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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
7 figures
Plutarch
46 – 119The biographer who invented the idea that character makes history.
Alexander von Humboldt
1769 – 1859Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.
Friedrich Engels
1820 – 1895The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.
Max Weber
1864 – 1920Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.
Karl Polanyi
1886 – 1964The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1918 – 2008The Gulag Archipelago broke the Soviet system's moral standing.
Svetlana Alexievich
b. 1948Built a new documentary genre from thousands of interviews.