and Harvard University. He served in World War I with the York Rifles and Machine Gun Corps, becoming a major.
Go to Profile#4412
Julio Jiménez Rueda
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Julio Jiménez Rueda was a Mexican lawyer, writer, playwright and diplomat. Biography Jiménez Rueda studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and graduated in law at the Universidad Nacional de México in 1919. Later on, he was appointed as the director of the Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral of UNAM. He completed a doctoral degree of philosophy and literature in 1935. As a diplomat, he served in Montevideo in 1920, and afterwards in Buenos Aires until 1922. Back in Mexico he was the director of the General Archive of the Nation, and later president of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. In...
Go to Profile#4413
Gabriela Mistral
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga , known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral , was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and Catholic. She was a member of the Secular Franciscan Order or Third Franciscan order.She was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences.
Go to Profile#4414
Henry D. Sokolski
1900 - Present (126 years)
Henry D. Sokolski is the founder and executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank promoting a better understanding of strategic weapons proliferation issues among policymakers, scholars, and the media. He teaches as an adjunct professor at The Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., and at the University of Utah and has an appointment as senior fellow for nuclear security studies at the University of California at San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy.
Go to Profile#4415
Paul E. Kahle
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Paul Ernst Kahle was a German orientalist and scholar. Biography Kahle studied orientalism and theology in Marburg and Halle. He attained his doctorate in 1898. His dissertation on the Samaritan Pentateuch was supervised by . Kahle worked as a Lutheran pastor. He studied Semitic philology in Cairo, between 1908 and 1918. In 1909 he discovered leather puppets near Damietta, Egypt used in medieval puppet drama. In 1918, he was promoted to a full professorship at Gießen University, a chair previously held by Friedrich Schwally. In 1923, he switched to Bonn University, where he developed the Ea...
Go to Profile#4416
Herbert Storing
1928 - 1977 (49 years)
Herbert J. Storing was an American political scientist with broad ranging interests who is best known for reviving the serious study of the American Founding. The constitutional theorist and American politics scholar Walter Berns called him "the most profound man I have encountered in the field of American studies."
Go to Profile#4417
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.
Go to Profile#4418
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.
Go to Profile#4419
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.
Go to Profile#4420
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.
Go to Profile#4421
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.
Go to Profile#4422
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...
Go to Profile#4423
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.
Go to Profile#4424
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.
Go to Profile#4425
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...
Go to Profile#4426
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 .
Go to Profile#4427
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 .
Go to Profile#4428
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.
Go to Profile#4429
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.
Go to Profile#4430
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.
Go to Profile#4431
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...
Go to Profile#4432
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.
Go to Profile#4433
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.
Go to Profile#4434
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.
Go to Profile#4435
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...
Go to Profile#4436
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.
Go to Profile#4437
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.
Go to Profile#4438
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.
Go to Profile#4439
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.
Go to Profile#4440
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.
Go to Profile#4441
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 ...
Go to Profile#4442
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.
Go to Profile#4443
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.
Go to Profile#4444
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...
Go to Profile#4445
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.
Go to Profile#4446
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...
Go to Profile#4447
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...
Go to Profile#4448
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.
Go to Profile#4449
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.
Go to Profile#4450
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.
Go to Profile