100 Most Influential Figures in World History

[H. Ross Peron]

Michael Hart's book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential People in World History was published in 1978, with a revised edition being released in 1992. As the title indicates, Hart attempted to produce a list of the most influential human beings in world history regardless of their level of notoriety. Thus Ts'ai Lun, the Chinese eunuch who invented paper is ranked among the top 10 most influential people in history despite being unknown in much of the Western World. Perhaps his most notable and most discussed ranking was him placing Muhammad in first place in the list. Occasionally Hart's judgements are idiosyncratic if not eccentric such as his belief that Shakespeare's plays were authored by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Outside of this book, Hart is also a controversial figure due to his links to white nationalist organizations despite being Jewish and having a mainstream role thanks to well known book.

Hart's list from the 1992 edition may be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140228055006/http://www.adherents.com/adh_influ.html

With nearly 30 years having elapsed since the publication of the revised edition, what additions and subtractions would you make from the list of the 100 most influential figures in human history?

My thoughts:
-Hart places too much emphasis on English and French philosophers to the exclusion of German ones with Descartes, Bacon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Malthus, and Locke all having all place on the list while Immanuel Kant and GWF Hegel are excluded. Voltaire should be dropped from the list imo given his main role in history was as a popularizer of Enlightenment values rather than coming up with any revolutionary theories himself. Immanuel Kant certainly deserves a place on the list as probably does Hegel.

-Hart excludes any American President or statesman after Thomas Jefferson except John F. Kennedy which is a curious omission given the United States of America is the world's strongest military and economic power today. While Hart argues that certain major historical developments had so many key figures involved that no one figure deserves a place on the top 100 list, I don't think the rise of America to superpower status falls into this category. Hart does include Stalin, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Oliver Cromwell, Hitler, and Elizabeth I. Hitler's place on the list is notable not because he was evil (after all the ranking of influence makes no judgement on any figure's morality), but because Germany was on the losing side of World War II with most of Hitler's long-term influence being a negative one where outcomes were the opposite of what Hitler intended. At the very least, Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserves a place as one of the most influential figures in history. Roosevelt helped develop welfare state and Keynesian fiscal policy which would become cornerstones of not just America but other liberal democratic states, fundamentally reoriented America's international relations, shaped the postwar political and economic order, and initiated the Manhattan Project which resulted in the development of nuclear weapons. Hart gives Kennedy a place on the list solely because of the Moon landing but the impact of nuclear weapons has thus far been greater than that of the space program.

-Between the 1978 and 1992 editions, Hart reordered several figures related to the history of communism including Marx himself as well as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao because he deemed their ultimate influence reduced in hindsight of the fall of the Eastern Bloc in the few years preceding republication. Moreover, he placed Gorbachev on the list due to his role in the dissolution of the USSR. Since then, however, the People's Republic of China has only entrenched itself and has grown rapidly to challenge the United States for global superpower status. In that light, Mao Zedong may deserve a reranking (though the contemporary PRC's policies are very different from Mao's) but more importantly Deng Xiaoping is now reevaluted as probably the most influential world leader of the latter half of the 20th Century due to his reforms that transitioned China to a market economy without breaking the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. The subsequent enormous economic growth of China has had a direct impact on the lives of over a billion people and an indirect one on countless more such as the millions of Americans affected by offshoring to China. Given the renewed interest in Marxism in the West in the past decade and the failure of Hart's prediction that all communist states could potentially disappear in the decade or two after 1992, Marx himself may deserve some reevaluation.

-Hart does not exclude artistic figures but it is interesting that his cultural personages are drawn from high culture. I think the high cultural figures he lists such as Shakespeare, Beethoven etc. are sound but this excludes the influence mass culture has had on human society, especially movies which have potential audiences of hundreds of millions if not billions. While arguments can be made for various film figures such as Cecil B DeMille for pioneering modern cinema, I think the most obvious mass culture figure is Walt Disney who produced several popular movies and founded a company that would go on to dominate global popular culture.

