Please don’t ask me where the great women are. History is the story of violent action and the preparation for, exploitation of, and consideration of, said action.
20 Most Influential People in History
The webmaster has asked me to compile a list of top 20 historical figures, and is going to do God only knows what with it. In compiling this list chronologically I became interested in the clustering of the historical figures. I am neither an advocate of ‘the great man’ or the ‘ages’ school of thought. Rather I am interested in how the theory that ‘great men’ have fueled world events and the alternative theory that ‘great men’ are symptoms of world events—mere mariners on the tidal sea of history—converge on the list below.
Picks 2 and 6 will be debated by most. I will do short pieces on why a given figure made this list on request, or in response to comments, otherwise I’m content to post this as an appendix to 40,000 Years From Home.
Unqualified Picks in Chronological Order
1. Moses, archaic
2. Joshua, archaic
3. Homer, archaic
4. Aristotle, ancient
5. Alexander, ancient
6. Archimedes. ancient
7. Julius Caesar, ancient
8. Saul of Tarsus, ancient
9. Siddhārtha Gautama, medieval
10. Mohamed, medieval
11. Genghis Khan, medieval
12. Leonardo, early modern
13. Christopher Columbus, early modern
14. Copernicus, early modern
15. Hernan Cortez, early modern
16. Isaac Newton, early modern
17. Napoleon Bonaparte, modern
18. Charles Darwin. modern
19. Karl Marx, modern
20. Adolf Hitler, modern
Note: 1-2, 4-5, 12-15, and 18-19 appear in contemporaneous clusters, which may be cited for arguments in favor of social and technological momentum over the ‘great man’ theory. Also note that the Middle Ages [9-11] is dominated by Asian figures.
There will be a top 20 list of unknown persons.
The great women were being consumed by raising children and taking care of their barbarians' castles. They had neither wives nor secretaries, so the only ones who had a chance of making it to a small paragraph in an encyclopedia generally seemed to be childless and often husbandless. This is just my opinion, because I asked the same question of my mother when I was under 10. She didn't know why, so I had to go through the childbearing / raising cycle to figure it out by myself. Tough luck...