← Fame through time1700-1799
The 18th century
Whose working lives fell in the 18th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 18th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Immanuel Kant22 decades - 2
Jean-Jacques Rousseau22 decades - 3
Leonhard Euler22 decades - 4
Adam Smith22 decades - 5
Marquis de Sade12 decades - 6
Thomas Paine22 decades - 7
David Hume22 decades - 8
Montesquieu22 decades - 9
Jeremy Bentham22 decades - 10
Denis Diderot21 decades - 11
John Wesley22 decades - 12
Pierre-Simon Laplace2 decades - 13
George Berkeley8 decades - 14
Joseph-Louis Lagrange0 decades - 15
Johann Gottfried Herder18 decades - 16
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhabnot measured- - 17
Johann Gottlieb Fichte22 decades - 18
Marquis de Condorcet1 decades - 19
Daniel Bernoulli22 decades - 20
Adam Weishaupt18 decades - 21
Henry Cavendish22 decades - 22
Joseph de Maistre21 decades - 23
Henri de Saint-Simonnot measured- - 24
Giambattista Vico22 decades - 25
Cesare Beccaria22 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.