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,
#4401
Walter F. Dodd
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Walter Fairleigh Dodd was a professor in the political science department at Johns Hopkins University who wrote "one of the most important books on the process of amending state constitutions." Biography He graduated from Florida State College in 1898, and received a Bachelors in Science from John B. Stetson University in 1901. At the University of Chicago, he was a Fellow, 1902–1904, and received a Ph.D. in 1905. In 1904–1907, he was in charge of the section of foreign law in the Library of Congress. He held a research appointment at Johns Hopkins in 1908–1910, in 1910–1911 was associate in ...
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Luther Carrington Goodrich
1894 - 1986 (92 years)
Luther Carrington Goodrich was an American sinologist and historian of China. A prolific author, he is perhaps best remembered for his work on the Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644. Life Luther Carrington Goodrich was born on September 21, 1894, in Tongzhou, a southeastern suburb of Beijing, where his parents were serving as Protestant missionaries. His father, Chauncey Goodrich , had published A Pocket Dictionary and Pekingese Syllabary in 1891 and among the nephews of Chauncey's great-grandfather Josiah were a US Senator and US Representative.
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Bernard B. Fall
1926 - 1967 (41 years)
Bernard B. Fall was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Austria, he moved with his family to France as a child after the Anschluss. He started fighting for the French Resistance at the age of 16 and later for the French Army during World War II.
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Paul H. Appleby
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Paul Henson Appleby was an American journalist, public servant, and educator. He was the editor of Iowa Magazine in Waterloo, Iowa from 1920 to 1924. The four years following saw him as an editorial writer for the Des Moines Register and Tribune. In 1928, he moved to Virginia and published the News-Journal in Radford, Virginia. In 1933, he became Assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. By 1940, he was the Undersecretary of Agriculture and in 1944 he became Assistant Director of the Budget for the United States. He left Washington DC to work for the radio station KIRO, ret...
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Walter Rice Sharp
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Walter Rice Sharp was an American political scientist. He was born on January 25, 1896. Sharp attended Wabash College. Upon graduation, he served in the United States military as an infantry captain. After the end of World War I, Sharp enrolled at Yale University. Further graduate study at the University of Bordeaux in France was funded by the American Field Service Fellowship awarded in 1920. Sharp received a doctorate in law in 1922, and returned to the United States. He taught at Washington and Lee University from 1923 to 1924, then joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty for fifteen years.
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Jacobus tenBroek
1911 - 1968 (57 years)
Jacobus tenBroek was an American disability rights activist, historian and political scientist. Early life TenBroek was born in Alberta, Canada in 1911. He became partially blind at the age of 7 due to an accident with a bow and arrow. His remaining eyesight deteriorated, and he was completely blind by age 14. His mother decided to move the family to California so tenBroek could attend a state school for the blind.
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Louise Overacker
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Louise Overacker was an American political scientist. She specialized in the study of money in politics, United States presidential primaries, and comparative party systems, particularly those of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She was one of the first professors to teach government at Wellesley College, where she was a faculty member from 1925 until 1957, and helped to establish the Wellesley Department of Political Science in 1940.
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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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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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F. S. Northedge
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Frederick Samuel Northedge was a British Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Early life He attended Bemrose Grammar School in Derby. Northedge then read classics at Merton College, Oxford, before moving on to study international relations at the London School of Economics.
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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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Harold Walter Bailey
1899 - 1996 (97 years)
Sir Harold Walter Bailey, , who published as H. W. Bailey, was an English scholar of Khotanese, Sanskrit, and the comparative study of Iranian languages. Life Bailey was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, and raised from age 10 onwards on a farm in Nangeenan, Western Australia, without formal education. While growing up, he learned German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek from household books, and Russian from a neighbour. After he grew interested in the lettering on tea-chests from India, he acquired a book of Bible selections translated into languages with non-European scripts, including Tamil, Arabic, and Japanese.
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Louis Hartz
1919 - 1986 (67 years)
Louis Hartz was an American political scientist, historian, and a professor at Harvard, where he taught from 1942 until 1974. Hartz’s teaching and various writings —books and articles— have had an important influence on American political theory and comparative history.
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Jacqui True
1900 - Present (126 years)
Jacqui True is a political scientist and expert in gender studies. She is a professor of international relations at Monash University, where she is also Director of the Centre for Gender, Peace and Security. She studies international relations, gender mainstreaming, violence against women and its connections to political economy, and the methodology of feminist social science.
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Mercer Cook
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Will Mercer Cook , popularly known as Mercer Cook, was a diplomat and professor. He was the first American ambassador to the Gambia after it became independent, appointed in 1965 while also still serving as ambassador to Senegal. He was also the second American ambassador to Niger.
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Clinton Rossiter
1917 - 1970 (53 years)
Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III was an American historian and political scientist at Cornell University who wrote The American Presidency, among 20 other books, and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for his book Seedtime of the Republic.
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Arnold Wolfers
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Arnold Oscar Wolfers was a Swiss-American lawyer, economist, historian, and international relations scholar, most known for his work at Yale University and for being a pioneer of classical international relations realism.