-The biggest cultural and technological development since 1992 has of course been the advent of the Internet accompanied by the rise of the personal computer and later on the smartphone. The history of the Internet is a field I'm generally unfamiliar with but it seems like the ultimate credit for the development of the Internet must be divided between several different people. However, Steve Jobs may deserve on place in the list for his pioneering role in both the personal computer and the smartphone.

-Given the Green Revolution of the late 20th Century helped ameliorate starvation and famine around the world, Norman Borlaug deserves a spot on the 100 as well.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Galileo as #12 on that list is ridiculously high. While important for his status as a pioneer in the development of observational instruments and an early proponent of heliocentrism, he also had many unscientific theories on topics such as the nature of the tides and of comets that he held to despite their being other contemporary theories that were more scientific and more correct. The most prominent of his errors was his theory that there was one daily tide which was a major argument he gave for being in favor of heliocentrism. At the very least, Kepler, who he ranks as #75, ought to be ranked higher than Galileo. Also, taking a definitive view in support of the Oxfordian hypothesis concerning Shakespeare in a list such as this is frankly ridiculous.

[Beet]

I don't really agree with the inclusion of inventors and scientists on the list unless there is clear evidence that had they not existed, then someone else would not have reached the same conclusions before long. Most of them lived in societies that were already collectively on the verge of the breakthroughs that they get individually credited for.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Galileo as #12 on that list is ridiculously high. While important for his status as a pioneer in the development of observational instruments and an early proponent of heliocentrism, he also had many unscientific theories on topics such as the nature of the tides and of comets that he held to despite their being other contemporary theories that were more scientific and more correct. The most prominent of his errors was his theory that there was one daily tide which was a major argument he gave for being in favor of heliocentrism. At the very least, Kepler, who he ranks as #75, ought to be ranked higher than Galileo. Also, taking a definitive view in support of the Oxfordian hypothesis concerning Shakespeare in a list such as this is frankly ridiculous.

??

Kepler more influential than Galileo? Galileo was the first person to decisively debunk Aristotelian physics that had been the framework of natural philosophy for over a millennia. It was an intellectual earthquake on the level of Newton's discovery of gravity or Einstein's theory of relativity. Kepler was very important in the sense that he continued the ongoing Copernican Revolution in astronomy, but it was Galileo who was responsible for the Kuhnian "paradigm shift" away from Aristotelian natural philosophy and towards the new physical sciences based on observation.

[Orwell]

Why is JFK on the list? Where is Roosevelt? I would also contend Billy Graham is one of the 100 most influential people in World History.

[H. Ross Peron]

Why is JFK on the list? Where is Roosevelt? I would also contend Billy Graham is one of the 100 most influential people in World History.

Hart placed JFK on the list solely because of Kennedy sponsoring and funding a manned Moon mission which he considers one of the most significant accomplishments of humanity.

[Skill and Chance]

This whole concept is dumb because outside of maybe scientists/mathematicians a list like this is 100% culturally specific. 

[Cassandra]

While I don't know about the particulars of his list, trying to pick out the one hundred most "influential" historical figures is an intriguing challenge.

I like that his top ten is stacked with religious figures; I feel like the founders of major religions are the most obvious shoe-ins for this list. I would flip his rankings though and put Jesus above Muhammad, seeing as Muhammad was clearly influenced by Jesus. Which brings to the fore the question of causality. From one perspective, shouldn't the most distant historical figures be the most influential, since their actions rippled down to affect (one might say...influence) those clerics, scientists, generals, and rulers who came after them? He ranks Ts'ai Lun, the ancient chinese inventor of paper, number seven on list. Why then isn't the unknowable inventor of cuneiform writing on clay tablets above him?

I think a "most influential historical figures of the modern era" might be a bit more interesting of a list. I mean the modern era in the broadest since, from the discovery of the New World by Columbus to the present. Here's a provisional top 10, I'm curious what you guys think.

