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Era
10 figures
John Stuart Mill
1806 – 1873Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.
Søren Kierkegaard
1813 – 1855First existentialist; wrote on anxiety, despair and the leap of faith.
Karl Marx
1818 – 1883Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821 – 1881Took the reader inside the mind that has decided to do the terrible thing.
Leo Tolstoy
1828 – 1910War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.
Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 – 1900Genealogy of morals, the will to power and the revaluation of all values.
Thomas Troward
1847 – 1916Indian-service judge whose Edinburgh Lectures gave New Thought a systematic metaphysics.
Sigmund Freud
1856 – 1939Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.
Rudolf Steiner
1861 – 1925Founded anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman; still practised in European hospitals.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1889 – 1951Twice redirected philosophy — first with logical form, then with language as use.