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Merle Fainsod
1907 - 1972 (65 years)
Merle Fainsod was an American political scientist best known for his work on public administration and as a scholar of the Soviet Union. His books Smolensk under Soviet Rule, based on documents captured by the German Army during World War II, and How Russia is Ruled helped form the basis of American study of the Soviet Union, and established him "as a leading political scientist of the Soviet Union." Fainsod is also remembered for his work in the Office of Price Administration and as the director of the Harvard University Library.
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Hugh Seton-Watson
1916 - 1984 (68 years)
George Hugh Nicolas Seton-Watson, CBE, FBA was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia. Early life Seton-Watson was one of the two sons of Robert William Seton-Watson, the activist and historian. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with First Class Honours in 'Modern Greats' .
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A. Leo Oppenheim
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Adolf Leo Oppenheim , one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of his generation was editor-in-charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute from 1955 to 1974 and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
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Martin Wight
1913 - 1972 (59 years)
Robert James Martin Wight was one of the foremost British scholars of international relations in the twentieth century. He was the author of Power Politics , as well as the seminal essay "Why Is There No International Theory?" . He was a teacher of some renown at both the London School of Economics and the University of Sussex, where he served as the founding Dean of European Studies.
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Franz Neumann
1900 - 1954 (54 years)
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German political activist, Western Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of Nazism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 to 1945. During the Second World War, Neumann spied for the Soviet Union under the code-name "Ruff". Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political scienc...
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Elmer Eric Schattschneider
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Elmer Eric Schattschneider was an American political scientist. Life and career Schattschneider was born in Bethany, Minnesota. He received his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Pittsburgh and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He taught at Columbia, the New Jersey College for Women , and Wesleyan University . Schattschneider was president of the American Political Science Association for 1956–1957 and is the namesake of its award for the best dissertation in the field of American politics. He died in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
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Godfrey Rolles Driver
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver , known as G. R. Driver, was an English Orientalist noted for his studies of Semitic languages and Assyriology. He is considered the "most distinguished British Hebraist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".
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Stein Rokkan
1921 - 1979 (58 years)
Stein Rokkan was a Norwegian political scientist and sociologist. He was the first professor of sociology at the University of Bergen and a principal founder of the discipline of comparative politics. He founded the multidisciplinary Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, which encompassed sociology, economics and political science and which had a key role in the postwar development of the social sciences in Norway.
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Homer H. Dubs
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Homer Hasenpflug Dubs was an American sinologist and polymath. Though best known for his translation of sections of Ban Gu's Book of Han, he published on a wide range of topics in ancient Chinese history, astronomy and philosophy. Raised in China as the son of missionaries, he returned to the United States and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy . He taught at University of Minnesota and Marshall College before undertaking the Han shu translation project at the behest of the American Council of Learned Societies. Subsequently, Dubs taught at Duke University, Columbia University and Hartford Seminary.
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Karl August Wittfogel
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Karl August Wittfogel was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. He was originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, but after the Second World War, he was an equally fierce anticommunist.
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Daniel David Luckenbill
1881 - 1927 (46 years)
Daniel David Luckenbill was an American assyriologist and professor at the University of Chicago. Publications Complete bibliography:John A. Maynard: In Memoriam: A Bibliography of D. D. Luckenbill. In: The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. 45, 1929, S. 90–93. A Study of the temple documents from the Cassite period. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1907. Thesis PhD Annals of Sennacherib. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1924. Reprint 2005. .Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1926/1927. Mehrfache Reprints.Bd. 1 Historical records of Assyria: from the earliest times to Sargon.Bd.
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Harold Foote Gosnell
1896 - 1997 (101 years)
Harold Foote Gosnell was an American political scientist and writer, known for his research and writings on American politics, elections, and political parties. Gosnell attended the University of Rochester, graduating summa cum laude in 1918. He went on to the University of Chicago, where in 1922 he received his doctorate. He became a professor at Chicago and taught there until 1941. During World War II, he went to Washington, D.C., as a budget analyst and later as an operations officer for the United States Department of State, while he continued to study and write on politics. He served in the federal government until 1960, and was on the faculty at American University.
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Philip Marshall Brown
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Philip Marshall Brown was an American educator and diplomat, born at Hampden, Maine, and educated at Williams College. In 1900–1901, he served as secretary to Lloyd C. Griscom and from 1901 to 1903 was second secretary for the American Legation of Constantinople. He served as Secretary of legation to Guatemala and Honduras, 1903–1907, and as secretary of the American Embassy of Constantinople, 1907–1908. From the latter year to 1910 he was minister to Honduras. Resigning from the diplomatic service, he was appointed instructor in international law at Harvard University in 1912 and in the foll...
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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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Francis D. Wormuth
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Francis Dunham Wormuth was an American lawyer and teacher, having been a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.
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George Catlin
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Sir George Edward Gordon Catlin was an English political scientist and philosopher. A strong proponent of Anglo-American co-operation, he worked for many years as a professor at Cornell University and other universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. He preached the use of a natural science model for political science. McMaster University Libraries holds his correspondence archive and the body of some of his works. He had two children, one of whom was the politician and academic Shirley Williams.
