BBC Online Poll for the Greatest Thinker of the last 1000 Years

I would like readers of this blog to let me know who they consider to be greatest thinker of the last 1000 years. The person you nominate must have relevance for issues in today's world.

Personally, my nominations are:

1. John Stuart Mill
2. Sigmund Freud
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. Ayn Rand
5. Karl Marx

 John Stuart Mill's essay 'On Liberty' is to me the greatest secular work on the subject of individual liberty ever written. I consider individual liberty to be the most important aspect of moden life.

Mill's essay starts like this:

THE SUBJECT of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treatment.

1

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar...

The whole essay can be found here: http://www.bartleby.com/130/


Ayn Rand is probably the exact opposite of Marx (ideologically). I respect both thinkers a lot and I always consider their works as food for further thought rather than the last word on a subject. I disagree with a lot of Marx's and Rand's prescriptions for society but I cannot ignore them. I am in agreement with most of their descriptions of the inadequacies of society as we know it. I have very high regard for Marx as a foremost thinker who is probably the most influential intellectual legislator of the last century.


In September 1999, BBC News Online users voted for the greatest thinker of the last thousand years. They voted overwhelming for Karl Marx.

From the BBC Website.....


Marx the millennium's 'greatest thinker'

Karl Marx: Controversial revolutionary ideas

Revolutionary writer Karl Marx has topped a BBC News Online poll to find the greatest thinker of the millennium.
The nineteenth century writer won September's vote with a clear margin, pushing Albert Einstein, who had led for most of the month, into second place. The top 10 included philosophers Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes as well as twentieth century scientist Stephen Hawking.






Karl Marx is probably the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the nineteenth century and one of the founders of communism. Although dictatorships throughout the twentieth century have distorted his original ideas, his work as a philosopher, social scientist, historian and a revolutionary is respected by academics today. Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was born into a middle-class family in Germany, but he became a revolutionary in Paris, Brussels and London. He met the like-minded Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) in France. Together they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which outlined the theory of the class struggle. Marx was exiled from Paris and Brussels for his revolutionary activities and settled in London where he lived until his death. Amongst Marx's other influential works are the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which remained unpublished until the 1930s, and the monumental work Das Kapital. BBC News Online readers from across the world took part in the millennium poll. Dag Thoresen from Norway, said: "Karl Marx has inspired thousands of liberation struggles. He was the father of modern political thinking." And Jyotsna Kapur from the USA said: "Marx analysed best the working of capitalism. Given that that is the system that characterises the world at the end of the twentieth century his work is as relevant to understanding the world we live in as it was for understanding the nineteenth century."
BBC Website 'Millenium's Greatest Thinker'