1492-2021 Most influential figures?
1. Martin Luther
2. John Calvin
3. Christopher Columbus
4. Adam Smith
5. Karl Marx
6. Isaac Newton
7. Albert Einstein
8. Napoleon Bonaparte
9. Adolf Hitler
10. Vladimir Lenin

[RINO Tom]

I think Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great should be higher.  In one way or another, the Western Civilization that more or less influences the course of modern world history at every turn doesn't exist without a Christian (late) Roman Empire that Constantine helped to usher in, and there is no (early) Roman Empire as we know it without the Hellenistic World that Alexander left us.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I think Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great should be higher.  In one way or another, the Western Civilization that more or less influences the course of modern world history at every turn doesn't exist without a Christian (late) Roman Empire that Constantine helped to usher in, and there is no (early) Roman Empire as we know it without the Hellenistic World that Alexander left us.

One can argue Alexander had a substantial influence on the history of India and Eastern Asia as well.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

So all you need to know about this list is that the guy that invented paper is number 7 and the guy that invented the Middle East is number 87.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

I think Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great should be higher.  In one way or another, the Western Civilization that more or less influences the course of modern world history at every turn doesn't exist without a Christian (late) Roman Empire that Constantine helped to usher in, and there is no (early) Roman Empire as we know it without the Hellenistic World that Alexander left us.

I’d argue that without the post-Alexander Hellenistic you don’t just not have the Rome we know, you don’t have Christianity or Rabbinical Judaism as we know them and certainly you don’t have Islam without those two.

But, the you get into the question of how much credit you give Alexander for accidentally making the Western world, both because it’s not like that’s what he set out to do and because you can’t talk about Alexander without two other figures, the above massive snub Cyrus, without whom, among many other things, there is no neat little consolidated imperial administration for the Macedonians to yoik and Phillip, who built Alexander’s Macedon and was debatably about to do more or less what his son did before his premature death.

But really, the whole issue with this list is that it’s comparing not just apples and oranges but apples, apple trees, gardening equipment, and orchards. The various people listed both are making contributions in field different enough that a quantitative comparison to most of the rest of list isn’t possible and, by it’s nature, everyone on the list is going to impact their contemporaries and successors such that attribution becomes hard to impossible to untangle.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Treating Moses as a historical figure and following a "fake Shakespeare" theory is quite...interesting

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Galileo as #12 on that list is ridiculously high. While important for his status as a pioneer in the development of observational instruments and an early proponent of heliocentrism, he also had many unscientific theories on topics such as the nature of the tides and of comets that he held to despite their being other contemporary theories that were more scientific and more correct. The most prominent of his errors was his theory that there was one daily tide which was a major argument he gave for being in favor of heliocentrism. At the very least, Kepler, who he ranks as #75, ought to be ranked higher than Galileo. Also, taking a definitive view in support of the Oxfordian hypothesis concerning Shakespeare in a list such as this is frankly ridiculous.

??

Kepler more influential than Galileo? Galileo was the first person to decisively debunk Aristotelian physics that had been the framework of natural philosophy for over a millennia. It was an intellectual earthquake on the level of Newton's discovery of gravity or Einstein's theory of relativity. Kepler was very important in the sense that he continued the ongoing Copernican Revolution in astronomy, but it was Galileo who was responsible for the Kuhnian "paradigm shift" away from Aristotelian natural philosophy and towards the new physical sciences based on observation.

Definitely. Don't get me wrong, as I do think he belongs on the list, but Galileo was primarily important for his observations and being willing to follow the results of those observations and rejecting received wisdom when the observations conflicted with them. But whenever Galileo tried to construct a new system on his own, such as with tides and with comets, he was quite willing to promote his "theories" without any scientific reasons or testing. Unlike Galileo, Kepler was willing to test his theories and was able to provide observational support for them before presenting them.