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Josef Laurenz Kunz
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Josef Laurenz Kunz was an Austrian American jurist. He was a Professor of International Law at the University of Toledo from 1934 to 1960, after having emigrated from Austria in 1932. Kunz earned his doctorate degree in 1920 from the University of Vienna, where he was a student of Hans Kelsen.
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Daniel Lerner
1917 - 1980 (63 years)
Daniel Lerner was an American scholar and writer known for his studies on modernization theory. Lerner's study of Balgat Turkey played a critical role in shaping American ideas about the use of mass media and US cultural products to promote economic and social development in post-colonial nations. In 1958, he wrote the seminal book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Scholars have argued that the research project that formed the basis of the book emerged from intelligence requirements in the US government, and was a result of the contract between the Office of Int...
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Alexander Nikuradse
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Alexander Nikuradse , also known by his pseudonym Al. Sanders, was a Georgian-German physicist and Nazi political scientist. Born in Samtredia, Georgia, Russian Empire, he was sent by the Georgian government to complete his studies in Berlin. Nikuradse remained in Berlin and became a German citizen after the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia. Being in staunch opposition to Soviet rule in Georgia, he was actively involved in Georgian émigré activities, and had close Nazi connections. Since their common days as Soviet exiles in Munich in the early 1920s, he had been on friendly terms with Alfred Rosenberg whose views on the Caucasus were largely shaped under Nikuradse's influence.
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Dolf Sternberger
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Dolf Sternberger was a German philosopher and political scientist at the University of Heidelberg. Dolf Sternberger is known for his concept of citizenship in contemporary German political thought, and for coining the term "constitutional patriotism" in 1979, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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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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Owen Lattimore
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Owen Lattimore was an American Orientalist and writer. He was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1938 to 1963. He was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations there from 1939 to 1953. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on American policy in Asia.
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Edward Samuel Corwin
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Edward Samuel Corwin was an American legal scholar who served as the president of the American Political Science Association. His various political writings in the early to mid-twentieth century microcosmically depict the rising activist thinking in various areas of American, constitutional law.
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Rupert Emerson
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Rupert Emerson was a professor of political science and international relations. He served on the faculty of Harvard University for forty-three years and served in various U.S government positions. After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1917–1918, he received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1922, then a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 1927. He was a member of the American Political Science Association, the Association for Asian Studies , the African Studies Association , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
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F. Gregory Gause, III
#4443
C. B. Macpherson
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Crawford Brough Macpherson was an influential Canadian political scientist who taught political theory at the University of Toronto. Life Macpherson was born on 18 November 1911 in Toronto, Ontario. After graduating from the University of Toronto Schools, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto in 1933. He then earned a Master of Science degree in economics at the London School of Economics where he studied under the supervision of Harold Laski, he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1935. At that time a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the social sci...
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Julie Novkov
Julie Novkov is an American political scientist, currently a professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She studies the history of American law, American political development, and subordinated identities, with a focus on how laws are used for social control while also being affected by social reform movements.
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Robert K. Carr
1908 - 1979 (71 years)
Robert Kenneth Carr was an American scholar in the field of government/political science. His main area of interest and expertise was in the field of civil liberties/civil rights, and he did the bulk of his writing while on the faculty of Dartmouth College. Carr also served as the executive secretary of President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Civil Rights. He was the primary author of the committee's landmark report, "To Secure These Rights" , which spotlighted the need for more rigorous federal enforcement of civil rights. He served as president of Oberlin College, Ohio, from 1960–1970.
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Morton Grodzins
1917 - 1964 (47 years)
Morton M. Grodzins was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, as well as a dean of the school and an editor at Chicago University Press. He is known for coining the term "tipping point" in studies of white flight, such as "Metropolitan Segregation" and The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem . His theories related to Tipping Point were later made famous by Malcolm Gladwell and his book, "The Tipping Point." His book Americans Betrayed was the first major study criticizing the Japanese-American internment during World War II, based on his and others' work at the Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Study at University of California, Berkeley.
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Turrell V. Wylie
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Turrell Verl "Terry" Wylie was an American scholar, Tibetologist, sinologist and professor known as one of the 20th century's leading scholars of Tibet. He taught as a professor of Tibetan Studies at the University of Washington and served as the first chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. Wylie founded the Tibetan Studies program at the University of Washington, the first of its kind in the United States, setting a major precedent for future programs and research in the field. His system for rendering the Tibetan language in Latin script, known as Wylie transliteration, ...
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Billy Dudley
1931 - 1980 (49 years)
Billy Joseph Stanley Oritsesaninomi Dudley was a leading Nigerian political scientist, working mostly at the University of Ibadan , which he joined in 1959. Until late 1962, he was on the staff of the Extra Mural Department of UI, and from 1960 to 1962 he was based in Zaria, where he began the research that he later supplemented with research in London, England, during periods of leave in 1961, 1963, and 1965, each lasting several months. His resulting PhD was published in 1968 as Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria. He became a Professor at UI in 1971 and Head of department in 1972.
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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.
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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 .
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