The 35 Most Influential People of the 18th Century

A century of revolutions, symphonies and steam engines, argued down to a single name.

1. 1
   Benjamin Franklin

   Shaped the century's science, its printing trade and the founding of a new republic.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Marquis de Lafayette

   Fought beside Washington as a teenager and then drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a hero of two revolutions.
   921pts
3. 3
   Antoine Lavoisier

   Named oxygen, killed the phlogiston theory and made chemistry quantitative.
   864pts
4. 4
   George Washington

   Won the American war of independence and then handed power back, twice.
   864pts
5. 5
   Immanuel Kant

   The Critique of Pure Reason split philosophy into before and after.
   832pts
6. 6
   James Cook

   Charted New Zealand and Australia's east coast on three Pacific voyages that filled in the map of the world for European science.
   832pts
7. 7
   John Wesley

   Rode some 250,000 miles preaching in open fields and founded Methodism, now a church of tens of millions worldwide.
   806pts
8. 8
   Toussaint Louverture

   A formerly enslaved man who led the Haitian Revolution from 1791 and made Saint-Domingue the first place where enslaved people won their freedom by force.
   779pts
9. 9
   Mary Wollstonecraft

   A Vindication of the Rights of Woman put gender equality on the Enlightenment agenda.
   779pts
10. 10
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

    Wrote more than six hundred works in thirty-five years and redefined every form he touched.
    652pts
11. 11
    Edward Jenner

    Developed the smallpox vaccine and with it the whole idea of vaccination.
    652pts
12. 12
    Montesquieu

    The Spirit of the Laws (1748) set out the separation of powers that the framers of the US Constitution copied almost line by line.
    652pts
13. 13
    Peter the Great

    Dragged Russia westward, built St Petersburg from a swamp and made the empire a European power after beating Sweden in the Great Northern War.
    652pts
14. 14
    Edmund Burke

    His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) founded modern conservatism as a political philosophy.
    576pts
15. 15
    Richard Arkwright

    His water frame and Cromford Mill created the factory system that drove the Industrial Revolution.
    576pts
16. 16
    Joseph Priestley

    Isolated oxygen in 1774, invented soda water and championed the religious and political dissent that drove him out of England.
    576pts
17. 17
    Denis Diderot

    Spent twenty-five years editing the Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment's attempt to put all human knowledge in readers' hands despite repeated bans.
    487pts
18. 18
    Frederick the Great

    Turned Prussia into a great power over a 46-year reign and became the model of the enlightened absolute monarch who corresponded with Voltaire.
    487pts
19. 19
    David Hume

    The Scottish sceptic whose work on causation and empiricism woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber and still frames modern philosophy.
    487pts
20. 20
    Leonhard Euler

    The most prolific mathematician in history, who gave the world e, i, f(x) and graph theory, and kept publishing after going blind.
    487pts
21. 21
    George Frideric Handel

    German-born composer who conquered London with Italian opera, then wrote Messiah, the most performed choral work in history.
    487pts
22. 22
    Carl Linnaeus

    Invented the naming system that still organises every living species.
    487pts
23. 23
    James Watt

    His improved steam engine set the Industrial Revolution's pace for a century.
    384pts
24. 24
    Thomas Jefferson

    Wrote the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three.
    384pts
25. 25
    Joseph Haydn

    The father of the symphony and the string quartet, who wrote more than a hundred symphonies and taught the young Beethoven.
    384pts
26. 26
    Samuel Johnson

    His Dictionary of the English Language (1755) standardised the language for a century and made him the age's great man of letters.
    384pts
27. 27
    Adam Smith

    The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a subject in 1776.
    384pts
28. 28
    Voltaire

    The Enlightenment's sharpest polemicist against censorship, torture and clerical power.
    262pts
29. 29
    Catherine the Great

    Expanded Russia's borders and its court culture across thirty-four years on the throne.
    262pts
30. 30
    Johann Sebastian Bach

    Left the century its deepest body of keyboard and choral music.
    262pts
31. 31
    Thomas Paine

    Common Sense sold in the hundreds of thousands in 1776 and turned colonial grievance into a demand for independence.
    262pts
32. 32
    Maria Theresa

    The only woman to rule the Habsburg lands, she held her inheritance together through war and modernised Austria's state and schools over forty years.
    262pts
33. 33
    Maximilien Robespierre

    The Jacobin leader of the Committee of Public Safety, whose Reign of Terror defined revolutionary politics for the centuries that followed.
    262pts
34. 34
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    His writing on the social contract and on childhood reshaped politics and education.
    0pts
35. 35
    Qianlong Emperor

    Ruled Qing China for sixty years, doubled its territory and presided over a third of the world's population at the empire's peak.
    0pts

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